Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices
npr.org
npr.org
Obviously the vax theme is topical in this case—that makes this a good chance to apply discernment and distinguish between thoughtful, substantive comments and shallow, dismissive ones. As that is what we all should be doing on HN anyway, practice is good.
Folks, it’s a good idea to heed dang’s warning at the top of the thread. I’ve read all the comments and can confidently say there’s nothing worth reading here. Just people absolutely convinced of their ideas and principles, shouting past each other. Nothing we haven’t seen on this topic 50 times before.
You’re better off going outside for a walk.
I particularly dislike this type of comments, which tell people what to feel and think about a thread, however well meaning it might be. You're in a performative contradiction when you shallowly dismiss the entire thread with an overgeneralization and with that make it definitely less useful.
Yes, this thread is more divided than your usual one, but I personally found useful nuggets of information in the comments, so it is definitely not "nothing worth reading".
Remember, nobody is going to change their mind on this issue because of a perfectly worded response in an internet discussion. If you want to change anyone's mind, focus on the people you can speak to in the real world—and have a conversation filled with love and respect. Fear of vaccination is a powerful meme which cannot be countered by deriding the people who are sincerely captured by it. Instead, I suggest you walk them through the statistics and place them into human terms and human context. Show them how to calculate risk of death. Show them how to calculate risk of long term injury.
Social pressure is an important phenomenon and public opinion can really end up changing a lot over time, and I'm not so sure it's useless to add numbers to your side of an issue and contribute to a sense of societal consensus. It seems very difficult to pick out exactly what kinds of actions move societal opinion over time. E.g. what were the singular actions between the years 2000 and 2015 that were able to shift opinions on gay marriage so dramatically and make it so widely accepted now in America? If everyone that was fighting for this cause over that time had assumed it was hopeless and just given up and gone for a walk instead, it's possible this shift would not have happened.
Though the delta variant clearly shows vaccine works but if you get infected you don't die. Even with infection spikes in France or Spain for example you don't see deaths spike.
In the low vaccination countries you see spike in the infections and in deaths.
What should not happen - what cannot happen - is the government or private entities forcing you to be vaccinated, or you lose your means of supporting yourself. It's as un-American as it gets.
Part of being a free society - a truly free society - is that people must be free to make their own choices, even if they're poor choices.
That's the way I see it, anyway.
edit: an example, and a counter-example. Gay marriage is the example: there was never going to be a steady equilibrium reached of roughly half the US opposed and half the US in favor. One side had to win the fight and settle the issue.
On the other hand, abortion seems kind of similar and has in fact been in a fairly steady equilibrium in terms of public support. I think that may be because it's less one issue than two: the right to life of a fetus + bodily autonomy.
IMHO they gone way outside the reasonable scope of an employer - this is a cultural decision at the society level - why the fuck does my employer give a shit about this. Unless the employees are only commuting back and forth to work this does fuck all. It's feel good virtue signalling and I can't stomach any more counter productive SJW bullshit. The risk from COVID is not even that high for vaccinated individuals. What low risk bullshit are they going to make rules about next? Don't expect me to smile when you ask me to trade freedom for a bit of false security.
Want to change something? Then change societies perspective on the vaccine on your own fucking time.
Personally this ranks with their worst decisions and they made some fucking awful decisions over the years. I probably will act as if I don't have the vaccine and let them fire me for it when push comes to shove.
This is a game of odds. People keep acting like this is binary. You’re statistically more likely to have and spread covid without the vaccine.
I would be delighted if my employer enforced this policy but in Finland it’s never going to happen.
Diabetes can make you much more likely to have issues with infection too. Should it cause you to stay home? How are you going to eat and pay utilities?
What's next in this scope creep? Your local grocery forces you to vaccinate if you want any food?
It’s funny though how you say this phrase for a vaccine and not for the hundreds of other riskier situations you face daily. “I drove a car…risk was worth it I decided”. It sounds a bit self-important. Vaccines are just something you do. For me it was not a decision. It’s an interesting exploration in psychology where people oppose something mostly because they are told to do it. Like a teenage rebellion attitude. I get this feeling when I feel like I am being taken advantage of or have been recently.
I can imagine it’s tough being a Google employee in the SJW era. There are a thousands ways they tell you you need to change. New language, etc. Constant unrelenting bullshit that you cannot oppose.
I think this is a way for people to take back control of something because they feel a loss of control in other areas.
Just like brexit, people want to go against things because of the people telling them to do something.
Google shouldn’t tell me. The government shouldn’t tell me. SJWs shouldn’t tell me.
But sadly I don’t think there is a way around this. But I do think the SJWs and vaccine/mask crusaders make things much worse.
epistemic risk is fundamentally different from empirical risk
you started off strong with the max level condescendence and ignorance
but I do agree with the rest of the message, roughly at least
And yes, driving a car absolutely is a risk, as is just about everything.
Yes I would take it. Because if there is a vaccine available and recommended to the general population that has 90% kill rate, the thing it’s protecting against would undoubtedly have a higher kill rate then this. End of days scenarios we would be talking about nonetheless.
Yes, it's reverse psychology. The effect is to maximize death rates among the demographic group to which anti-vax has been successfully marketed.
> SJWs shouldn’t tell me.
SJWs aren't the ones campaigning for vaccines. Center-left technocrats are. Big difference.
The point is that the presence of unvaccinated people is going to cause stress and problems for other people who are less productive and happy at home and want to return to the office but feel unsafe doing so knowing that they would be sharing space with unvaccinated people.
I don't think they should care if it is work from home (except that it potentially raises insurance premiums for everyone if they come down with some kind of chronic stuff from getting covid or being intubated or have to pay out company life insurance policies), but in the office there is is an obvious interest in having people vaccinated, just like college dorm rooms required even before covid.
>Unvaccinated people have made a choice to risk their lives, they don’t get the choice to risk mine.
