>We were promised this wouldn't happen by our governments last year right?
We were promised that a company can't require a vaccine as a condition of employment? Seeing as some companies have required vaccines for as long as there have been vaccines, I think I must be misunderstanding you.
>Why are private companies stuck policing these absurd policies?
Companies are requiring the vaccine because they make employees less likely to miss work due to illness.
With the exception of healthcare I don't think a lot of companies have mandated vaccines. My wife works in healthcare and there was a tuberculosis shot mandate for specific jobs at her hospital. There was a flu shot mandate of sorts, but it was tied to a small bonus.
You can't point to a small sector that has mandates and say it wouldn't be a significant change if suddenly 100% of all workers everywhere were subjected to it.
Millions of people in various sectors outside healthcare (by the way, since when is healthcare a "small sector"?) have had vaccines required as a condition of employment. , mostly people with plenty of risk like teachers, the military and some people working in the travel industry, but this is not always the case. I was required to get the flu shot (or an exemption) in my last job at an electrical engineering firm.
On a broader note, I think (coming from the US) workers should have stronger protections against being fired, but everyone I've personally talked to who does not believe your employer should be able to fire you for not getting a vaccine is also opposed to "state controlled employment" or almost anything else that exerts control over the employer-employee relationship. You can be fired for almost any reason in the US, being fired for not getting a vaccine does not seem any worse to me than being fired for any number of awful yet totally legal reasons.
As a counterpoint, when I worked for a private university (unrelated to healthcare) I was required to have up-to-date vaccinations. I was also not allowed to smoke on campus.
These kinds of workplace safety rules may be more common than you think.
My employer already went this route, something about a fed mandate for their contractors... and we have a lot of those. They extended it to everyone lol
I don't think weight is a protected category, so yes this is fine. For example insurers will discriminate based on weight. The military discriminates based on weight. Hooters discriminates based on weight. Etc.
In general, when an employment discrimination is not specifically forbidden via the Civil Rights Act (or interpreted as equivalent to something explicitly forbidden by the Court), it is legal to discriminate based on it in the United States. Beyond that, the Court and the legislature are (from a political philosophy standpoint) generally willing to let individual employees and employers (or employers and unions) hash out the messy details.
When I miss work, it costs the company much more than my salary. Otherwise what would be the point of hiring me, if I cost exactly as much as what the value I bring to the company?
And that's not even accounting for the fact that if you get sick, you might infect others in your company.
That’s not how infectious diseases work. You can be getting other people sick. Vaccines aren’t 100% effective so prolonged exposure in indoor spaces increases chances. Some people also are immuno compromised and can’t be vaccinated so you’d be putting them at risk too. Are you going to start paying for their sick time too and signing away that you’re personally liable for deaths?
That's not boolean: vaccinated individuals transmit _less_ than the unvaccinated. It's not as good as we'd like but it's better than doing nothing and given how quick, easy, and cheap vaccines are it's like mandating seatbelt usage even if you know that some people will still be injured.
"In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated)."
No difference in infectiousness. And with it, no logical justification for mandates. But this is Google and factions within it will certainly not give up a chance to get rid of what remains of the conservative/libertarian part of their workforce.
you will have to come with a citation needed to make that claim. I have seen studies showing exactly the opposite of what you claim.
You also have to factor the social aspect. Vaccinated people, thinking they are protected, are way less careful now and therefore have a higher propensity to transmit the virus.
It's also not how other workplace safety rules work. You can't just sign a waiver allowing you to go without a hard hat on a construction job. Vaccination during a raging deadly pandemic seems to fall squarely in the "workplace safety" category, like banning smoking, which few people seem to have a problem with. Employers have a responsibility to take steps to ensure their place of work is not hazardous.
I keep hearing this in this thread but I don’t follow.
> Based on evidence from clinical trials, in people ages 18 years and older, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.
If you’re prevent infection, aren’t you effectively reducing the R0 by definition? How is the vaccine making it harder to infect not reduce transmission rates?
Yes, these are the original data from clinical studies. Now, in real life, a few months later the efficiency has dwindled considerably [0]:
> Reports of waning vaccine-induced immunity against COVID-19 have begun to surface. With that, the comparable long-term protection conferred by previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear.
That covers you but what about the members of staff who actually have a genuine reason for not receiving the vaccine? Peter in ops recently received a double lung transplant and no longer has a functioning immune system. Are you prepared to also sign an agreement barring yourself from ever walking into one of our offices or attending social gatherings?
If Peter in ops has no immune system, he will get sick from non-COVID viruses or diseases regardless of what is done by other people. In that hypothetical situation it would be him who shouldn't go to an office, not other people.
I'm not sure why you immediately assume this is hypothetical. I know a couple people in similar situations. They exist and are not so uncommon as to assume the OP is making it up.
It's also not the doom scenario you describe. Yes they have to take extra precautions, and yes the people around then have to make a point to not be around when they are sick, but with a little consideration plenty of people with highly compromised immune systems live meaningful lives.
