New York's largest healthcare provider fires 1,400 unvaccinated workers | Hacker News Reader

New York's largest healthcare provider fires 1,400 unvaccinated workers

reuters.com

92 pointsdev_tty01334 comments

Is this really the behavior of a hospital system on the brink of collapse due to an ongoing pandemic? Really?

I'm meant to honestly believe that the hospital system is on the brink of collapse, and that you are now firing 1400 workers who have been the ones keeping it going for the last 20 months?

I think this might be my "yeah, the pandemic is officially over" moment. You don't fire the freaking healthcare workers in a time when you supposedly need them desperately.

They employ over 75,000 people, so 1,400 is not the shocking total it might seem. They also are not necessarily all in patient care roles.

I have heard remarks like this before in the restaurant industry. Like with dish-staff, even the Janitor is a critical role, doing an essential task that no other will do.

It sucks - I wish these people didn't need to be let go - if only they had been warned repeatedly about the consequences of not getting the vaccine (to their health and their jobs), been given clear evidence on efficacy from trusted sources and hadn't bought into bullshit they read on facebook.

> Like with dish-staff, even the Janitor is a critical role, doing an essential task that no other will do.

Easy to hire and train new janitors and dish-staff

You seem to be unaware of the massive labor shortage affecting the US right now.

That sentiment has not worked well for the shipping industry.

Sure you do, if they're relatively low-skilled and straightforwardly replaceable, and they're endangering the rest of the staff by refusing to comply with health and safety requirements.

This is 1.8% of their workforce. Their normal annual turnover is 8%.

>if they're relatively low-skilled and straightforwardly replaceable

narrator: "they aren't".

What qualifies you to speak on the subject?

What makes you more qualified than the people who actually have professional education, training, and experience in running a hospital?

I took the time to look up the employee turnover rate at a regional health care provider in order to write my comment. Can I ask that you expend at least that much effort (it's not much!) to support your claim with evidence?

My argument might be more subtle than my comment makes it seem; if so, that's my fault, because I wrote downthread as well and probably assumed people read both comments. A very large cohort of the workers in a regional health chain are not medical professionals, but rather support staff. Those are the employees that I'm saying are relatively low-skilled and replaceable. What's more, our current economic conditions make it straightforward for them to hop to other jobs right now.

What you're saying seems pretty unlikely, given the demographics of vaccination.

Health officials have spent nearly two years claiming that all of society has to shut down because they cannot increase staffing capacity at all. That's why so many of the emergency hospitals that were built ended up shutting down having never seen a single patient.

This claim was always implausible on its face, but having so adamantly claimed this, public health does not now get to claim that huge numbers of workers can be trivially hired and trained within a few weeks. If that actually is the case then the justification for lockdowns evaporates.

You are right, I did not understand that you were speaking about support staff and not those in nursing. Obviously nurses and doctors are not trivial to train and replace.

Our local hospitals have lost on average over half their nursing staff in the last year, and hasn't been able to replace near enough of them. This was before vaccine mandates.

Which is only putting more stress on the ones who stayed, and it's getting to where they are getting burnt out, having gone through a year and a half of COVID and now taking to the slack due to the shortages.

No telling what's going to happen when the vaccine mandate kicks in next month for most of the nurses.

The normal overnight staffing where my wife works is usually one doctor, 3-mid levels and 6 nurses.

They've been down to one doctor and 1-2 nurses for most of the last month.

> endangering the rest of the staff

Where did this idea come from that we vaccinated people need to be protected from the unvaccinated? That’s what the vaccine is _for_, protecting us from the unvaccinated. And it’s good at its job!

Please educate yourself on herd immunity.

Delta is so transmissible that herd immunity is no longer achievable even with 100% vaccinated.

it's not black & white

Which edition of herd immunity, the early 2020 or 2021 definition? It's a moving target you see...

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101161006/https:/www.who.in...

https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease...

It is a moving target because yes - we don't (as a society) have a ton of practice with worldwide pandemics. Information evolves and our expert's interpretation evolves with it. If you reject opinions from everyone who has ever changed their mind after receiving more information you'll be left with one or two ridiculously lucky people and a who bunch of stubborn morons who simply reject the notion that their past selves might have been incorrect.

It's not that I reject it it's that Id like to see something like git logs. Public health officials should drop the aura of infallibility and adopt some dev community style humility.

I am in disagreement with most of my family on this point (taking the least popular point of view). I understand the idea that transparency always allows better information around personal decisions - but I'm not certain if more transparency that might include speculation during a pandemic would actually lead to a greater sense of public safety. I feel like generally being transparent does increase public stability by increasing faith in the government - but I also feel like a pandemic is a good time to burn some of that public good will to keep a unified message to the public.

The current US federal government has no public good will left to burn. You have to be deluded to think they do.

Society has been experiencing pandemics for as long as society has existed. There is literally nothing humanity has more experience with than disease.

Herd immunity is a moving target because people like Fauci change their assessment of it depending on opinion polls. That's by his own words, not anyone else's. The guy admitted it to the New York Times. The "science" is not evolving and people who keep claiming it is, are just hurting the credibility of actual science even more than it's already been hurt. After all, a "science" that is constantly asserting things with 100% confidence and then next week asserts something totally different, also with 100% confidence (which they do), is actually pretty worthless to society.

Am I looking at the wrong parts of those pages? In the first I see "The threshold for establishing herd immunity for COVID-19 is not yet clear." and in the second I see "The proportion of the population that must be vaccinated against COVID-19 to begin inducing herd immunity is not known."

Also, the threshold for herd immunity is based partially on how well the virus spreads, and Delta changed that, which means that the threshold for herd immunity probably changed. When facts change, the messaging needs to change to stay accurate.

...? The vaccine isn't a panacea that eradicates the virus. Vaccine means your viral load is going to be lower than the alternative and less likely to spread. You can be vaccinated and still spread the virus, but getting the hogs to stop running around so we can try and achieve herd immunity for those that aren't able to get the vaccine is a pretty obvious goal.

It reduces your risk of serious illness to the point of irrelevance. If you’re vaccinated, you’re not quite at zero risk, but you’re close enough that the pandemic is over for you.

And delta is so transmissible that herd immunity is no longer achievable even with 100% vaccinated.

> And delta is so transmissible that herd immunity is no longer achievable even with 100% vaccinated.

There is ample evidence that suggests the exact opposite[1].

[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2106757

That article isn’t about herd immunity.

It doesn't reduce risk to irrelevance - there can still be some serious consequences - and the more unvaccinated people we've got around the more likely we're going to see even more variants which may bypass the efficacy of the vaccine and force us back into full lock downs.

> It reduces your risk of serious illness to the point of irrelevance.

For the most part, and if you're healthy. Unfortunately in a hospital you're working with people that are vulnerable.

Why is this such a controversial thing anyways? In the past we've made vaccines mandatory.

The vaccine isn’t without side effects, and there is still a debate about whether natural immunity is sufficient.

The he side effects are trivial. Just get the vaccine and stop deluding yourself.

No. You’re just assuming that it’s by choice.

Because you're still allowing people who can transmit the disease around these "vulnerable" patients.

And the line drawn isn't even an arbitrary number, but an arbitrary policy with an assumed improvement.

An improvement that we know isn't good enough to prevent spread in populations with near 100% vaccination rates.

It's a free, safe vaccine that significantly reduces the spread of the virus that has caused a global pandemic over the last 18 months or so. If you're a health care worker and you won't get vaccinated, you probably should find a new line of work.

It doesn't need to be 100% effective at stopping spread to be an excellent idea.

Amusingly enough, 1.8% is close to the IFR of Covid.

CFR, not IFR.

Ok so the percent of staff they’re firing is higher than the IFR?

The healthcare system in this country is multifaceted, and has multiple points of failure. We've seen most (if not all) of them at various points: a lack of PPE, insufficient respirators and ICU beds, a lack of staffing, &c. Each of those is a sufficient condition for describing the system as "on the brink of collapse."

As others have pointed out, those 1400 workers were also not necessarily essential medical personnel. All other things being equal, Joe in Billing is more likely to be resistant to getting his shot than Susie in Immunology.

