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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Is this really pushing the envelope though? Routine drug testing by employers, for example, has been considered totally acceptable by society for decades now. I'd consider a one-time proof of vaccination against a deadly pandemic to be far less intrusive than that.

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Is routine drug testing universally considered acceptable? If I'm going to be a pilot, maybe. For a developer job, I would never consider one that asked for a drug test (I don't use drugs just to be clear, my objection is to a company having any say in what people do on their own time). People complain about having to do a coding test during the interview process, but somehow it's ok to verify that you don't smoke pot on the weekends?

I've been drug tested for corporate programming jobs before. I wouldn't say it's the norm in our industry though and this may be even less common now, IDK.

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 have never done a drug test but had to disclose very invasive information for security clearances in the past. But in those cases I made a voluntary choice to work in a particularly interesting area.

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.

“ Giving up to authoritarianism just this once is not a useful precedent to set.”

The precedent is already set for things of far less value. Vaccine disclosure actually seems like one of the few things companies require I provide that is valuable for the workplace.

If they can ask for your COVID vaccine status, they can ask for your other vaccines, your HIV status, they can ask for the results of your latest colonoscopy, your blood pressure, your blood sugar, all in the name of a "healthy workplace."

That sounds like the slippery slope fallacy. COVID is a wide- and fast-spreading, current risk to public health. You don't need to ask for more, because nothing else is in the same ballpark.

I never understood this "fallacy", it's really common for laws and policies to build upon themselves. You call it the slippery slope fallacy, I call it slowly boiling the frog. People adapt and suddenly it's the new normal.

> 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.

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?

> Is routine drug testing universally considered acceptable? If I'm going to be a pilot, maybe. For a developer job, I would never consider one that asked for a drug test

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.

Do you have to disclose that to the employer or only to the lab so they wouldn't include the positive result in the report? I am genuinely curious.

After testing at the lab, the lab reports a potential positive, employer contacts you and says that you need to talk to the lab, and the lab gives a pass upon proof of prescription.

Medical Review Officers actually have access to prescription histories. I'm not entirely clear on how it works as I haven't personally seen that end, but they can verify non-negative results without speaking to the donor and report the result as negative (clean) to the company. They only need to speak to the donor if there's a non-negative result and they have no prescriptions that could cause a false positive for that. Also the MRO contacts the donor directly using the information on the chain of custody; the employer is never made aware that there's something abnormal about the sample.

"Is routine drug testing universally considered acceptable?"

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.

> what people do on their own time

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.

Having to put something in your body is different than most requirements. Only thing that's close is childhood vaccination I guess.

They can drug test you. Isn't that just controlling what you are allowed to put in your body?

You're not compelled to put something in your body.

Drug testing by employers may be broadly accepted in the USA, but not in Europe.

It's not the 'proof' part of "proof of vaccination" that's the problem. It's compelling an employee to put a foreign substance into their body. This is also much different than requiring an employee NOT ingest a substance. The situation you've created here is akin to restricted speech vs compelled speech (drug test the former, vaccine the latter).

Before this year I think most would have agreed that requiring an injection of a novel pharmaceutical is more intrusive than a non-medically invasive test of urine or hair follicle.

But what makes you think the vaccination will be one-time? There's plenty of indicators the Covid-19 vaccine is only effective for a limited number of months, so -if it turns out to be more like a flu vaccine than a measles vaccine- should we then continuously be able to prove that we got a booster shot in the last 6 months?

> Is this really pushing the envelope though? Routine drug testing by employers, for example, has been considered totally acceptable by society for decades now.

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.

The radical change is when you make access to events, places and employment conditional on this passport's contents.

The radical change is that previous generations took, at scale, vaccines against Polio and Small Pox. To the point these diseases don't matter really anymore. Today we tend to prioritize personal inconvenience over a truely greater good.

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