Hospital staff must swear off Tylenol, Tums to get religious vaccine exemption | Hacker News Reader

Hospital staff must swear off Tylenol, Tums to get religious vaccine exemption

arstechnica.com

37 pointslightlyused28 comments

TL;DR: Asking employees to affirm understanding when claiming religious exemption on grounds of fetal cell line R&D or testing techniques:

> … "we provided a religious attestation form for those individuals requesting a religious exemption," he said. The form includes a list of 30 commonly used medicines that "fall into the same category as the COVID-19 vaccine in their use of fetal cell lines," Conway Regional said.

> The list includes Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, aspirin, Tums, Lipitor, Senokot, Motrin, ibuprofen, Maalox, Ex-Lax, Benadryl, Sudafed, albuterol, Preparation H, MMR vaccine, Claritin, Zoloft, Prilosec OTC, and azithromycin.

Wow, this level of smugness must do great in vaxxer Facebook groups! Let’s just hope there’s no crossover with other religious groups because there might be a slight problem requiring religion to be consistent.

Religion being a protected class is itself inconsistent: all of the other protected classes are inherent attributes (except veteran status), not optional adult discretionary choices.

Religion tends not to be much of a choice in practice due to childhood indoctrination and other factors.

In the US, a child of Muslim parents is literally 250 times more likely to grow up to be a Muslim as an adult compared to the children of non Muslim parents.

Source?

Also, either way: do vegetarianism.

Religion is always a choice. Childhood indoctrination can influence adult choices, but does not confer any innate traits.

Choosing to blindly continue to accept childhood indoctrination as an adult is itself a choice.

> Religion is always a choice.

Except for that death-for-apostasy bit a particular crowd likes to hand out.

Implicit in my statement was US jurisdiction, implied by the invocation of US anti discrimination regulation terminology (“protected class”).

Fortunately, that doesn’t happen too often in the USA.

So the other major religious objection would be Christian Scientists, who wouldn’t use any of the listed drugs anyway.

I’m struggling to think of a religion that would object to all of the covid vaccines (I believe one of them has a milk derived ingredient, but you don’t have to take that one) but wouldn’t object to all sorts of other common drugs.

'“A lot of this, I believe, is a hesitancy about the vaccine, and so that’s a separate issue than a religious exemption,” he said.'

Shouldn't that be the issue worth addressing then?

Why? In what other contexts do we respect an employee's "hesitancy"?

I have a hesitancy about getting in a car crash on the way to work, does that mean my employer must allow me to work remotely so I don't have to commute?

I have a hesitancy about whether Kubernetes is the right strategy, does that mean my employer must allow me to keep using VPSes?

I have a hesitancy about the stability of the US dollar, does that mean I can demand to get paid in Euro?

Or, in all seriousness - I have a hesitancy about returning to work when we know that vaccines are imperfect, does that mean I can demand that all my coworkers wear N95 masks all day and must go outside to remove them (including to drink water)?

America is not a country where employees' neuroses are coddled when the business has a job to do. I know, and understand, that even my neurosis about covid transmission is a neurosis and is going to be met with "If you don't like it, you can quit." If you want to be hesitant about things, you can spend all day at home being as hesitant as you like.

> In what other contexts do we respect an employee's "hesitancy"?

When enough people quit, employee hesitancy matters. When remote work isn't allowed and people quit, remote work is suddenly allowed. When employers hinge on old tech that doesn't net any recruits, they invest in new tech. And when employees don't want to be paid in USD, they will be paid in whatever the prevailing currency is at the time.

> If you want to be hesitant about things, you can spend all day at home being as hesitant as you like.

This works if your job involves building websites and not healing sick people. If everyone at your local hospital went on strike, do we just let everyone there die because nobody wants to take care of them? Staff are stretched thin already, the system is already nearing collapse, having people quit at this point would further complicate the problem.

Not for medical staff, no. If your surgeon believed that washing their hands was how Bill Gates got 5G chips into people, so refused to do it, you’d be posting a job ad for a new surgeon.