Also, the worst of the Delta variant is over, and New York was never as much of an area under strain as red states were post-vaccination

That was just a matter of seasonality, and a quirk where the southern states which tend to be the least vaccinated also have late summer respiratory virus surges. Highly vaxxed Vermont has been experiencing a major surge, we might expect the same in New York although they might have a much higher proportion of naturally immune.

You're going to pass the last few months off on seasonality? That strains credulity.

Southern states stay inside in the summer.

Northern states stay inside in the winter.

Kentucky and Missouri have roughly the same climate zones as most of the Northeast, thanks to their inland position. A decent chunk of Missouri is actually in a colder climate zone than the NY metropolitan area[1]!

[1]: https://basc.pnnl.gov/images/iecc-climate-zone-map

Vermont is a pretty bad example because while the numbers are up again they're still quite low - thankfully the state has never been hit terribly by the virus.

I keep my fingers crossed that the worst of Delta is indeed over for NYC, but I don’t feel more than 50% confident. Last winter NYC experienced a huge surge before the introduction of new variants. I hope the vaccines, booster, and upcoming child vaccination will help this time around, but it is hard to predict or control this disease.

So why the need to fire 'Joe from Billing', who has been working diligently from home for the last 18 months? Folks don't contract COVID by Internet.

> So why the need to fire 'Joe from Billing', who has been working diligently from home for the last 18 months? Folks don't contract COVID by Internet.

I've been working from home too, but that doesn't stop me from going to the bar on the weekends (I'm not sure about where you live, but in NY they've been open for months).

And to point out the obvious: at some point, Northwell is going to want Joe to return to the basement of whatever hospital his billing department is in.

Creating exceptions like this might allow you to retain some portion of these employees but it will complicate rules around employee interaction (Sorry Joe - you're not allowed to attend the employee picnic this year) and open the company up to liabilities from both the patient and HR side that are unnecessary dangerous. Additionally, the more carveouts you add the more likely you're going to get a wrongful firing suit.

They may be more concerned about the potential of it spreading to their other employees. People occasionally associate with their coworkers physically outside work (e.g., happy hours, coffee, lunch, etc). Even if they are mostly working from home, they present a risk to the other employees.

Because Nancy in Nursing might need to go to Joe from Billing's office to discuss a payroll discrepancy, whereupon Nancy in Nursing becomes a potential carrier, infecting Paul the Pediatric Patient.

When I visit hospital I have to get or pay bills (providing by their billing staff) on site before procedures. Also emergency happened everyday, even billing or any staff many need to do on-site work if network is done. Checked facebook today?

While they aren't perfect, the vaccines do drop transmission rates. Why would they want more contagious people handling the elderly and immune compromised, or, even if they just relegated the unvaccinated to handling the young and healthy, spreading it more through the hospital system ultimately reaching elderly and immune compromised patients?

>Is this really the behavior of a hospital system on the brink of collapse due to an ongoing pandemic?

I hope so. When better to fire workers who won't comply with safety protocols than in an "ongoing pandemic"?

What is this logic?

NYS implemented a mandate for all healthcare organizations to follow.

Deadline was end of September and all organizations followed through on it.

Especially when a lot of them have caught COVID and have anti-bodies against it.

The number of lies (and censorship) being used to sell this mandate is pretty shocking. This won't end well for Democrats in 2022.

I’m afraid to ask why having antibodies from a previous Covid infection isn’t as good or better than taking the vaccine.

Sending an upvote before all the downvotes come piling in...

Because you don't take a chance in dying if you get the vaccine but you do if you catch COVID. Also, you spread COVID when you get COIVD, you don't spread COVID when you get the COVID vaccine.

Broad strokes paint outside the lines.

For a large portion of the population, COVID isn’t a death sentence. I had COVID not long ago and it was like every other flu I’ve ever had—aches, lethargy, over in 3 days. I didn’t even know it was COVID (instead of a normal flu) until my sense of smell was gone. (Back a week later)

Wrong, you do take a chance getting the vaccine. The media and SV have been instrumental in keeping that fact from most of the public but the risks are very real. The benefits are also far less than originally hoped, we're seeing ICUs all around the world filling up with "fully vaccinated" people.

The risks are unknown, the benefits are unknown, the censorship and group-think is real though. Fuck that, I won't be getting any of the current vaccines, I'll go homeless and defecating on the streets of SF before I allow any of the current Pfizer, J&J or MOderna jabs into my own body. Novavax looks a lot more promising, so if safety data for it isn't censored by the media and social media including Youtube, I'll gladly get one.

Doesn't excuse firing people who have already had it.

Regardless of whatever the argument is about those who haven't had it.

The problem is if you can get natural immunity independently, how can you be dependent on the government? Reduced dependency for vaccines and healthcare will reduce the need for government intervention and reduce the justification for increased taxes and regulations.

There are many cases people get covid more than once, even some congressman I think.

I think it's mainly ego at this point. The establishment said that herd immunity won't work, accepting that those who already have had the disease are as immune as those with the vaccine would be in effect admitting they were wrong.

Because the CDC insists on PCR-positive nonserovonversion cases as proof that previous infection does not guarantee antibodies.

PCR-positive results don't necessary guarantee evidence of infection.

Would you hire a carpenter that didn't believe in nails?

Or a software engineer that didn't believe in binary?

> Or a software engineer that didn't believe in binary

If using binary may incur a chance of heart failure and blood clots, yes, I'd be sure to hire a software engineer who didn't do that.

How about unvaccinated staff pose a risk to patients who are in the hospital and likely immunocompromised?

I agree if they fired people wfh that was stupid, but for doctors and nurses? Yeah they are a liability for other patients.

Except they are firing people. My company just announced all remote employees must be vaccinated. What does that mean? That is what their lawyers told them the vax mandate means. The same vax mandates that are getting nurses fired. Why can't people just come out and say it that the federal government mandates in their current form are illegal?

> Why can't people just come out and say it that the federal government mandates in their current form are illegal?

Because 1) they're not illegal and 2) they're quite useful to society as we want to make sure everyone gets vaccinated.

Nonsense. You have no evidence to show they're not illegal.

To show they're illegal the burden of proof is on you.

What are you talking about here? Could you provide some documentation?

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcome...

https://nypost.com/2021/03/15/italy-france-germany-pull-astr...

https://nypost.com/2021/10/04/twitter-criticized-for-fact-ch...

For me personally, I don't know anyone who's died of COVID, but I know two people who had complications from the vaccine, including my aunt who was already in fragile health and who was sent to the hospital due to myocarditis, and then told not to get shot number two. She's already partially disabled because of her health problems, but because of government mandate that requires she be 'fully vaccinated' (i.e., dead in her case) she can also no longer work any job (even remote ones, because apparently sitting in your home working is also illegal). Thanks Joe Biden!

A better comparison would be a software engineer who refuses to patch his out-of-date operating system because he's "not sure what the updates will do".

As opposed to installing every published patch, without internal testing, whether the patch is needed/applicable, or not?

Without realizing it, you're criticizing debian's release methodology without realizing why people use debian. There is often good reason not to just patch things willy-nilly. Patches that are easy and allay obvious safety concerns yes. But being a little bit behind bleeding edge is a good thing.

The virus is a zero day unauthenticated remote code exploit against postfix. Dunno how we're so far into this thing and people don't get that yet.

Very poor comparison that misrepresents their motives.

None of these people opposes vaccines. They either don't accept THIS vaccine, esp. how politicized it has become, and they don't accept being force do take it.

Who politicised it and why? And when you say THIS vaccine, which one?

At least when it comes to the US - these vaccines have been strongly embraced by major figures in both political parties. They were mostly developed and rolled out initially under Trump and have been continued under Biden - so both sides of the aisle would really like you to get it.

I'm in Canada and my spouse had some concerns about AZ when it was first being rolled out in pharmacies by booked appointments - so I waited until the national rollout of Pfizer & Moderna - if you've got concerns over a specific version of the vaccine there are other options.

That is the reaction of a child. Not an adult working in a critical service.