Doesn’t the vaccine cover for this? You get the vaccine and it reduces your symptoms, making you less likely to end up hospitalized or die. Even vaccinated you can still get infected, get sick from and spread the virus.
> Doesn’t the vaccine cover for this? You get the vaccine and it reduces your symptom
I don't want reduced symptoms, I just don't want your germs. And I wear seat belt or helmet but that doesn't give you a pass to booze up your commute, even though it would reduce the symptoms of rear ending me.
If anything, i think it has highlighted things like how cramped public transport, bars, clubs, etc really are and we just never paid it attention.
At the end of the day, this is one of the mitigations of a disease's spread and an office is somewhere it can happen. Let me flip it: Remote work ends and you now have to go back in, you're not vaccinated because [whatever reason you want] and you inevitably end up contracting the virus (along with it's risks). (My pessimistic guess is: people then sue the company for unsafe working conditions.)
It's not about you, nobody's stopping you from playing Russian roulette with your own skull. I personally do not want to be around unvaccinated people any more than I want to be on the same road as a drunk or street racer.
What risk? Using this phrasing means we have already lost.
Security (or safety) requires some social contracts to be fulfilled. When these social contracts aren't enough we start to see polices and law take up the slack. Our existing privacy laws and regulations (e.g. HIPPA compliance) could be argued to be too strict, whereas at the same time, we're in an age of spyware / ad-tracking which is in dire need of curtailment.
I am vaccinated but the only place I am willing to prove it is at an airport or a medical facility. There is a developing liberty/security divide which is going very much in the direction of far too far. Going along with the irrational ways so many people talk about vaccination I am not willing to give up an inch of liberty to the hivemind. No “papers please” to allow me to participate in normal society where the group in power gets to decide if I’m acceptable.
https://abc7news.com/vaccine-cards-security-covid-19-coronav...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/no-digital-vaccine-bou...
Now let's see where that MRN is embedded... http://dicom.nema.org/medical/Dicom/2016c/output/chtml/part0... http://www.j4jayant.com/2013/02/hl7-identifiers-person-patie...
Citation needed? It’s HIPAA, by the way; one P and two As.
> There is a developing liberty/security divide which is going very much in the direction of far too far.
Total drivel. I’m sick of lockdowns and mask mandates. If you’re legally and medically eligible for a vaccine and you haven’t gotten one, I’m happy for private businesses to refuse you service.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
There is an example. There has been a proliferation of for-profit companies offering health-related services which aren't counted as healthcare providers which a freely selling and distributing personal data for profit, to law enforcement, and accidentally because they are "not medicine" but in reality they are indeed collecting data about your health and giving you tools, information, and advice as a result of that data.
Companies covered by HIPAA are also sharing your health data extensively either through authorizations which don't very well describe the sharing which is actually happening, or freely without notification or approval as "deidentified" data which has been shown time and again to be rather trivial to unmask deidentified records to figure out the person in question.
Also anonymizes healthcare data is neigh impossible to reconstruct so I don’t understand your claim.
Do you have any proof?
What are your thoughts on individuals contracting and spreading a disease that has killed millions already due to their refusal to comply with the most basic health and safety precautions?
Do you believe that someone's refusal to comply with basic sanitary precautions should take precedence over my and my family and loved one's desire to not die of a preventable disease?
And where do you draw the line in that refusal to comply with basic health and safety precautions? Do you also extend it to other viral diseases that are preventable by vaccination such as measles, or do you single out covid?
>Do you believe that someone's refusal to comply with basic sanitary precautions should take precedence over my and my family and loved one's desire to not die of a preventable disease?
Did you and your family get vaccinated? What unvaccinated people do does not affect your risk profile in any meaningful way. Are your kids too young to get vaccinated? The last flu season pre covid killed more under 18s than COVID-19 has.
Do we need government mandated vaccinations and mask mandates for every flu season now?
>And where do you draw the line in that refusal to comply with basic health and safety precautions? Do you also extend it to other viral diseases that are preventable by vaccination such as measles, or do you single out covid?
Do you get asked if you've had a measles vaccine before you get seated at a restaurant? Are you suggesting this is a reasonable action?
You draw the line where there is a real serious threat which passes a certain threshold.
But with COVID-19 like so many things, the people speaking loudly about promoting their cause in protecting us from it (not the professionals) have absolutely no conditions for victory and will endlessly move goalposts forward and endlessly try to do more regardless if risks change by orders of magnitude.
If you're vaccinated or too young to be vaccinated, COVID-19 is over for you. The risk went from 1 in 1000 people dying to no worse than the risk in any flu season, unless that very mild risk makes you think that we should reinvent what personal freedoms in society means, stop turning and ending pandemic into a catastrophe.
I'm not sure this is settled fact at the moment. There are known variants which have shown to reduce the efficacy of at least some of the available vaccines.
The danger isn't from the individual unvaccinated person, it's from pockets of them creating a reservoir of the virus from which new variants can develop. Strong arming people into being vaccinated is the stick with which to try to limit these reservoirs.
Personally, I'm comfortable with limiting peoples ability to attend mass events (which are elective and for entertainment value only) in the tail end of a pandemic without proof of vaccination, I'm less conformable about allowing employers (outside of perhaps those who work with people who are at risk) to do the same.
Others will be taking a risk for your liberty, that is where it becomes unacceptable.
We live in a society and individual freedoms must be balanced by the responsibilities towards your fellow man.
That's the future I want to avoid, you want the screaming majority to dictate if you're allowed to do anything outside your home, go ahead and continue to advocate social control with this metaphor.
In many countries there has to be a justified reason to request a criminal record certificate.
As for the vaccine, the employer has no business knowing or demanding anything related to the health of an employee, unless that thing is directly affecting their performance. Lack of vaccination does no such thing.
First and foremost, sometimes checks include arrests (without conviction, or a not guilty verdict) if the company chooses the wrong background check company. The government doesn't regulate them very well.
But it can be things like a google search for you (Which means that a protest you went to could mean you "aren't a good fit for the company.").