This seems roughly equivalent to refusing Christian religious exemptions if the person doesn’t stone unclean women or if they get divorced, or Buddhists if they eat meat or get angry and say something they shouldn’t. Nobody is consistent or perfect in their beliefs, and we don’t want them to be, especially if you read the religious texts texts. This is religious persecution by the hospital

What's next, muslims who eat pork won't be allowed to enter the prayer room? Funnily enough, being an arbiter of religiousness is blasphemy in islam.

> What's next, muslims who eat pork won't be allowed to enter the prayer room? Funnily enough, being an arbiter of religiousness is blasphemy in islam.

Apples to Oranges, I think, given that both these cases deal with medicine, while your example does not.

To be fair, it could be on the basis of method of administration - I could see someone having religious objections to injections while not having objections to orally administered medicines.

In any case, if your religious objections extend only particularly to the COVID-19 vaccines, there's a good chance that you're not exactly being honest and trying to abuse the rules.

Or perhaps you are having your very own set of spiritual beliefs, and could live without nozy employer trying to mould them to his liking

Can you explain how it is consistent to refuse the COVID-19 vaccine due to the use of fetal tissue but also use those other drugs?

You might want to try reading the article. All the hospital is saying is that if you request a religious exemption based on the use of fetal tissue, then you should also avoid similar products.

The appropriate pork analogy would be pointing out that if you are avoiding pig products, you probably also want to avoid eating bacon ...

A more accurate analogy is that if you avoid eating pork you must also avoid eating anything with gelatin made from pig bones, such as licorice, pudding, and some baking mixes.

Which is correct right? Someone who avoids pork would definitely avoid those.

It works as a thought experiment. If someone at a restaurant refused to handle pork products, but was seen on Facebook eating a BLT. Is it the employers place to interpret their religion?

Similarly many Jews disagree on the definition of work on the Sabbath. If a Jewish person took off on the Sabbath for religious reasons, is the the employers place to tell them they can't turn any lights on, or use the oven?

(16:115) He has only forbidden you dead meat, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and any (food) over which the name of other than Allah has been invoked. But if one is forced by necessity, without wilful disobedience, nor transgressing due limits,- then Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

So only meat is banned and only when it's not "necessary" (which is really open to interpretation)

Except the hospital is even more justified. Because the relationship between the COVID-19 vaccine and fetal tissue is exactly the same as the relationship between those other medications and fetal tissue.

It's directly a 1-1 relationship even more than pork and gelatin.

Yeah that falls apart too: people don't get to judge others' religious consistency (again, it's blasphemy). It is only between god and them. That's why it's religion and not law.

So I just pulled up Nahl 115, and I can make an argument that I can deny preventative care (ie vaccines) while still accepting medicine that suppresses my symptoms if they contain the wrong substances. So the hospital is definitely wrong, and anyone who thinks they can be an arbiter of religion is blasphemous and has not learned the lesson from Europe's dark ages.

Tylenol, Tums and many of those medications predate the use of any fetal cell lines whatsoever. Tylenol originates from before 1900.

For the others the medicines may have some tangential relationship to fetal cells, but their approval didn’t hinge on it.

I get it, it’s a clever (if inaccurate) “gotcha” and it gets reported because people click on it and submit it to HN.

> Tylenol … predate the use of any fetal cell lines

Doesn’t mean not used for today’s Tylenol.

Quoting from a University of Notre Dame essay grappling with morality of fetal cell lines:

”[S]ince traditional Catholic moral principles make it clear that the reception of vaccines produced with or tested on HEK293 is easily justified in a global pandemic (how could it not be if taking a Tylenol, also tested on HEK293, is justified by a headache?)—then perhaps the time has come for us to focus our moral concern on the ongoing use…”

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/does-the-origin-of...

Additional contextual background around concerns re COVID vax, at North Dakota health site:

https://www.health.nd.gov/sites/www/files/documents/COVID%20...

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