Adults realize the danger in unchecked authority. Children do not. That is why they trust their parents without question. It's only as an older teenager you come to realize that your parents are imperfect people, with idiosyncracies, faults, and problems of their own.

Adults realize what unchecked authority is like, and that this isn’t it.

They also realize that a global pandemic has left no country untouched, and even enemies are desperate for vaccination.

Finally, adults realize what a privileged position we’re in and that insisting rights are being trampled (whose rights?) doesn’t make it so

Except the global pandemic has left the vast vast vast majority of the world's population untouched.

Except it has affected many.

https://www.aier.org/article/no-lockdowns-the-terrifying-pol...

Context is everything: Polio affected less than 1% of the population. Even a smaller fraction, when counting those paralyzed.

Still a scary disease.

Oh really? How many people have been hospitalized or died compared to how many people are alive today?

Far more than some of scary diseases that we eradicated last century.

That's a pretty poor analogy. Nails are often the right and often the wrong tool for different circumstances. And there are different kinds of nails. Lots of carpenters have preferences for what types of hardware they use - based on their own experience and that of experience from others. And even if I disagreed with a carpenter on what tools were right for any given particular circumstance, it would be silly to try to micromanage them doing their job - just let them do their work!

I can see "nails vs screws" ending in a brawl if enough alcohol is served beforehand. The first punch would probably be thrown after the clipboard warrior makes some quip about dovetails and other "fastener free" joints and gets everyone riled up.

I'm a draw-bored mortise and tenon guy myself.

But if an expert in fasteners says "use this nail/bolt, made of this material and grade, for this application"...and then Joe Roofer says "WELL I actually work on roofs unlike those ivory tower mechanical and structural engineers, I'll use what I think is best" and then years later a couple people get killed...

There are a lot of infamous incidents caused by people thinking they know better than the people who designed stuff and actually had training, experience, and education in that field. Doing things like changing fastener grades, or styles, or completely changing how something is put together. The most ready example I can think of is the hotel bridge collapse that killed a couple dozen people, because some mouth-breather thought he knew better than the structural engineers that drew up plans on how to anchor the bridge to its overhead supports.

Virtually nobody at a hospital is qualified to second-guess vaccines, and the people who do are people I don't want anywhere near patient care because they're going to second-guess other experts, like the doctors they work with, the instructions for equipment and drugs, etc.

Would you listen to an expert doctor who didn't wash his hands before childbirth or a old wive's tail midwife? BEcause this is an actual life and death scenario, and history doesn't look well on the 'experts'.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/3756639...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Bridge#First_design_and...

> Virtually nobody at a hospital is qualified to second-guess vaccines

...and the people in the hospital are also in a great position to verify that (1) vaccines work.

Let P(H|V) be the probability that had outcome H happens if you are vaccinated, and let P(H|~V) be the probability of that had outcome when you are not vaccinated.

Then P(H|V) / P(H|~V) = P(~V) / P(V) x P(V|H) / P(~V|H)

where P(V|H) is the probability that someone with outcome H was vaccinated, and P(~V|H) is the probability that someone with outcome H was not vaccinated.

All they need to do is look at their patients that have outcome H (such as being hospitalized, or dying) and count how many were vaccinated and how many were not, find out the vaccination rate of the community their patients came from, and they can calculate P(H|V) / P(H|~V) which is how much vaccination reduces your chances of H.

For example, if 70% of the people in your community are vaccinated, and you have 50 people who died from COVID in the last month, 5 vaccinated and 45 not vaccinated, you'd get that P(H|V) / P(H|~V) = 0.048. Vaccination is reducing a person's chances of dying by 95%.

So even if they don't want to just trust the experts they can see for themselves that the experts are telling the truth.

Or for people who want their math in pie chart form

https://twitter.com/simondotau/status/1444537141413888003

Unfortunately vaccine efficacy is something almost nobody can verify on their own so trust is required.

The real question is: why do you trust people that they don't?

They're probably like me. I know the vaccine helps. I also know that I have near-zero risk from COVID. So I don't get the vaccine because I don't like injecting unnecessary stuff in there.

Or they got it already, and equally or better protected than by vaccination.

There's evidence that the vaccines give better protection than natural infection. There's also evidence that being infected and then being vaccinated gives better protection than either one by itself.

Additionally, this isn't how public health works. Vaccines are a level of protection that is easy to standardize and operationalize. We don't let schoolchildren skip getting the chickenpox vaccine if they've already had chickenpox.

OK but then make the vaccine (which one btw? there's so many to choose from for sars-cov-2) mandatory.

Don't say people have a choice, then punish those who decided to choose to not get vaccinated.

I'm fully vaccinated and so is my wife, but I'll fight for the right of those who decide to not get vaccinated.

It's not ok to call other names (like "egoist") when they exercise the choice they still, to this date, have.

It’s not all about you. Unvaccinated people are more likely to infect others. Stop being selfish and get vaccinated.

>It’s not all about you...

>Stop being selfish and...

His body his choice.

Healthcare providers choice to fire their employees.

Even some who got tested positive in the past and who have better immunity than most of the vaccinated ones...

> I also know that I have near-zero risk from COVID

There's no such thing as "near zero risk from COVID." There are factors that make you high risk (age, obesity, etc) but whether covid ends up being "nothing" to "a bit sick for a few days" to "sick for weeks" to "hospitalized" to "fatal" is basically luck of the draw.

The odds of dying from covid are far, far worse than the odds of any complication from the vaccine.

95%+ of the people in my area's ICUs for covid are unvaccinated, according to the supervising physician who was interviewed on the radio.

> I don't like injecting unnecessary stuff in there.

That's...not how that works. This sounds like the same stuff new parents believe about how they don't want to "overload" their baby's immune system with too many vaccines at once. Their immune system sees more "load" from them picking a pacifier off the floor of their living room and sticking it in their mouth.

Please speak to your primary care physician.

You're getting the spike protein mRNA in you one way or another. Only question is if you want to go the low risk route or the high risk route (and your risk of hospitalization is non-zero, it runs at about 2% for 20 year olds, even though death rates are much lower).

I'd say this is more akin to taking a software beta. Prior to a few months ago it was still experimental and in alpha. The software was rushed to market and you have no recourse if it bricks your system. The vaccine mandate is similar to forcing only trusted users on your network. Now you have created a catch 22 because any dissenters have been removed from the health care system.

Don't take this as a request not to be vaccinated, but rushing has created some very bad problems in the past: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/cancer/in-dep...

> Would you hire... a software engineer that didn't believe in binary?

Though unary is quite sufficient, it really depends upon whether they are legally licensed to practice software engineering. Believing or not believing in numbers or numbering systens, which are ideas with no tangible existence, can not be a criteria for employment because federal law (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) and the laws of most states prohibit employers from engaging in religious discrimination.[1]

[1] https://www.cantorsparadise.com/why-mathematics-isnt-much-di...

As an emergency physician, good riddance to bad garbage. If they haven’t learned anything in the last 20 months then they deserve to go.

As a possible patient, good riddance as well. These people clearly don't believe in science and/or they don't believe in trusting experts and following their instructions.

That's the last person I want anywhere near me. Especially if they're nurses. I've run across a lot of nurses who think they know better than doctors, and this seems like a fantastic way to weed them out.

How much you want to bet "accidental" deaths go down after this?

People who worked like crazy, got COVID, recovered, and now don't want to take the vaccine as a consequence. Selfless heros to bad garbage, in less than 12 months.

Public health in a nutshell. The world will not forget.

Public health means that healthcare workers must put the well-being of their patients front and center. That’s why we have many vaccinations before medical school, rotations and residency and that’s why we have to have vaccinations before working clinically.

The vast majority of us knew that this was serious from the get go and acted accordingly. The majority of us have received our vaccinations and the rest have now been or real soon now be weeded out for their pro-disease and anti-science ideology.

More like selfish idiots to me.

Healthcare workers are at the highest risk of contracting disease and spreading it to others. There are numerous reported cases where unvaccinated healthcare workers have transmitted illness to patients who had been brought in with other ailments, in a number of cases with fatal outcomes. Firing a very small part of your workforce who carries a very large risk makes perfect sense.