It can be a credit check: I had to pass a credit check to work at a gas station once. The district manager was convinced that bad credit meant you were more likely to steal.
Very, very often - and more often than a criminal background check - is a drug test. I didn't take a job that did pre-employment hair follicle tests, mostly because the person in the room with me explained she had a drug problem in the past. She had been clean for 2-3 years clean and was willing to take regular drug tests. But they said the tests went back further than that, and no job if the hair follicle test wasn't passed (I think there are now laws that would have protected her).
Urine tests are more common, though. And a slew of employers do random drug tests - some call centers, for example, might do random hair follicle or urine tests (Student loan collections do this in some places). It doesn't matter if it would affect your job or not.
This is all mostly because there is no law protecting it: The behavior would be illegal where I live now.
Now, with vaccinations: Employers do have a little bit of business knowing health concerns if it can affect workplace safety in ways that can make other employees or customers fall sick. They already do this to some degree in, say, foodservice. For example, I know a food factory here (That I worked at temporarily) that requires stool sample tests and time off work if you have any sort of vomiting or diarrhea - you know, because it can make others sick.
I agree with you on workplace safety, but in this case it seems like posturing, since the SARS-2 vaccines don't protect from sickness and transmission (any more). Several countries are experimenting with "vaccinated, cured or tested" to enable reasonably fair and safe access to social life. Since tests will no longer be free, this seems to be a very strong incentive to get vaccinated.
In countries like the UK, Germany, France, etc they're also pondering making it mandatory for health care professionals to get vaccinated. That probably makes sense, together with e.g. teachers, especially since kids can't get the vaccine. But the government must guarantee that any vaccine side-effects will be made up for. The nasty thing about AZ for example was that you would of course get treated if you got the brain thrombosis, but no compensation was awarded. I indirectly know of someone that had this critical side-effect and they survived but last time I heard they were still half paralysed.
But I do feel like there's a distinction between a urine test and a vaccine, since it's impossible to have a negative reaction to a piss test.
As a fully vaccinated individual, I still dislike the idea of having to disclose this fact. Not for any logical reason I can personally attribute, but just because I'm used to not wanting to discuss my personal medical history in a professional setting. Perhaps this is actually worth changing, given how fucked up our medical system is here (USA). Just because something is new doesn't make it bad. What worries me though is backlash for the tiny fraction of population that actually can't take the vaccine for whatever reason.
This line of reasoning falls apart pretty quickly after this point, since if you look for it, you can come up with whatever reasons you want for fearing the vaccine and therefor not taking it. At the end of the day you just need to trust that some things work as designed and that you are probably stronger than you think you are.
Sorry I ended up going off on a tangent here.
I also have both my vaccine shots and got them as soon as I possibly could.
What I worry about is the idea of being compelled to do it, and of being compelled like you say to provide sensitive information for employment. It's better to push against something that you agree with the goal but are uncomfortable with the methods than wait until you have to fight against something you disagree with entirely. I would have to think very hard before taking a job where I had to prove to anyone I was vaccinated.
My view is that focusing on increasing voluntary vaccinations to the point that it doesnt matter is the answer. Giving up to authoritarianism just this once is not a useful precedent to set.
I feel this jab is disingenuous.
The goal of a drug test is to test whether you took recreational drugs. The goal of vaccination is to ensure the odds you contract and spread a disease is low to none.
What I find mind boggling is that the concept of a drug test is extremely intrusive, as it tracks whether you took a recreational drug sometime in the recent past, like in your personal time very far away from the company's offices and while not on the job. Why is that encroachment deemed acceptable and normal by antivaxers but the simple and extremely safe act of taking a vaccine is somehow a major problem?
Not to mention it would strike many positives thanks to prescription amphetamines being prevalent among developers. Then one would have to disclose psychiatric diagnosis (ADHD) to prove not being a druggie.
In the US, yes. There is a very, very, very good chance that your cashiers, call center workers, and a slew of other low-level (and store management) positions have had to take a pre-employment drug test. A lot of government jobs require it as well (IIRC, the government has some issues getting tech folks because of drug test requirements): Some have to take random drug tests during their employment.
It doesn't matter if it will affect your job at all. In some states, they can reject or fire you for nicotine.
I don't think this is as acceptable outside of the US: I'm in Norway now, and it would probably be illegal without reason (pilots, for example... perhaps). And a real reason, not just wanting sober employees or to sort potential employees.
if taking drugs would cause bleed-over effects into the job time, then it's not really only affecting their own time, and thus, the employer has the right to control it partially.
I don't know what's the experience in the US, but in my home country everyone has a little booklet they carry with them since pretty much birth where we register not only when we took vaccines, such as measles or tetanus or hepatitis, but also when we should take the booster shots.
Oddly enough, the booklet looks a bit like a passport. Well, a passport is also a log, right?
So I'm kind of baffled why some people claim this is a radical turn of events.
Unsure about anyone else, but I have been very much taken by surprise by the level of anti-vax and anti-lockdown sentiment during the pandemic. I'd have expected _some_ of the behaviour we're seeing, but not on this scale. In the UK we've seen huge "freedom marches", which are literally mass acts of disobedience against public health policies designed to save the lives of the elderly and vulnerable.
It makes me wonder what other public reactions I might be wrong about. For example, will people react to climate change getting worse by actively adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? Might they drive (then outlawed) combustion engine vehicles in long processions through capital cities?
I've recently been reading Obama's memoirs and he talks about how he came to realise people are moved by emotions rather than rational argument, how he was disappointed by that but forced to embrace it.
I wonder, therefore, if the poor leadership of some world leaders during the first year of the pandemic is a key factor in the strength of backlash against public health policy we're seeing. Perhaps this situation is an exception caused by a void of decisive emotional argument in the other direction. I don't know, but I do know that I'm surprised.
Now, apply the same principle to an active pandemic and half the country is losing its mind about it.