For many people, it's more than just a jab, it's 1-3 days of being quite unwell.
I have no underlying health conditions, but I've been bedridden by my 2nd shot and booster shots, with a high fever, fatigue, dizziness, and aches for at least 48 hours. My partner who is immuno-compromised is worse off, generally being very ill for 1-2 weeks after each jab. Her case is somewhat different though, as her situation is just all round unfortunate.
I'm not saying I won't continue to comply with all health advisories for vaccination or other public safety measures, and I'm not saying vaccines aren't worth it for society. But it's not "just" a jab.
This is why the company I work for will give you up to three paid days off after getting a vaccine shot. Feeling bad after the shot should not be a reason to not get it.
The pro vaccination camp has been more annoying than the antivaxers - at least the nutjobs are easy to filter out, it takes soo long to wade through the bullshit when it's veiled as facts.
Until it isn't. Then what are you going to do? Probably nothing except suffer debilitation for life or death (~20,000 that have been reported to VAERS, so probably substantially more).
I saw less than half that number — 8099 — on the VAERS site.
And this is for a disease which has killed 821,335 Americans after infecting 51 million.
So if it’s absolutely perfectly safe and there is a roughly 5% chance of getting infected with Covid while waiting for the vaccine to take effect, it would look like this.
Not sure where you get that number. Also, the numbers for VAERS entry are very probably not even in the ballpark of all injuries because doctors don't often advertise VAERS or even enter patient data there. Why would they, it's basically extra work they don't get paid for.
I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
I get that it can be a serious disease for some, but it's rare unless you're already in poor health. The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
> The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
Last year the UK ran short of mortuaries and body bags.
On several occasions, hospitals have been unable to meet demand in various different ways, from beds (meaning staff for them rather than literally beds), to oxygen.
> I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
My condolences.
But it works both ways: If he’d had a recent vaccine instead of a covid infection, that would be listed on VAERS as correlated to the vaccine, from what I gather.
Most of the case (>99.9%), it's very likely just a temporal correlation rather than real causation. Even without vaccine, thousands of healthy people die every day without any prior sign and vaccine doesn't change that.
At my restaurant we save money by never cleaning the kitchen. No one should coerce me into doing something where it is not necessary. Cleaning wastes my time and money and it's my freedom to not clean! No one should take that freedom away in a free country!
So they were checking every morning when you were taking your company car that you had no alcohol in your blood? How did that work? Your boss was waiting at the door?
The reason why drunk driving is so dangerous is because of the choices of past governments to make implicit subsidies for cars and urban planners making car dependent suburbia.
Our choices are already constrained before we even realize it and yet people chose to die on the vaccination hill.
You're talking about employment where the employer makes much much of off your labor than you will ever receive, and you are powerless to demand your fair share. Yet instead, a safe workplace is the coercive part?
If you don't want to be coerced, you had better not be an employee with wages. Go out there and start your own business.
It’s hilarious to see HN flip from “I dream of a future where no one has to work and fall under the yoke of greedy employers” to “just get injected with this drug and be thankful you have a job; don’t get it and you deserve to starve”.
The vaccines are the magic future where a small bit of technology prevents disease and death.
> don’t get it and you deserve to starve
It's not by chance that you have to make up ridiculous words and put them in my mouth to attempt to criticize the comment, either in this part where I quoted you, or in the weird assertion about no one having to work.
> The vaccines are the magic future where a small bit of technology prevents disease and death.
That's the part I've found so disappointing about this: a couple of decades of development and we have a massive breakthrough in our ability to rapidly create and update vaccines which precisely target near-arbitrary targets. Seeing what would have been a sci-fi technology when I was a kid being the target of so many conspiracy theories must be incredibly disappointing to all of the actual medical experts who worked so hard on this.
HN used to be firmly anti-FBI/CIA and pro-Assange. Something flipped that around such that the FBI and CIA are Real American Heroes and Assange is some sort of Russian asset. The NSA is still a bit of a bogeyman here, but even that may not hold.
HN is also filled with people who were OccupyWallStreet or AntiWar types who now bloviate endlessly on portfolio management and advocate for the invasion of Iran/Syria/Russia/China/etc.
And don't even get me started on the cypherpunks, the phrack guys, etc. There might be one or two of them left who aren't actively wiping their asses with the CAM or Hacker Manifesto daily.
I suspect that evolving from eating Ramen and reading zines in a communal hackerspace to being paid $400k/yr to analyze the click habits of a billion people changes a person.
The anti-war/free love/hippie/flower power boomers did precisely the same thing, of course. Money and status will always kill lofty ideals. Always.
It hadn't occurred to me that this might lead a whole bunch of people, who didn't previously, to regard the employment relationship as fundamentally coercive. Hm. I'm now torn on this.
We were promised that a company can't require a vaccine as a condition of employment? Seeing as some companies have required vaccines for as long as there have been vaccines, I think I must be misunderstanding you.
>Why are private companies stuck policing these absurd policies?
Companies are requiring the vaccine because they make employees less likely to miss work due to illness.