They should be protected and masked up. They are not the source of the highest risk.

Stats say you are most likely to catch it from your kids.

Immunocompromised and elderly hospital patients have some agency when it comes to galavanting with kids.

They don’t really have a choice about hospital visits and have no meaningful way of verifying vaccination status of who interacts with them at the hospital. It’s bad enough they have trouble finding out if all their providers are in network, but at least that issue only means debt not death.

> firing 1400 workers who have been the ones keeping it going for the last 20 months

The fact that they kept it running doesn't mean they actually run the place now and can do as they wish. I only hope that the severance is good and reflects their contribution well, but they Northwell is well within their rights to require vaccination in their workplace now.

A lot of people are providing logical responses. But don’t forget that fundamentally even if what you say is true, it is in no sane universe a valid excuse not to fire these people.

“We’re facing a terrible teacher shortage so we can’t fire the ones who abuse the kids just a little bit.”

>“We’re facing a terrible teacher shortage so we can’t fire the ones who abuse the kids just a little bit.”

That is an absolutely absurd comparison.

We’re facing a terrible teacher shortage so we can’t fire those who refuse to teach evolution"

Firing unqualified idiots is always an excellent choice.

Not really. Unvaccinated healthcare workers risk killing patients.

I’d fire nurses who refuse to wash their hands, too.

Not saying firing is the best course of action, but they’re endangering others, so what choice do you have at this point? Vaccine has been available for months and it is free (while other countries are begging for it). We’ve asked nicely, tried educating, mandating, pleading … there are still people who refuse to vaccinate.

I don’t know what the answer/solution is. But nobody has the right to put others at risk.

What about these people? But no one has actually cared about people. From the very beginning, whole thing was about numbers, graphs, percentages, calculations, and other deathful thrills from the nuclear reaction in the media only wars could previously initiate. The already detached bureaucracies across the whole world have received a nitro injection, and nothing could stop their wheels. If Procrustean machine tells that they have to go, they have to go, and be thankful they are not getting shot in one day — there seems to be many people ready to pull the trigger if it's for the betterment of the humankind.

Your caring about people is out of date, comrade. Trust the numbers!

My fellow conservatives keep screaming about how the lockdown are communism, Marxism, etc. I vehemently disagree, and frankly hate their one trick pony of blaming communism for everything . Even Stalin and Lenin would be marveling at the way in which we've achieved authoritarianism. There's nothing communistic or Marxist about what's going on in America. It's purely the fault of capitalist technocracy.

> I think this might be my "yeah, the pandemic is officially over" moment. You don't fire the freaking healthcare workers in a time when you supposedly need them desperately.

Welcome to the club. If there were the pandemic we were promised and made to be afraid of... we'd be seeing people collapsing in the street as the CCP made us believe. Yet, I don't even know anyone who's died of COVID. I know a handful of people who've had it. I know several people hospitalized for other random things. No COVID deaths. One COVID hospitalization (now recovered).

> Yet, I don't even know anyone who's died of COVID.

I do - what’s your point ?

Are you disputing covid deaths ?

No... I'm disputing that they are high enough to affect most people.

I expect there will be a lot of comments on this post representing a diverse set of views.

From an economics perspective, people choosing to avoid vaccinations adopt a stance that exacerbates a public health risk because, by their choice, they avoid internalizing the costs of their decisions. Mandates like the one rolled out by the Biden administration are legal, have strong standing, and are effective policy tools. And no one is being held down and coerced to receive a shot.

If their hospital is anything like the one I work for, their business model would be crippled by not requiring vaccination simply due to the impact on utilization.

Fair point of view. Except that everybody pays taxes yet get different treatment based on what they decide to do with their body.

That has pretty much always been the case though right? In 1995 people who chose to smoke were prevented from being indoors in NYC for their entire dining experience if they wanted to have a cigarette. It is perfectly reasonable that there be some differences in treatment based on your choices.

Except 'having a cigarette' and 'breathing' are activities with two different moral weights. 'Having a cigarette' in a building is a luxury. Breathing in a building is not.

For example, it would be okay for a state to ban drivking alcohol anywhere. Alcohol is a luxury. Breathing is not. Neither is working.

Well I'm against government forcing this either. It should be venues responsibility. You can always leave a venue that is smoker friendly.

It's the businesses choice to make healthcare a job benefit.

I know we've gotten to where the practice it's common, but that doesn't make it any less of a business decision.

So what happens when companies start screening new hires for expensive health issues?

If the health issues were communicable to the other employees in the office, I would personally probably support those screenings. Besides being expensive for the company that pays me, it's entirely reasonable to expect my coworkers have done the absolute bare minimum to also protect me from an awful disease.

Fauci was also for banning hiv/ aids patients from public places in the 80s. Because a novel disease was thought to be more communicable, more deadly, and more of a pandemic than it really was.

> more deadly, and more of a pandemic than it really was

Essentially 100% of people who contracted HIV in the 80s died from it. So I'm really not sure how you can say that it was thought to be "more deadly" or "more of a pandemic than it really was." HIV was a death sentence, and without treatment, it continues to be a death sentence.

HIV and COVID-19 are not comparable, and the politics around them cannot be boiled down to a single person's opinion at any one point in time.

No one cought it by having a conversation or casual contact at work or in public.

>Essentially 100% of people who contracted HIV in the 80s died from it.

You need highly contagious and deadly. Not or. Speed of spread/ death counts, as well.

Besides, COVID was initially sold as being much more deadly than actually is. Hindsight makes justification/ lack of easy.

Yet how long would the hypothetical lockdowns have taken credit for slowing the spread back then? Even without lockdowns, how long did the cooties stigma last?

>cannot be boiled down to a single person's opinion at any one point in time.

I've been told to trust the experts.

Unfortunately, the only fact you've stated is this:

> No one cought it by having a conversation or casual contact at work or in public.

Correct. The transmission of HIV was also not understood. Nor was it even known to be a virus for quite some time, hence why it was called "the gay cancer." Part of the reason why it wasn't understood was the government's intentional apathy towards it, out of bigotry.

> Besides, COVID was initially sold as being much more deadly than actually is.

You might recall that the first wave completely depleted the availability of ventilators. In fact, this very website hosted links to DIY ventilator projects because the problem was so bad.

Who are you to decide how much death is enough death to warrant concern? If the world healthcare systems cannot keep up, it's a problem. Five million people will have died by the end of the year. No other disease in US history has ever killed as many people. Your waffling about what makes a disease worthy of concern is unnecessary: salmonella only kills 0.4% of people who contract it, but we don't argue about restaurant staff using clean cooking equipment.

Mandates like the one rolled out by Biden administration are definitely not legal, just like the eviction moratorium is not legal. The federal government does not have police powers and the agencies and regulators can't make rules outside their mandate.

The authority to mandate vaccines is at the state and local level.

> The federal government does not have police powers

Then what's the FBI?

An investigative agency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_power_(United_States_co...

Unconstitutional. It is unconstitutional. And morally wrong, and very corrupt (look at literally anything Hoover have done, or recent scandal with spying, or Page and Strzok.)

What part of the constitution?

Constitution is whitelist not blacklist, what part give it permission?

Police power doesn't simply mean having a law enforcement agency. It means being able to do the daily policing work that the federal government is basically explicitly barred from doing except in particular circumstances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_power_(United_States_co...

> Federal police power has been defined by Supreme Court rulings. In affirming that Congress has limited power to enact legislation, the court ruled in United States v. Lopez (1995) that "The Constitution...withhold[s] from Congress a plenary police power that would authorize enactment of every type of legislation."[6][7] In United States v. Morrison (2000), the court invalidated a provision of a federal law on violent crime. The court stated, "The regulation and punishment of intrastate violence that is not directed at the instrumentalities, channels, or goods involved in interstate commerce has always been the province of the States...[W]e can think of no better example of the police power, which the Founders denied the National Government and reposed in the States, than the suppression of violent crime..."[6][8]

Eh, you're technically right but the courts have interpreted interstate commerce extremely broadly. A pandemic is interstate in a similar sense as the wheat in Wickard v. Filburn.