The 'freedom marches' as far as I'm aware were mainly focusing on lockdown and vaccine passports. The former is a general liberty issue, but the latter is actually a really sensitive subject in Britain.
Since basically forever, it's been a point of principle that British Citizens Do Not and Will Not carry identification around. Even if you're pulled over by the police when driving, you are only required to submit documentation via post within 7 days of being pulled over.
Dozens of governments have floated identity cards for nearly the last 50 years, and it was a surefire way to quickly tarnish a party's reputation.
Vaccine passports are ID cards on steroids.
Rolling Coal is/was a thing and it was exactly that: emitting pollution as a form of anti-environmentalism. See a Toyota Prius behind you? Hit them with a cloud of smog.
So that is not the case in US and you still have to get a vaccine? Or is it simply because there is no "proof" that you have been previously infected?
Most EU countries (that I checked - Austria is an exception) don’t even recognise the presence of antibodies as proof of past infection.
In other words, there's strong evidence that you get a stronger immune response, for longer, that is more effective against variants with the vaccine than with a natural infection. The paper I think you're referring to (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...) states "It is not known how well these results will hold if or when some of the newer variants of concern become prominent. However, if prior infection does not afford protection against some of the newer variants of concern, there is little reason to suppose that the currently available vaccines would either. Vaccine breakthrough infections with variants have indeed been reported [17]", but this is directly contradicted by some of the other studies I cited, that to show better protection against variant re-infection.
> previously infected’s antibodies are equal-to or better than the vaccine
Better how? If they still get reinfected (and they do) then how is this quantified?
The simple reason being that the vaccines have the spike protein as a marker - the part of the virus that we expect is least likely to change significantly.
What we do know is that the current Delta variant, which is a fitness escape but also partly an immune escape, has infected a number of people that had the vanilla variant.
[1] https://twitter.com/ENirenberg/status/1412865782862725125
There is this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01377-8 saying that natural immunity seems to be slightly worse than Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, but better than AstraZeneca or Johnson vaccine.
Vaccines and prior infection train the adaptive immune system to recognize pathogens so that the body can begin fighting the infection sooner. Some people's immune systems work less well than others, or due to situational factors, a person is more susceptible to infection and they become sick. People with immunity generally do far better at fighting the infection, being less ill and recovering faster.
Nothing is perfect. Vaccines are better than getting sick or doing nothing.
Time between infections and mutations.
At worst it does nothing, at best it helps. I don’t see why google should bother with an exception here.
For a big chunk of the population vaccinating is very safe because the virus is very dangerous. A vaccine doesn’t have to be very safe for a disease that kills on the order of one in a thousand off otherwise healthy adults.
Being very young or already having contracted the virus significantly alters it’s risk profile. With a virus several orders of magnitude less deadly you have to start being much more careful that the vaccine is provably considerably safer than doing nothing. That’s not hard when you’re trying to beat 1 in 1000. It is very hard when you’re trying to beat a one in millions risk.
There have been concerns and side effects. Much less amplitude in signal compared to the virus, but still big enough to halt briefly a few of the vaccines, still enough that small children don’t get emergency authorization, still enough for a few warnings about immune reactions.
It is very rational to take a one in a million risk to prevent a one in a thousand risk. It is very rational to pause before taking a one in a million risk that could very well prevent nothing.
From my experience, the immune reaction to the vaccine after having had the infection is an order magnitude worse than what the brochures and previously uninfected people say.
> The infectious period varies a bit from person to person but it is considered that an adult with flu starts being able to pass on the infection from during the day before their symptoms appear and then they remain potentially infectious for three to five days. The start is probably the same for children but it is often stated that it runs on for up to seven days after onset.
> However, the risk to others is not constant throughout. Infectiousness rises steeply when the person starts feeling unwell and that is when he or she is most dangerous to others. The risk of catching influenza from someone even just before they become ill and after the end of the first three days is quite low.
I would be pissed if I need to upend a release if some unvaccinated idiot won himself a trip to the ICU.
Don't know what it's like over in the US, but here in the UK 'the vaccinated' aren't some tiny percentage of hospitalisations. Actually, they're currently sitting around 40%, which means there's almost as much chance of your VACCINATED colleague "winning himself a trip to the ICU" as the unvaccinated. You might want to use the word 'idiot' more cautiously.
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-vallance-corrects-mistak...
Ultimately when enough of the population is vaccinated, you’d expect the majority of hospitalizations to be vaccinated.
So apparently, vaccines can never fail, by definition!
A vaccinated person is doing the bare minimum to avoid serious complications and the vaccine is extraordinarily good at that. S/he is not an idiot. An unvaccinated person is practically inviting illness. They're idiots, through and through.
* lobby for laws which forbid corporations from violating employee's privacy and mandate medical procedures.
* move to a country which already does the above
A large part of the vaccine hesitancy is just convenience.
Maybe not on the question of vaccination, but in general you could prick a random first world country.
The US started the war on terror, that wasn't really about civil liberties and the course hasn't changes as far as I know.
It's the same approach as with antivax parents -- don't want your kids vaccinated? Then you'll need to homeschool them.
So when your unvaccinated coworker exercises his selfish right to be stupid, you’re putting others at risk. The difference here is that your exposing your coworkers children and others who cannot be vaccinated to infection.
We socially tolerate people like this who choose to infect an entire office or daycare with rhinovirus, flu or the cold, because the impact is generally lower. COVID is different, and frankly, people don’t want to be around unvaccinated people just as they avoid people who display bad judgement in other ways.
FWIW I think (I think) they should be allowed to enforce this if they want, even if i dont like it. Although I might support measures to make this kind of discrimination illegal, I'd have to think more about that. Despite having my vaccine, I would not work for a company that asked me to prove it, however. I've got no beef with the vaccine, only with giving state or corporate actors power over my health choices.
Perhaps a rather simplistic model, but somewhat illustrative.
- Lots of people cannot get vaccinated due to medical reasons
[1] for the Delta variant, which at this point is what matters
If an officemate wanted to be a free rider on one of those they could, and it would be very unlikely any harm would come from it.
