These are healthcare workers. Jobs have requirements. They're free to quit instead of increasing the dangers of disease for their sick and older patients who are at highest risk for covid. No one is controlling their body any more than making it show up at work in order to get paid. Coal miners are forced to work in dangerous conditions around the world in order to keep their job. Getting a vaccine is far less risk, there have been 8 billion plus vaccine doses given against covid around the world.
Most of the argument is whether this requirement is in the "employee must wash hands before surgery" category, which is about the patients' right to be safe not the employee's (in theory the patients didn't "choose" to be there).
The people complaining are reacting as if the ruling sounds like "male high school teachers get vasectomies, to keep teenage pregnancies down", because the effects are "permanent, * upto six months" and directly to your body without it being an on-the-job requirement.
The part that makes me leery is that these sort of "are your vaccines upto-date" checklists have always existed, but this time it is controversial (or maybe it was for MMR - but it wasn't news).
this is also the first time where the vaccine industry and the broader public health space have been put under this kind of scrutiny and the combination of politicization, outright lies and deception over masks and policy in both directions and the overall visibility of the sausage making process happens to be occurring alongside a decline of trust in institutional expertise. when most people got their tetanus shots, the faces of the medical profession were not acting as explicitly political agents.
I don't think you can argue that it's the medical profession's fault that this issue has become politicized without acknowledging that the GOP deserves most of the blame here.
Nearly every common-sense measure implemented during this pandemic has been derided by the right as some sort of unacceptable infringement on individual rights.
Not saying those in power have gotten it all right 100% of the time; I'm especially disappointed with the mask fiasco you mention, but... c'mon. Doctors are not acting as "political agents" in the vast majority of situations that have caused the US's pandemic response to be as lacking as it's been.
> Nearly every common-sense measure implemented during this pandemic has been derided by the right as some sort of unacceptable infringement on individual rights.
It's not common sense if a plurality of people don't agree with it. Denying children in-person schooling for a year wasn't "common sense", cancelling elective procedures like cancer screenings wasn't "common sense", forcing people to wear masks outdoors wasn't "common sense", and so on. Lots of people were denied rights in these cases and would consider those measures unacceptable.
It's common-sense in that the large majority of medical professionals agree that those measures are a good idea. Those ideas are non-controversial amongst experts.
frankly there is plenty of blame to go around among partisans starting with the complete and total looting of our pandemic response capabilities that occurred during the obama years or the bipartisan offshoring of nearly all our capacity to produce medical supplies and allowing consolidation to make hospitals utterly brittle in the face of a crisis. the lies and poor decisions are numerous enough from all sides that it really is not interesting to play the blame game about who is worse, residents of either team will always believe their lies were noble and mistakes justified while the 'other' is the source of all the real problems. the end result is the same, efficacy and legitimacy of administrators has cratered and i cannot honestly blame anyone who does not trust these institutions to act in good faith anymore.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately done it a lot lately. We ban that sort of account because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
If having had an abortion materially negatively impacted a healthcare worker's ability to safely provide healthcare to a sick person, then yes, that should probably be grounds for disallowing those people from working as healthcare practitioners. Thankfully that's not the case.
Your intuition is correct (in that there's no over-arching precedent or Constitutionally-derived right that makes it illegal), but it's specifically banned under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as per a 1978 law modifying the act. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/pregnancy-discrimination-act-1...
... Which goes to the court ruling that's the topic of the article: Congress has the power to decide these issues.
Does that mean you support a rollback of all vaccine requirements? For example the MMR, TDap, HepB, polio, chicken pox vaccines required for school children? Or the numerous vaccines required for military personal?
And would you be comfortable having a pediatrician who wasn't inoculated for diphtheria knowing that an infection could be fatal for your baby?
There is no right to not receive another's germs. If we take your argument to its logical conclusion, then the flu vaccine would be mandated. But it's not. So if you say that Covid is different, then what is your threshold or cut-off for when a medical procedure should be mandated?
There is no right to not receive another's germs. If we take your argument to its logical conclusion, then the flu vaccine would be mandated. But it's not. So if you say that Covid is different, then what is your threshold or cut-off for when a medical procedure should be mandated?
Why not? if the cost & benefit ratio is worth it, maybe we should. The same for any other diseases you can think of. If the answer is yes, then there are no reason for any of us to refuse unless we have good excuses.
Identical arguments are made around abortion. Or mandatory organ/blood donations. Actually, nobody argues for mandatory blood donations because we can all tell that would be icky.
The case for that line of reasoning is extremely weak given that vaccines provide dramatically low protection against infection and vaccinated people also infect others at high rates.