Um okay... but he asked what the FBI was. Is the FBI enforcing covid vaccines? I don't think so

I used the FBI as an example of a federal agency that has broad enforcement powers and that most Americans don't consider unconstitutional.

A pandemic is much more legitimately interstate than anything in wickard v filburn

I agree that requiring large employers to require vaccines has a more significant effect on interstate commerce that a person growing wheat for their own use. I think it's a similar order of magnitude though.

How is mandating a remote employee, who's clearly not moving around a legitimate interstate interest. Pray do tell. In general, non-kangaroo courts require laws to be written to be suitably tailored and narrow in scope.

>How is mandating a remote employee, who's clearly not moving around a legitimate interstate interest

Do I get to use the same asinine reasoning they used in Wickard v. Filburn?

Because if not then your guess is as good as mine.

Fwiw; Biden has full authority to mandate federal employees are fully vaccinated.

Explain OSHA

Honestly... will someone please explain OSHA? It was held by many to be unconstitutional at the time of institution. It still is today. Just because the feds broke the law in the past doesn't mean we get to excuse it again in the future. The federal government is very good at breaking laws. At some point, they must be held to account.

No police powers are being used, so I don't see how that is relivate. Also, the Agencies are not going out of their mandate. OSHA was created to make the workplace safer and by mandating vaccines, they are.

Police powers are obviously being used... how do you think laws and regulations are enforced?

If a business violates the OSHA rules and then doesn't pay the penalties, they are shut down and, if the business continues operating in violation of the regulators, arrested. That's the obvious and implicit statement. The police do that!

The police aren't out raiding houses but the police powers are obviously being used; it's the state's monopoly on violence! It's the government's biggest lever!

So all federal laws are invalid?

No? All federal laws rely on the police to enforce them. I'm a realist, not an anarchist.

Just don't pretend that there isn't a clear threat of violence, when you are making laws that tell people what to do or take their money.

ok so the point about federal laws being invalid because they are enforced by the police is invalid?

Are you intentionally misreading what I wrote?

I never said anything about federal laws being invalid. I said they are enforced by police action. Which is obviously true.

If you aren't vaccinated, you are fired because the government has mandated it. If you don't leave, you're trespassing and the police will most certainly going to be involved.

But in general, American oligarchs have figured out that private enterprise is a good way to circumvent constitutional and legal limits to their power.

This is also how the surveillance state came into existence. BigTech is a de facto arm of the government while maintaining legal separation. It does the dirty work because it doesn't have to play by the same rules government must. As naive libertarians like to say, it's private so it's all consensual so it's cool, man.

OSHA was not designed or ever granted power to mandate vaccines, just like the CDC was granted power to stop evictions.

Can OSHA mandate that employers create rules that employees must pass a physical fitness test? Must become vegetarian?

OSHA's charter is to reduce hazards in the workplace. Physical fitness tests have nothing to do with that. A deadly communicable disease that could be spread by co-workers falls squarely into the "workplace hazard" bucket.

Didn't all public schools ask for student's vaccination card already? Legal and scientific

Public schools are locally controlled.

> From an economics perspective, people choosing to avoid vaccinations adopt a stance that exacerbates a public health risk

So do people choosing to leave their house. There are certain classes of externalities that society has chosen not to explicitly internalize, such as those imposed by living a normal life.

Which, moving forward, will probably mean being vaccinated for COVID.

Maybe, but don’t pretend you’re arguing from a purely economic basis, unless you’re also willing to punish people for ever leaving their house.

You’re also missing the higher-order issue of internalization overhead, but that’s a whole separate consideration.

> And no one is being held down and coerced to receive a shot.

This is absolutely garbage reasoning. They're having their livelihoods ripped away. Simply not pulling a trigger does not give you some moral high ground.

Funny choice of words when talking about healthcare workers.

Healthcare workers have a duty to their patients. Those patients include the willfully unvaccinated, but they also include immunocompromised individuals who can't mount a robust vaccine response. While that latter class of people might sound like an edge case not worthy of consideration in larger society, it is exactly the sort of edge case that's relevant in a healthcare setting.

If a healthcare worker isn't willing to receive a jab that could literally save someone else's life, they're in the wrong field. If they don't believe that vaccines are effective or safe or whatever, they can choose not to vaccinate; but they shouldn't be allowed to force that risk on their patients, especially since a "vaccine-hesistant" position is overwhelming at odds with the medical consensus.

But that doesn't explain firing all those among those 1400 who tested positive in the past and whom, according to recent studies, are not just a bit but way less likely to spread the Delta variants than those who, like me, got the Pfizer vaccine but never tested positive.

I'm vaccinated but this entire witch hunt against unvaccinated people makes me very uneasy.

> But that doesn't explain firing all those among those 1400 who tested positive in the past

Sure, I think that's a valid concern, but it's also shifting the goal posts. You can advocate for that specific subset without advocating for the entire group.

> they avoid internalizing the costs of their decisions.

You don't know that. There are ways to take precautions to the benefit of your fellow citizens that do not involve taking the vaccine. There's more than one way to be civil.

> And no one is being held down and coerced to receive a shot.

No.. but you're limiting their rights under the guise that their decisions must be harming someone. You're engaged in penalizing behavior without actually establishing any guilt. It's disturbing that this is bandied about so readily.

> You don't know that. There are ways to take precautions to the benefit of your fellow citizens that do not involve taking the vaccine.

That's certainly true, but I expect the intersection between "people who don't trust vaccines" and "people who don't take any precautions" to be overwhelming.

What is this expectation based on?

What if it was only true for 50% of the unvaccinated, would that still justify this approach? At what rate would it be justified?

Obesity has a sizable impact on the healthcare system. WHO says that obesity kills 2.8 million people a year.[0] Would these kinds of methods work there too? Get fit or be let go?

Obviously this wouldn't ever be taken seriously, but it is surprising to me that obesity is an issue that's mostly ignored. Yet the impact of it is on at least the same scale as the pandemic.

[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/6-fac...

that's a valid argument, also please keep in mind that obesity kills people in decades, while covid kill people in days.

And sadly there are some people would get fired because of overweight in some fields.

I think, speaking as an obese person, that if there was a solution that was as easy as getting jabbed in the arm twice - I'd jump on it in a moment. Obesity has a diversity of causes but I can guarantee you that it's never an easy thing to overcome.

My body my choice. If you infect me with your covid, it's a problem. Covid kills more people a year than obesity.

How does my body my choice not apply to the other person?

The obesity examples fails because obesity is non-contagious. The issue with COVID is that not getting vaccinated puts your coworkers even more at risk in an environment where you're already much more likely to be infected.

Additionally, in health care you're often working with patients who have comorbidities, for these patients, contracting COVID from a healthcare worker could be a death sentence.

>The obesity examples fails because obesity is non-contagious.

There's plenty of research showing that people tend to gravitate toward the weight of other people they are around.

What an interesting response, do you really think obesity is similar to a contagious virus or are you just grasping at straws to support your ideology?

> What an interesting response, do you really think obesity is similar to a contagious virus or are you just grasping at straws to support your ideology?

All I'm doing is pointing out that a statement in the parent comment is false, nitpicking essentially. It's kind of what we do here. There's no need to project an entire ideology onto me. Just because I disagree with one particular falsehood on one particular side of an issue does not immediately mean I am on the "other team".

But the risk with obesity and Covid is that they both overload the healthcare system. As long as it keeps working fine then Covid is unlikely to spiral out of control. Obesity itself seems to make Covid worse.

do you know what coerced means?

compelling a party to act in an involuntary manner by use of threats, including propaganda or force.

They're clearly coerced, unless you don't think getting fired falls under threats.

It is immunity which confers safety. You can achieve immunity by vaccination, but if you've already had covid, you have better immunity.

Many countries recognize this

When the government requires people to get a medical procedure, it had better be necessary, not just for the population, but also the individual.

If there is no benefit to the individual, it is unethical, and probably illegal, to force a person to get it.