If we had a 90% vaccination rate for this coronavirus we would not be having this conversation (and several hundred Americans would not be dying daily from a preventable illness).
As for the flu, its not especially dangerous, not prone to exponential spread, pre-symptomatic transmission is rare and the vaccines are not especially effective. So the flu shot is in a different class than the others.
Certainly not in the older generations. I never had a chickenpox vaccine. They didn't exist when I was a child. I have had chickenpox though.
Less transmission of disease in the office would be a good thing as we return.
So as long as it can be ensured that the unvaccinated won't infect others (e.g. through testing), they should not be forbidden from participating in society. This is not justified by the current course of the pandemic. Maybe if we discover in a few months that the vaccines don't work any more because of the low vaccination rates this becomes more critical.
This would be fair if the equivalent public school spending for that student were instead given back to parents as a voucher to spend on homeschooling or on a different education provider of their choice with different vaccination requirements. But otherwise there is a financial coercion into divulging health choices or giving up bodily autonomy that doesn’t feel right to me.
Every one of us will end up having to pay for the problems caused by 1/3rd the population feeling they have the right to risk my life because of unfounded fears. If said people were so worried about their life, they would do the same risk analysis lots of us did. It's very clear that COVID is more likely to fuck me up than the vaccine.
And if it turns out the data was a result of every first world country in the world coordinating amongst themselves to spread an insanely damaging lie telling us exactly the opposite of the truth, we have much much worse problems.
That is not perfectly clear actually. From what I’ve heard refusal requires a “talk” with the HR. Sounds like termination is on the menu if company doesn’t want to grant remote privileges to that person.
EDIT: I suppose a doctor's note could say you can't be vaccinated without revealing why.
It affects the balance of propabilities, and that is everything in the current situation.
Shifts in probabilities make the difference between large scale disease (a wave growing exponentially) or not (decaying to zero).
They CDC have always acknowledged that vaccinated people can spread COVID-19 with some probability. There is no "admission" because that's not new. What's changing the advice is new measurements, modeling, social behaviours, vaccination levels (or hesitancy), and the delta variant all update the balance of probabilities.
I'm getting downvoted but people who refuse to get vaccinated tend to be poor and minorities. And who can blame them for not wanting the government injecting a needle inside their body given the US history?
PS: I'm not antivax by any means, I got my two shots.
This nation has done some horrific human experimentation on marginalized groups and always claimed they were “helping people and saving lives.”
I don’t begrudge folks who have a good reason to distrust the system and demand that we at least do the usual baseline caution in investigating brand new tech
I realize it's hard to believe I'm not being snarky, but I'm legitimately asking. How is this similar to segregation based on skin color?
Lower socioeconomic communities have poorer access to vaccinations and lower rates of vaccination.
Just because something does not claim to discriminate by race, does not make it true. Measures to segregate the unvaccinated WILL impact lower socioeconomic communities more than middle class communities.
Early on, maybe. Not now.
Find the poorest zip code in Alabama, 35203, which is in Birmingham. Look it up in Vaccines.gov. Nearest vaccination locations:
Publix Supermarket, 0.79 miles, in stock.
UAB Hospital, 1.03 miles, in stock.
Walgreens, 1.62 miles. CVS, 1.65 and 1.74 miles.
Legion Field vaccination clinic, 1.99 miles.
There are a dozen more within 5 miles.
That's a populated area. If you look for Cotopia, AL, a small remote town in the poorest county in Alabama, where the post office closed in 1986, it's not quite as easy. You have to go 9 miles, to the nearest WalMart (#10-0731).
If you can make it to a WalMart, a CVS, or a Walgreens, you can get vaccinated.
-- John Milton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiCeqySVhCE&t=1255s
Intellectuals focusing on how the unwashed masses are the reason we can't have nice things would do well to take a long, hard look at themselves and those they serve.
We are talking as if Google and Facebook doing something will cause everyone else to do something. Some companies will, others won’t. Reality is, a lot of us are sick of COVID and quarantine and masks and not seeing friends and family and just want it to stop dominating our lives.
I was sick with COVID in April and it was a bad few days. I was then re-infected approximately 10 months later and it was even worse. I have severe medical anxiety and the best decision I made for myself was to get the vaccine.
You can make your own personal choice but other people don’t need to cater to you. Many of us have been personally affected by COVID and our freedom means we don’t need to put up with BS anymore.
I won’t support government mandated vaccines, but I will support individual companies making this decision.
If you, a tech worker at FAANG, truly can’t find another job in this hot market.. then we can start talking about welfare in this country and how most don’t make 500K at FAANG and get totally fucked over by the lack of support from their government. Never mind the complete wreck of an economy the last year was.
The required vaccines overlap with ones required to go to school in the US. So between school vaccines and immigration vaccines, perhaps this is why companies have not had to require any vaccines before now?
Though I understand that healthcare workers were commonly required to get the flu vaccine every year.
Since it’s really one “side” of the culture divide who’s pushing this, I just want to ensure we’re all on the new rules:
1. I don’t ever want to hear the “my body, my choice” slogan again. Not when abortion laws are debated, not when you’re demanding legalization of drugs, not when the dangerous bath houses are being shut down, etc. Your bodily autonomy apparently stops when any vague connection to the “common good” can be made.
2. Don’t even try to continue to play the “IDs for voting are racist” card. Not while you’re demanding to see my vaccine card to buy groceries. It’s just too absurd to even debate it with a straight face at this point, so don’t try.
3. Don’t cry when this same precedent is used by private businesses in ways the “science” will inevitably enable. In 20 years, they’ll have enough knowledge to correlate everything from intelligence to aggression to specific genetic markers that can be tweaked. “Sorry, for the safety of our fellow employees, we won’t hire <racial group> until they’ve been vaccinated against hyper-aggression.”
