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Comment by chasd00 | Hacker News Reader

when you tell someone "get vaccinated or be fired" what choice do they have? My job required us to all upload our vax cards or be fired. I resisted for a few days and even applied for an accommodation on the basis of "crisis of personal conscious" but was told if my accommodation was denied then i would be fired. I eventually relented and uploaded my vax card because i wasn't going to risk my family's wellbeing over a random piece of paper.

i did file a formal HR complaint and asked for a list of other personal health information required for continued employment that was not in my offer letter. I expect no response though.

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> when you tell someone "get vaccinated or be fired" what choice do they have?

That's the point. You don't have a right to endanger the healths of other people, and you never have; the legal groundwork for vaccination mandates significantly predates the current crisis.

> I eventually relented and uploaded my vax card because i was going to risk my family's wellbeing over a random piece of paper.

Close to 5 million people have died worldwide, and your concern for their wellbeing only begins when you're required to get a vaccine that's been free & convenient for months? With all due respect: have a little perspective.

If i knew my vaccination records were required to work where i work i would have taken my skills elsewhere. Not once was i ever told my medical records would or could be required for continued employment.

I got vaccinated to protect myself and those around me. My job has no business in my health records. period.

edit: also, i'm 100% wfh since before the pandemic started. I'm endangering no one at my workplace.

> My job has no business in my health records. period.

You mean other than the health insurance they (hopefully!) provide you, right?

Even beyond that, the idea that the piece of cardboard that the CDC gave you constitutes meaningful (much less private) medical data about you is facile. Depending on the state you live in, your employer de facto has knowledge of your medical history: if you went to a public or private school in most US states, they were legally required to obtain proof of your vaccination against multiple diseases. The reason your job doesn't ask for that proof independently is because we've succeeded at lower levels in mandating it.

> also, i'm 100% wfh since before the pandemic started. I'm endangering no one at my workplace.

That's fine. But your workplace (presumably) isn't your only social sphere.

Edit: You're also (again, presumably) going to return to your workplace or travel on behalf of your employer at some point.

Isn't this logically inconsistent? The vaccinated should be protected by the vaccine, and thus little to no threat should exist.

Ah but the vaccines are leaky you say, the vaccinated can acquire and spread the disease, and they can do so asymptomatically. And to that I propose a question: are the vaccines definable as effective, that being the case? If you're so positive of the vaccine, shouldn't your whole family unit be vaccinated? Children aren't very susceptible to the disease. Once boosters are deployed to the aceding population, will that cause a paradigm shift? Once a large proportion of children are vaccinated? Once we hit the constantly moving target for "herd immunity"?

No, it's all or none. It's arbitrary. It is not logically consistent. It is government policy in a nutshell.

People die constantly. Attributing causality exclusively to COVID19 is asinine. Even using an aggregate like excess mortality is a fool's errand. It's been clear since the beginning that comorbidity in combination with COVID19 is what typically causes death. Any numbers pulled to evidence how deadly COVID19 is are fraught with interdependencies and overlap and hardly present a true to life picture.

It's naive to think you can save everyone. It's okay that you're afraid.

> Isn't this logically inconsistent? The vaccinated should be protected by the vaccine, and thus little to no threat should exist.

This isn't why we encourage mass vaccination. We encourage mass vaccination because herd immunity protects everyone, including people who can't be vaccinated for legitimate reasons (allergies, immunocompromised status, &c).

I'm young and healthy; my chances of severe illness from COVID are extraordinarily low. I didn't get vaccinated primarily for my own protection; I did it because I have friends and family who need it more than I do, and whose return to normal life is predicated on the participation of society as a whole.

The rest of your post is misinformed about the role vaccines play, and would be addressed by improved public education about immunity, improved immune responses, and lower incidence of severe cases. Individual vaccines produce different outcomes along each of those axes, which has (understandably) produced a great deal of confusion as to whether the COVID vaccines "prevent" COVID or not. But the information is available, and it's incumbent upon you as a member of civil society to avail yourself of it.

> It's naive to think you can save everyone. It's okay that you're afraid.

What?

You can't get herd immunity with a virus that evolves this fast and can persist in animal reservoirs with a leaky vaccine.

Yes, you can. Herd immunity as a public health policy includes protection from severe illness; COVID vaccines have consistently been shown to provide protection against severe illness even when new variants appear.

Also, to point out the absurdity with all of this: we wouldn't have as many variations as we currently have if people were to actually get their vaccines. Handwringing over variants while also resisting the chief tool we have for reducing the likelihood of new variants is ridiculous.

Explain to me how exerting selection pressures through a leaky system prevents the likelihood of variants.

And to evince you of known hazards of leaky immunity, I suggest you look up Marek's disease.

I agree the vaccine does decrease the incidence of severe illness, even in the new variants. Based on this fact it should be given to the vulnerable.

A policy of mass vaccination to protect the vulnerable is a different thing and is more related to the concept of herd immunity. It can be very bad policy depending on the nature of the virus. Its really good policy for something like measles. Here's a link that takes a deep dive on how this relates to covid and the corona virus: https://www.juliusruechel.com/2021/09/the-snake-oil-salesmen...

I did a brief parse of that site, and it's the standard crank spiel about anything vaguely pharmaceutical (plus some "Great Reset" dogwhistling and bloviating about America's founding fathers). He even threw in a Sherlock Holmes quote; how can I argue with that?

Yes, pharmaceutical companies are bad. They're so bad that it's a trite and tired observation to base conspiracy theories on. Nothing written therein changes the fact that the shot is free for you and produces improved healthcare outcomes. The US government already spends hundreds of billions of dollars keeping people alive after decades of damaging their bodies; paying a few billion more for some vaccines is hardly worth a global conspiracy.

Agree with your criticisms but his points on herd immunity are pretty good. If you want a more scientific dive into it this Alberta neurosurgen did a pretty good analysis on some of the same aspects, all referenced: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/not-justified-canadian-...

I'm not going to do an in-depth rebuttal of these types of articles, because I'm (1) not qualified to do so, (2) not inclined to do so, and (3) lack the time needed to disentangle the science-adjacent claims from the standard conspiracy chaff about freedom, pharmaceutical companies, &c.

But two points:

* Being a neurosurgeon, even a highly educated and titled one, does not make someone an expert on immunology. If he was an expert on immunology, he would be an immunologist. This is exactly the reason why there are stringent rules about diagnoses and evaluations in hospitals: doctors are no less susceptible to expert confusion than the rest of us.

* mRNA vaccines are a new technology. But they're not that new: research into mRNA transport and delivery began in the late 1970s[1]. By the 1990s, they were recognized as the frontier of vaccine development, and were primarily stymied by an absence of funding. Vaccinology's history spans 300 years, the majority of which involved stabbing people with unknown quantities of pathogens without any real understanding of what we were doing. mRNA represents a significant and positive increase in the use of our modern understanding of immune systems to develop medicine. That doesn't make them safe, but they do represent the safest approach (in terms of healthcare outcomes) we've had to vaccinology in its history.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

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