It'll be surprising to see what actually happens when these mandates expire - I'm quite happy the government is taking a more serious approach to encouraging vaccination but I'll be interested to see if these folks (which I assume have loads of healthcare administration or service experience) will cause a noticeable wage dip when suddenly they're viable candidates again.

It's also probably going to be hard getting another job right now if you end up disclosing that you were let go for being unwilling to get vaccinated. Employers probably want to avoid hiring unvaccinated people and also will want to avoid any HR drama you're going to force on them.

I would assume most of the larger companies would just keep them in place, as it's good for business. the mandate gave companies cover to do what they really wanted to do anyway.

40% of the population is unvaxxed. More will likely be unvaxxed when the definition of unvaxxed expands to having a booster. Given the racial element, you are deluded to think there will be a time when these people 'come back' into the workforce. There will either be substantial federal structural change or substantial economic change, if not flat out riots. There is no situation under which this ends well. This will go down in American history as a very dark dark chapter.

> It's also probably going to be hard getting another job right now if you end up disclosing that you were let go for being unwilling to get vaccinated. Employers probably want to avoid hiring unvaccinated people and also will want to avoid any HR drama you're going to force on them.

No it's not. Republicans are more likely to be unvaxxed and more likely to own small businesses. They'll be likely picking up solid corporate candidates, amassing wealth and power, and will hopefully use it to end these stupid mandates.

> No it's not. Republicans are more likely to be unvaxxed and more likely to own small businesses. They'll be likely picking up solid corporate candidates, amassing wealth and power, and will hopefully use it to end these stupid mandates.

This might be a bit snipey but... if you can't do the cost benefit analysis on getting vaccinated I think you're going to have problems delivering value to your company.

This comment is exactly the problem with America right now. A large band of relatively well off people completely out of touch with their economic lessers, yet who feel morally superior to them. You don't realize it, but this will lead to a destabilizing force the likes of which you've not seen in your lifetime, and will put January 6 to shame. It has been the case in nearly every empire and nation where similar dynamics have been at play. What the poor, uneducated, and minority lack in economic power, they more than make up for in number.

Most of the poor and uneducated have been vaccinated - there certainly is a good chunk of the country that hasn't - but vaccinations are now in the majority.

America has some serious issues with societal stability and wealth inequality - but neither of those are really on topic for this discussion.

Don't worry, soon jab #3 will be required to be fully vaccinated (like in Israel... this is not some hypothetical), and we'll get to start this dog and pony show all over again. And yes, the societal stability and wealth inequality have a lot to do with this discussion. The government insists on spending social capital that it doesn't have; against a population that does not trust it. Just like deficit spending catches up with you, spending social trust capital catches up with you too. Except it's much faster and a lot more destabilizing.

Where is the discussion about the fact that a very large fraction of these employees likely already had far superior natural immunity - which is provable. So they were fired for refusing to undergo what amounts to an unnecessary medical procedure. And these vaccines are non-sterilizing - so it's not like other vaccinations that are routinely required in other public health contexts.

Many healthcare organizations require flu shots these days.

Vaccines are still beneficial and the more complicated the rules get the harder the administration of them becomes. Everyone[1] can, without any cost to themselves either monetarily or health-wise, go out and get a vaccine - if you suffered from COVID I'm sorry that you'll have long COVID systems but you'll also be supervaccinated at that point - which is even better!

1. With a few very very specific exceptions that should be respected.

"because it's inconvenient" seems like a pretty poor precedent to set for governments mandating (unnecessary) medical procedures.

Nah - the reason mandates are emerging is because people are acting irresponsibly and prolonging an event that's causing extreme amounts of economic damage. We want to get through this so that the country can return to normal economic activity.

The reason the mandates are so sweeping is because Americans are intensely litigious and making them targeted would potentially run afoul of all sorts of laws like the ADA.

From my evaluation and research, nearly all the economic damage is being caused by said mitigations - not the virus or pandemic itself. So... stop doing the things that damage the economy? People want to work. People want to travel. People want to play. Let. Them. Do. It. A few are fearful and want to hide - that's fine too.

These mitigations wouldn't be in place if there wasn't a pandemic on - the faster we can solve that the faster we can open things up again.

And this problem might be unsolvable - if that's the case then the vaccine mandates (which do lower risk) will probably become as set in stone as MMR shots which, if you went to school in America, you almost certainly got.

You mean the shots that provide sterilizing immunity for diseases that have orders of magnitude higher mortality rates for children and healthy people? None of which is true with COVID - and anyone that disagrees can just look up the stats on the CDCs website and read about sterilizing immunity on wikipedia.

1) Sterilizing immunity meaningless and unscientific: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/steriliz...

2) Sterilizing immunity is a pointless distraction. Seatbelts don't provide 100% protection in a car crash, surgeons washing their hands doesn't prevent 100% of infection, and having smoke alarms and two points of egress in a bedroom will not 100% save your life during a disaster. In fact, I can't even think of a mandated public safety feature that is 100% effective.

I'm all for vaccines but all against mandates. Vaccine is for your own safety and won't affect spread rate (that much). There are many procedures you can do to your body that can benefit you or others yet we don't act like it's legitimate for government to force this.

You know you can live with one kidney just fine.

Not true. 1. By not getting vaccinated you’re a potential Burden to the health system and taxpayers so it’s a public health issue. 2. Data shows vaccines reduce spread.

> Data shows vaccines reduce spread.

So does natural immunity, but this is being suppressed.

> By not getting vaccinated you’re a potential Burden to the health system

This doesn't mean you can MANDATE someone to take the vaccine. This is a violation of medical ethics to use someone instrumentally for the sake of some other good (which is precisely that you're describing).

1) Nobody (that I've seen in this discussion section at least) is denying that natural immunity is quite effective at preventing spread and complications - though a lot of people are correctly mentioning that natural immunity + vaccination has been shown to be even more effective than just natural immunity (so why not get vaccinated anyways).

2. Living in a society means you can mandate a vaccine - it means you can mandate a whole lot of things. I'm still unable to drive a tank to work even though I probably wouldn't hurt anyone - how unjust is that! Being part of a society comes with rules and requirements you need to follow - even in freedom loving america. There is a way you can leave that society - it is still quite possible. Buying a cabin in remote Oregon won't suffice but you can emigrate to an area of the world that doesn't effectively enforce laws - they do still exist.

So no, nobody is mandating that your body receive the vaccine - the mandate is that if you want to keep living in a prosperous society you need to do the absolute minimum to keep everyone in that society safe.

The vaccine mandate is ignoring the effectiveness of natural immunity. The mandate is get vaccinated or get fired.

1) You're burden for many life decisions. You're burden if you decide to smoke, if you decide to eat junk food and you're burden if you don't excercise. Still government should not have power to decide this. 2) So does natural immunity and it's frowned upon

I have bad news for toddlers who want to smoke in restaurants...

I hope somebody will pay their tab. The job market for toddlers is bad right now. It's like they are supposed to be reliant on their parents.

Flu vaccine is not sterilizing and commonly required required by employers.

To be in certain healthcare settings you’re often required to be vaccinated against some diseases e.g. if you’re going to be part of surgeries you need to get a TB vaccine. That’s a public health measure and this is no different.

This is the one thing I just don't get. I check the news everyday to see if the U.S. government has clarified the natural immunity part. The amount of research on it seems good, and other countries already acknowledge it and use it.

Why??

The only reasoning that makes sense at this point is that the US Government doesn't care if you have natural immunity. They want you to do as they say or suffer.

"Provably" is doing a lot of work here. Could they screen each of the employees for immunity? Yes. And the cost of that would be high, and you wouldn't get results back for two weeks or more.

And, natural immunity fades faster than vaccine immunity[0], so it's _not_ unnecessary. Hybrid immunity is "provably" better than natural immunity alone.

0: [edit: not from the delta variant]

This is actually false and contradicts findings from several very reputable and large studies. See e.g. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

> Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.

Did you read your own link?