4. When the right comes back to power, no more pseudo tears when they literally place land mines along the southern border to keep out dangerous, unvaccinated immigrants. Likewise, all your H1Bs were denied cause two people got Polio or some other mostly eradicated virus in India.
I'm in complete favour of vaccination, but I'm amazed that it's even legal for an employer in the US to ask such specific details about one's medical history.
My employer doesn't need to know what vaccines I've taken, or anything else from my medical record, unless I decide to share it.
Mind you, I'll still tell my team "I'll be about this morning for vaccination". But there's a difference between me willing to share information and the company demanding it.
People need to accept the reality that spreading a disease is causing harm, and that preventing people from causing harm is a core function of the rules of society.
Spreading disease is unique- unlike assault or robbery or rape or murder it doesn't require the harmer to intend to cause harm, so many people resist accepting that they are hurting other people.
We need to update our societal understanding of causing harm to understand it includes harm which was unintentional, unknown, or done passively.
The virus is the thing that's causing harm. You can't blame an individual for being skeptical about a vaccine (that has more voluntarily reports of causing harm than any other vaccine in recent history, btw) that's experimental, and unapproved.
Also, the science is in on there being an effective treatment, therefore emergency use isn't even warranted. Seems cut and dry to me .
The taxi cab driver would be relevant in February of 2020 when it was new and unknown. If you're going out in public today unvaccinated, you're knowingly complicit in spreading covid.
Given the amount of doses administered, we would expect this, right?
Or are you making the claim that the proportions are higher?
Mandating vaccines is going a step further - it's forcing people to do an action, which might reduce their chances of causing harm in the future.
If the sole goal was to prevent people to cause harm to others, we should prevent people from driving (they hit others with their cars) or we should stop people from being drunk (they end up fighting others, and also driving drunk).
So clearly actually, the more nuanced answer is that society is, amongst other things, a balance between protecting others and personal liberty (and these things often fight against each other).
(I'm personally vaccinated, and think as a society everyone should be encouraged to vaccinate, but that it has to be an individual decision and that we shouldn't force people to put things in their body that they don't want to put into it).
As far as I can tell there is no reasonable justification for an individual not to get vaccinated unless they are immunocompromised. It is a purely selfish thing to do. Choosing not to get vaccinated is essentially saying that you want everyone else to get the vaccine but not you because there is some infinitesimal risk involved. If you have to choose between the vaccine or covid you would be very irrational to choose covid, so you are essentially saying you want there to be herd immunity without personally taking any actions. It is pure selfishness.
The longer this goes on the clearer the damage and risk have become. If we don't reach herd immunity the economy will shut down again, hundreds of thousands of people will die in our country alone, unknown thousands more will have disabilities, and all of the problems that come along with social distancing will continue. It is a huge waste of life and resources and happiness in return for what?
Meanwhile the vaccine that has already been administered to hundreds of millions of people with virtually no long term negative effects. With a mandate everyone will be much better off, especially those who wouldn't get vaccinated as they are avoiding the much greater risk of the potential damage covid can cause.
My guess is that more companies will follow suit and I applaud it. The VA hospitals were the first and there will be many many more to come. The government wont ever do it so it is left to private businesses. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is the right call.
The problem is, you know what I don't want to have put in my body even more than the vaccine? The coronavirus. The fact that it's some anti-vax luddite coughing on my kid and putting the virus in their body that way instead of a nurse administering a shot is just a minor implementation detail.
We've banned leaded gasoline and smoking indoors because we recognize the harm caused to others, even if it's hard to directly pin-point a specific cigarette to a cancer case. We need to pull society into the 21st century and acknowledge that spreading viruses has the same dynamic.
Since we can't effectively hold people liable for the damage they cause (eg, suing or imprisoning the person who negligently spread the disease when someone gets hospitalized or dies) I don't see any practical option other than requiring the vaccine. Maybe the liability model could work- if you went out in public unvaccinated, you're held liable for the medical expenses, missed work or wrongful death of the people you exhaled the virus onto.
Does abortion cause harm to human life? Not wanting to enflame anything, but I don't think there are easy answers here. Especially in this case and the danger Covid poses, I believe mandatory vaccination isn't justified by a security argument.
Many would disagree with such statement. The core function of society is IMHO preventing people from infriging on rights and freedoms of other people. That is much more complex and multivariadic issue than just 'preventing harm'.
People generally cause harm to others in many interactions that are acceptable and resticting it would be oppresive. Situations where person A causes harm to person B can be classified to four cases:
1) No one is within their rights
2) Person B is within their rights, while person A is not. Examples are classical right violations like assault or robbery.
3) Person A is within their rights, while person B is not. In this case person B has to tolerate the harm, as requiring person A to abstain from that action would be infriction of their rights.
4) Both sides are within their rights, in this case society has to find compromise solution and weight both rights against other.
This vaccination issue seems to me like the fourth case.
One one side, there is the right of bodily autonomy, which is important and fundamental human right.
On the other side, there is the right to protection of health. That is also important right but it is relative based on threat level.
Before the society concludes that the second right is more important than the first, and vaccinations of adults may be mandated, there are several questions that should be answered:
Did we used enough non-forcible approaches to improve vaccinations rates (say financial stimulus)?
What is the quantified marginal risk of a small part of population not being vaccinated to others and how does this compare to other health risks that we accept as inevitable part of living in society?
Please explain this right? What exactly is it? So by this right, can I demand pills for my disease free of cost?
I would presume it's legal in many European countries as well, and I would expect some would go even farther. Note that they're requiring vaccinations for returning to offices that the company manages, not asking arbitrary questions about medical histories. It certainly would be legal in the country where I live, from everything I've read. Just as private businesses are free to require a vaccination certificate for entry to an establishment (e.g. clubs, or in certain European countries more essential services as well), employers are free to terminate an employee if their presence in the workplace poses an excessive risk.
Unlike usual vaccine trials, these vaccines have been deployed worldwide with hundreds of millions of people across many different conditions. Europe stopped using some due to an extremely rare blood clotting episode that was tens of people out millions. That suggests that rare, acute side effects have been (mostly?) discovered.
AFAICT, the FDA rules for full licenses seem to require a six month trial, as well as more information on process / manufacturing / quality control.
That just doesn’t seem that important compared to the massive, real-world “trial” data. What am I missing?
These vaccines have been applied hundreds of million times in the past year, true. Therefore, we have a very good understanding of their adverse effects in the first 6-12 months. What we cannot know, however, are possible adverse effects that are longer term. Susceptibility to other diseases maybe due to a weakened immune system. Possibly a higher prevalence of autoimmune diseases.
If these vaccines were regular, inactivated virus vaccines, we could extrapolate long term effects from other similar vaccines. But this is brand new technology which affects our immune system, which is far from completely understood.
I had originally hoped that Europe’s use of AZ might have avoided the concern over new methodology. But ultimately the various problems during production, testing, and rollout, “seem” worse than the newness of mRNA (in my circles).
There are also inactivated viral vector vaccines for COVID. I got J&J because it was what was available to me. I would have gotten an mRNA vaccine if I could. I agree that the mRNA vaccines should be studied for long term effects, but with what we know about them so far, my prediction is that we will find them to be much safer in the long term than viral vector vaccines. Only time will tell.
I challenge you to try again without assumptions! Unless you are saying, for those who are unsure of long term health risks, to just follow your expectations?
Please take a pause before replying to understand why people are hesitant to blindly follow the blind
My question is whether or not it is a rational position that the risk of the vaccine is higher than the risk of getting covid? Is this a conclusion that someone could reasonably come to - that they would rather have covid than be vaccinated?
If the answer to the question is no, I believe mandates from private companies are something that needs to happen as the government will not be able to act.
that is my basis. it's Smart.
What I don’t follow is that, AFAICT, full authorization is likely ~6 months from the date of filing (so November to January depending on manufacturer). So we won’t have long-term data.
Is full FDA approval meaningful to you? If so, how?
Unless you get infected, in which case you made a pretty big mistake.
So then your basically saying you don't want to get vaccinated or get covid. I'm guessing you probably also want to stop social distancing. in which case you would eventually certainly get covid if it weren't for the existence of the vaccines.
So the choices are: - Don't get vaccinated and everyone continues social distancing for several years, or until you get Covid. - Don't get vaccinated and stop social distancing once everyone else gets the vaccine - Get vaccinated
Only the third option is remotely defensible. The second option is borderline sociopathic and there are enough people taking it that it is far more dangerous than option 3.
- The pharmaceutical industry is notorious for manipulation of trial data to make their treatments looks as beneficial as possible, as they are incentivized to do so. In the current case Pfizer and others have still not made the trial data public, and probably never will [0][1]
- The main study on the Pfizer vaccine contained safety data for an average of about two months - on this basis the vaccine was declared to be extremely safe. Obviously longer term effects cannot be captured in this timeframe [2]
- Due to the requirements to generate a clear public health message, almost anything that may suggest a risk with vaccines is downplayed. See for example how VAERS data is routinely dismissed (with some reason)[3], whereas data on COVID hospitalization and death rates is largely unquestioned, despite containing some room for interpretation [4].
Again, the the totality of evidence suggests that the vaccine are safe and effective. But it is not crazy or evil, as some would suggest here, to question some of what we are being told and how the data is being presented to us.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01911-7
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/31/pfizer-resi...
[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
[3]https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaers-faers-idUSL2...
[4] https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-are-covid-19-deaths-c...
If anything, it seems like if someone doesn’t want to rely on the current EUA (because of limited data, incentives, etc.) then they shouldn’t suddenly be okay with the FDA’s full authorization.
I have plenty of my own speculation, assumptions, and anecdotes, but my hope is that someone pops up with an interesting nugget of “actually, EUA < something I haven’t considered >”.
I'm not an expert in the vaccine. So, I won't debate the details.
It is very jarring that FDA/CDC claims the vaccine is safe, but they refuse to approve the vaccine.
I predict that the consequences will be less COVID transmission among their employees. Shudder.
Is it fair to legally require these corporations to disclose conflicts of interest (eg investment in vaccines, or manufacturers thereof) given decisions of this magnitude?
Can they be held accountable if scientific consensus changes, such that it in hindsight it becomes obvious that forcing vaccinated people to return to densely populated indoor buildings further jeopardized public health in general? To be more concrete with respect to how such a situation may unfold, please see this peer reviewed paper published in April 2021 "Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein"[1].
Some key highlights from [1]:
- "Evidence from multiple experimental studies showing that single RBD point mutations can lead to resistance to neutralizing convalescent plasma from multiple donors suggests that specific single mutants may be able to evade spike-targeting vaccinal immunity in many individuals and rapidly lead to spread of vaccine-resistant SARS-CoV-2."
- "Our work suggests that it is likely that standing genetic variation alone has already produced a substantial population of viruses with single and double nucleotide changes that confer nAb resistance. These variants will establish quickly in the population under selection pressure. In fact, there is already a precedent for this behavior, as one such selective sweep occurred early on in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic when the D614G mutation rose to nearly 80% frequency in under 6 months [33]."
- "The speed at which nAb resistance develops in the population increases substantially as the number of infected individuals increases, suggesting that complementary strategies to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission that exert specific pressure on other proteins (e.g., antiviral prophylactics) or that do not exert a specific selective pressure on the virus (e.g., high-efficiency air filtration, masking, ultraviolet air purification) are key to reducing the risk of immune escape. In this context, vaccines that do not provide sterilizing immunity (and therefore continue to permit transmission) will lead to the buildup of large standing populations of virus, greatly increasing the risk of immune escape."
- "The juxtaposition of a relatively constrained immune response against the high degree of evolutionary plasticity of the spike RBD (visible even under neutral drift conditions) suggests that SARS-CoV-2 has extensive capacity to evolve to evade nAbs targeting a small number of antigenic regions. This capacity will negatively impact SARS-CoV-2 immunity in humans, whether active (vaccinal or natural) or passive (nAb prophylactics)."
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The Spanish flu took 2+ years. Learning to live with covid is a 5 year thing I think just because of how interconnected we are. Hopefully vaccines will dent it.
Which sucks, I like my job.
I'm a little confused by this. I live in King County, WA (and I work at Google). According to data reported by the county (as tabulated by the NY Times), one in 19 residents have contracted COVID[0]. That's >5% -- with a 1.8% case fatality rate in the US[1]. That's a bit below a one in 1000 chance of having died of COVID if you live in my county, including the infection fraction. If you look a the risk of just contracting it, based on the county, the risk is higher than any other disease I'm aware of.
Am I missing something?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/king-washington-...
We’re talking about public health here, not just yours or mine. Something tells me we should have a bit of trust in people who studied epidemiology and vaccines all their lives. And the consensus in the scientific community is that herd immunity by vaccination is a way to go.
If people want to put others at risk of harm, employers are under no obligation to indulge them.
At least FB and Google have remote employment for the anti-vax crowd.
The aggregate risk of a poorly-vaccinated population is, presumably, still likely much higher than the "longitudinal risks" of vaccines?
ie., it seems unlikely to me that vaccines will kill 100,000s (and, with covid continuing, 10s,000s+/yr).
Even doing this based on individual preference alone, presumably you have preferences for the safety of (some) others; of your workplace; etc.
Your risk of getting Covid if not vaccinated (and leading a remotely normal lifestyle) is close to 100%. With an R0 of 6 you can't just free-ride of people who take the "unknown longitudinal risk", because even if a lot of people take the jab it's extremely unlikely we will achieve herd immunity any time soon -- even if the jabs (or prior infection) granted perfect and permanent immunity which they don't. I'm suprised you think otherwise, and would like to hear your reasoning, in quantitative terms if possible.
Do you think you are consistent in your risk judgement across all parts of your life? E.g have you ever taken drugs? Illicit or prescription?
There's also a longitudinal risk of covid as well. Given that the future is unknown, why would you count that as a reason not to get vaccinated instead as opposed to a reason to get vaccinated? You should really basically be considering the longitudinal risk as neutral since you don't really have any information saying it's issue.
Vaccination also protects other people by reducing the spread in the population. By not being vaccinated, you will increase the chances of other people being infected.
How do you factor the risk to others into your decision?
When we work, we give all sorts of autonomy up. That what work literally is, exchanging some autonomy for some money. Most obviously that means doing parts of the job you don't like (docs aint going to write themselves). Some places it means wearing a tie (eww). My last job made me sign a document saying i agree never to bring a firearm to work.
All these things hinder my autonomy. Some may be more aceptable than others (eww dress code. Not interested in wearing a tie. But also wouldn't want to work at a nudist workplace either). In any case, almost every workplace has policies that prevent you from doing things that threaten the safety of other employees or their families. This is hardly much different.
What might "other reasons" be?
How easily are many falling into the trap of "common good" - please think about it, almost a century ago there was a time in one country in Europe where one nation was called to spread plague, only a few years later this nation was put to gas chambers. We are going to face the same situation very soon.
If you won't have respect to the other side you will see terror, and you will always find nice and round argument to justify that terror. Seeing how much of hatred is spread in this "technical" forum I must say, the time of terror is very near.
Aren't they just exercising their right to free speech?
Now we could approach the point of being to open up again, and it is about time. Because, with some luck and pressure, we can get enough people vaccinated. Only that we can't yet, because of the se crowd. And once we are at that point, this crowd basically wants a free ride. Talking about egoism, that's kind of the text book example.
I totally understand this measure and, for the record, agree with it, but I'm picturing the pushback that this will lead to.
For the record I will never disclosure my health status so don’t assume one way or another.
You could just as easily argue it points in favor of vaccines.
This is exactly the kind of bizarrely short-sighted reasoning that results in pandemics exploding in the first place: "Things aren't bad yet, so why do we need to do anything??"
But it is kinda easy to guess from your post.
It seems NYC has been registering a daily average of new 700 confirmed cases of covid, which is growing fast. This is a lower limit of the true rate of transmission as they reflect confirmed cases through molecular tests.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
In this page, if you check the graph, you'll notice that NYC is registering a new wave of covid infections that is as the highest level in about two months.
Even though covid infections in NYC are spiking, death rates are not. This is expectedly the result of the vaccination campaign.
No wonder they are mandating the vaccine. That's the only way to prevent another death wave.
I do think people with no vaccine now are becoming more and more at risk as the vaccinated population grows with more social interaction without much consequence to the vaccinated. This has increased the risks to the unvaccinated. Being a holdout is not a great position to be in now.
If I had to bet, these sorts of policies actually disincentivize people to get vaccinated. Let everyone suffer so you can keep living unvaccinated.
Can you explain your logic?
'The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.'
I'm not belittling the discussion that our society must have about what can or can't be mandated by an employer. However, I doubt the above quote was created in the context of high paying tech jobs, they were focused on the forced experimentation that occurred in WW2.
They are free not to take it if they chose to do so, and accept the consequences of their actions like any adult would.
- Nazis conducted horrific medical experiments on Jewish prisoners (who were mostly German citizens as well!). In fact, pretty much everything we know about hypothermia came from the Nazis freezing and attempting to revive prisoners.
- Nazis often used promises of medical treatment to ensure compliance. The famous "showers" were one such example. Prisoners were then sent into a room -- complete with showerheads, soap, and even puddles! -- to be gassed.
- Nazi propagandists created documentaries showing Jewish, Romani, and other "undesirable" communities as "disease-ridden". It is easier to convince normal people to betray "undesirables" when "normal people" believe they are protecting both their own health, as well as the health of their communities.
Your right to bodily autonomy does not extend to a right to put others at risk of harm.
Moved on from the Holocaust comparisons, at least.