Yes - infected+vaccinated is more protected than infected. But infected is way more protected than vaccinated only. If your position is that everyone should meet the highest standard of infected+vaccinated - which is only marginally better than just being infected - then we should be mandating mandatory covid infection. But if your position is that vaccination alone provides acceptable protection, then infection alone already far far surpasses that in both lasting immunity and total efficacy.

[edit] Here is an excerpt from their conclusion:

"This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity."

> But infected is way more protected than vaccinated only.

For the Pfizer vaccine, against the Delta variant specifically.

> If your position is that everyone should meet the highest standard of infected+vaccinated - which is only marginally better than just being infected - then we should be mandating mandatory covid infection. But if your position is that vaccination alone provides acceptable protection, then infection alone already far far surpasses that in both lasting immunity and total efficacy.

This is an absurd argument to make. There's no ethical argument to infect people. And the absolute material difference between vaccinated and natural immunity is literally dozens out of a population of over 600,000. Natural immunity might be "way more protected" but that's speaking in relative terms.

I agree it's absurd - which is why I wasn't sure why it sounded like you were making it. So since we established natural immunity is superior - why is it being ignored? Apparently it's not part of _the_ science.

See my original comment: proving natural immunity requires money, the testing is slow, and it's still less good than simply also getting the shot. And even with natural immunity, it's only somewhat better in some cases as shown by a small number of studies. OR logic is not subtractive to the social and political problem, it's additive.

Why is it absurd to believe in natural immunity and still hold folks accountable for using the zero-cost, (virtually) zero risk option?

Everyone shouldn't be required to meet the highest standard of protection. Everyone should be required to meet the highest standard of protection that can be achieved with neglible risks.

COVID infection has significant risks that rule it out as a medical intervention, even it is sometimes beneficial. Vaccination is virtually risk-free.

But what about people that have already engaged and benefited from that risk? For many of those people, the vaccine risk is not so negligible compared to the additional benefit they gain from any (much smaller) immune boost they might get. Also, how is policy making "following _the_ science" if it doesn't even acknowledge the superiority of natural immunity. The least they could do is own their disregard and say - we're ignoring some science for [reasons] instead of simply demonizing a large fraction of the population as bigoted selfish backward uneducated scum - which is my interpretation of POTUS declaring war on 20% of Americans - a so called "pandemic of the unvaccinated" in his own words (or whoever wrote the speech).

Vaccination has minimal risk and substantially increases immunity even for people who have been infected.

It is following the science to make them get vaccinated.

Mandating vaccination and ignoring naturally acquired immunity is selectively following the science. It is deceitful and reckless to ignore natural immunity and demonize the unvaccinated.

They aren't ignoring naturally acquired immunity. Vaccination strengthens immunity even for people who have been previously infected.

Yes, they are ignoring naturally acquired immunity. Having acquired natural immunity does not exempt an individual from the requirement to vaccinate.

So, in what way are they not ignoring naturally acquired immunity?

The vaccine increases immunity even for people who have already been infected.

If everyone gets vaccinated, spread will be lower than if only people who have not already been infected get vaccinated.

Natural immunity provides a stronger immune response than vaccination alone. So, there is a large group of people that have better immunity than any vaccine can give. But, they must still get vaccinated because the president says so? That is some fucked logic.

If all natural immunity people are required to get the vaccine because it gives them better immunity than they already had then by that same logic we should require all vaccinated people to get infected with COVID. Then everybody has the same immunity level.

Infecting someone with a deadly disease is not an ethical medical intervention. Vaccination is.

The requirement isn't to achieve the maximum level of immunity that is possible. It is to achieve the maximum level of immunity that is possible without incurring significant risk.

Natural immunity is better than the vaccine. There is a risk of adverse reactions to the vaccine. You are arguing that people who already have superior immunity take additional risk. This is as unethical as demanding the vaccinated get infected with COVID.

Nonsense. The risk from the vaccine is that you get a headache for a day. The risk from getting infected is that you die.

A headache isnt even listed as an adverse reaction. Please base your argument in fact. Getting the vaccine is not risk free and can rarely result in death. The chance of a natural immunity person getting COVID again and dying is lower than a vaccinated person.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...

I read their link:

> This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.

This is not published yet -- not even pass peer review... In graduate schools professors often give two papers stating contradictory conclusions. Gotta to find which one is correct.

from an operational security standpoint i find it hard to argue that workers in the healthcare industry should be able to refuse something which significantly reduces their risk of being a vector for a harmful disease and transmitting it to those who have a higher likelihood of having pre existing conditions

> significantly reduces their risk

I don't see how this statement is true without considering prior infection.

still true since some people get covid more than once.

That's nearly 2% of their workforce, at a place that I would assume would self-select for people who take vaccines seriously. I wonder what the unvaccinated % is for other industries.

Does employees include administrative staff, janitorial staff, etc?

Healthcare providers probably employ at lot of people who aren't nurses or doctors.

It does.

Yup it definitely does - but those people will more regularly rub shoulders with people engaged in actual patient care. Even the administrative positions should probably be treated seriously - and trying to break out exceptions (i.e. allowing unvaccinated people who are fully remote) can be difficult from an HR perspective and can expose you to unnecessary liability from both the patient side and from the HR side (by allowing more room for wrongful firing suits).

Actual healthcare providers are likely contracted companies and/or workers, and not direct employee hires. Moreso for physicians and mid-levels, but sometimes nurses and techs, as well. (Although idk about the subject of this story, specifically.)

Primarily educational institutions and 100% public hospitals are keeping physicians directly employed, and even some of them are now going the contract route.

>Healthcare providers probably employ at lot of people who aren't nurses or doctors.

Hard to say for any particular provider. Some facilities/companies subcontract everything. Some don't.

The losses are likely concentrated in support staff, both because of the educational correlation with vaccination and because relatively low-earning employees have a lot of employment options right now and perhaps not that much to lose by switching jobs.

Also worth knowing is their annual employee turnover rates, which appear to be 8%, vs. 1.8% in this firing --- since that's not a RIF, it's likely those roles will quickly be filled (though at higher cost).

Doctorates are the most likely to be unvaxxed though: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/americans-with-phds-are-mo...

Doctors (as in, medical doctors) have what looks like the highest vaccination rates in the country; nurses fall right in the sweet spot of the U-shaped distribution that article posits.

Doctorates =/= Medical Professionals

The claim is that the least educated are most likely to be unvaxxed. That is false.

> The study employs a novel sampling method with a soft ask and low response rate, the effect of which has not yet been fully studied

> To our knowledge, no other study has evaluated education with this level of granularity, which was possible due to our unusually large sample size (>10,000 participants with PhDs). Further investigation in to hesitancy among those with a PhD is warranted.

Given the "novel sampling method" and lack of other studies with similar results, you have to take those results with the grain of salt. It's an interesting finding worth studying further, but you can't really know if they were able to get a representative sample of PhDs, so it's premature to make a definitive claim that they are less likely to vaccinated.

That's not an accurate study since the demographics were self-reported, and there was evidence that the education demographics were not in line with the expected distribution of the other demographics.

Anti-vaxer's were likely lying to the survey (conducted on Facebook), and selecting the highest education level.

https://www.wnct.com/news/north-carolina/fact-check-setting-...

Somewhere in at least single digits isn't atypical for annual turnover. Yes, a lot of organizations will lose people who will probably have trouble finding equivalent jobs. But the organizations will manage.

I don't think it will surprise anyone to hear that Northwell is based on Long Island.

Other hospital systems were not obliged to fire so many staff.

Just last month, a study finally began to investigate the effects of COVID vaccines on women's menstrual system [1]. Because women's official complaints had been ignored by the medical communities all year. Now they've been forced to finally examine it. To say that any vaccine side effects are "trivial" (as some have commented here) ignores women's concerns about the real possibility that something may be going wrong down there due to the vaccine. We'll know the results 1 year from now, when the study concludes. I wonder how many of the 1400 fired unvaccinated workers were women with good-faith concerns over their menstrual systems.

1. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/newsroom/news/083021-COVID-19-vacc...

this is an intentionally inflammatory headline and all of the news providers have been doing them.

the correct headline should be: "New York's largest healthcare provider reaches 98% vaccination for entire staff, with help from mandates, leading to vastly improved patient and staff safety"

Wouldn't they be at 100% if they dropped the unvaccinated?

Yes!

1,400 out of 76,000 employees.

>2% death rate

They should do cops next. 95% of the Chauvin types are also anti-vaxxers. Union leadership would be decimated if only pro-vax cops were left.

a normalization of a papers please policy in everyday life will have lasting consequences for which demands companies make on their workers will be perceived as normal and how politics and unions will handle this.

My current feeling is that sooner or later this will collapse and burn in whatever form. this rapid downward spiral this country has been in for the last few years is not sustainable for much longer..

Grab a marshmallow brother, it's all up in flames.

The only reason you don't consider all the other safety mandates you comply with on a daily basis to mUh FaScIsM is because the time for politicizing them to your ends has passed. I guess surgeons washing hands, smokers barred from restaurants, drunks barred from driving, schools and military requiring all kinds of vaccines, seatbelts, smoke detectors, two points of egress, ADA ramps, drivers licenses, commercial kitchen food handling procedures, etc. are all fine because the administrations that enacted them are long gone.

And as thanks to your hard work, putting your lives at risk over the past year, you're fired.

What? You say you're immune because you already had it? Doesn't matter.

What percentage of them are black or Hispanic?

Many healthcare providers in NYC, including companies like Northwell, are staffed with black and Hispanic workers who have much higher rates of refusal to be vaccinated.

If these workers are disproportionately black or Hispanic workers, then this would appear to be a textbook example of systemic racism. This is certainly the view of BLM who has expressed this view w.r.t. the mandate.

This is systemic racism, and like most actual examples of systemic racism (as opposed to the completely trivial number of black men that are killed by police each year), this one is widely supported by most liberal whites, who, yet again, have completely ignored minorities after supposedly elevating our voices for the past year. What a joke. We should start teaching Malcolm X in school.

How do you feel about teaching critical race theory in public schools?

I think it's a bad idea any way you slice or dice it. Either it's an academic legal theory as some claim (in which case it belongs in law schools, not elementary, middle or early high school) or it's divisive as others claim. Personally, I fall on the side of divisive after being explained in great detail by my (white) history professor that I am a white man because, even though I'm brown and have faced ample discrimination (of the very explicit kind, not some voodoo-doodoo systemic crap), since I'm successful and well off and well spoken, I'm not really an immigrant, not really a minority and actually white on the inside in a process he described as 'whitening'.

You no sorry, my melanin and my experience beg to differ. I refuse to use 'whiteness' as a synonym of success. That is the most racist thing I've ever heard. How successful you are is not and should not be measured by how 'white' you are. Sorry not falling for this shit.

> If these workers are disproportionately black or Hispanic workers, then this would appear to be a textbook example of systemic racism

Does every incidence of disproportional representation indicate systemic racism, or is there some context lacking here?

Don't feed the trolls. These are the same folks screeching about supposed critical race theory in elementary schools.

This seems like a bad faith argument. Black and Hispanic workers are free to choose to get vaccinated just like anyone else and there are no barriers to them doing so, and it's not unreasonable that POC who work for a hospital would be held to the same standards as any other employee. "Racism" applies to things that can't be changed, like skin color or national heritage.

the racial gap has actually been closed for a bit now https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=racial+gap+vaccine&ia=web

My impression is that the vaccine is a net win for almost everyone who takes it, and for the persons they're near*.

We're losing 1400 healthcare workers in the middle of a pandemic, and those workers are (due to their own decisions [EDIT: s/own decisions/chosen stances/], I assume) losing their jobs. It just seems like such a tragic waste.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I haven't been able to find good, consistent information about the extent to which being vaccinated makes one less prone to infect others with the delta variant. But transmission aside, each unvaccinated person probabilistically adds to their community's healthcare burden.

Per your edit: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var....

> Fully vaccinated people with Delta variant breakthrough infections can spread the virus to others. However, vaccinated people appear to spread the virus for a shorter time

The last sentence clarifies.

The last information I saw was that asymptomatic vaccinated individuals with the Delta variant may be just as contagious as the unvaccinated / symptomatic, however you are of course much less likely to be infected in the first place.

I am almost certain that the....'probabilitically' added benefit of a trained healthcare worker is likely greater than their taxation.....

If our healthcare system cannot or does not wish to serve us, it is time to take responsibility for our own health.

Good start: https://store.hesperian.org/prod/Where_There_Is_No_Doctor.ht...

I don't see the connection.

COVID exists and makes people sick --> The best minds in medicine harness bleeding edge tech to create vaccine in record time --> vaccine gets tested, then distributed using crises management protocols established long before the pandemic --> vaccine uptake low due to right-wing propaganda

Where did healthcare fail folks here?

Page 147 - “ Vaccinations (lmmunizations)—Simple, Sure Protection”

These fired nurses have fallen quickly from heros to villians. What a terrible outcome for many who risked their lives and who helped so many survive. Feels like we are turning on them, blaming them for continued covid for not getting vaccined.

The current stats don't lineup with the theory that covid is being spread through unvaccined healthcare workers who should be fully masked and protected anyways. But the vaccine debate has turned political and the people who were the loudest praising nurses are the first to throw them to the wolves.

Nurses (employed still or fired) today feel forgotten. Celebrating them this year feels like a painful reminder of lockdowns.

It seems like society has turned cold hearted. Perhaps the endless social causes brought up as an identity page has caused people to truly not care.

How can you fire the very people who risked it all and saved you last year?

> How can you fire the very people who risked it all and saved you last year?

Risked it all, except getting a covid vaccine to help reduce their patients exposure to covid

They risked it all for you and your family and all you did was get a vaccine and you think you are morally right to support their firing because them getting a covid vaccine would help reduce exposure to covid? They wear protect masks better than the ones you can buy. You realize your risk is higher in person work, socializing and having kids in school. I hope you have taken steps to stop those activities before you toss the first stone.

> You realize your risk is higher in person work, socializing and having kids in school

Than working in the covid ward at the hospital?

I doubt it

A 1/3 of covid cases are in the age group 6-12. You are unlikely to pick up covid in a hospital from a first responder because they are protected wearing the best gear available.

Here's what the actual data says:

"...relative to non-essential workers, medical support staff had the highest risk of severe COVID-19 (RR 8.70, 95% CI 4.87 to 15.55), followed by health associate professionals (RR 7.53, 95% CI 5.44 to 10.43) and healthcare professionals (RR 6.19, 95% CI 3.68 to 10.43)." https://oem.bmj.com/content/78/5/307#T3

"Frontline HCWs had a significantly increased risk of COVID-19 infection, highest among HCWs who reused PPE or had inadequate access to PPE. However, adequate supplies of PPE did not completely mitigate high-risk exposures." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7273299/

"Prior to the availability of the COVID-19 vaccine, reports found HCWs accounted for 3.8 to 19 percent of COVID-19 cases." https://www.uptodate.com/contents/covid-19-occupational-heal...!

"Healthcare workers are currently at a much higher risk of being infected by COVID-19...frontline healthcare workers are facing up a nearly 12 times greater risk of a positive COVID-19 test, and those with inadequate access to PPE are at an additional 23% higher risk. Furthermore, we found that if they were directly caring for COVID-19 positive patients, healthcare workers were experiencing a 5 times greater risk of developing the disease, 6 times if they did not have access to proper PPE." https://covid.joinzoe.com/us-post/covid-risk-healthcare-work...

Since you seem to be concerned about nurses in particular, you should know that the majority of nurses are vaccinated and support vaccine mandates [1]. Also note that this article does not specify whether any nurses were fired.

[1] https://covidvaccinefacts4nurses.org/covid-19-survey

Just because a majority has support doesn't mean we start removing minority rights in 2021.

I agree! And indeed no rights have been lost!

The right to keep your job has. Which means your right to choose has been compromised.

If we're going to invent new human rights, what about an employer's right to hire and fire individuals based off their suitability for a job? And if you don't think employers have that right, then do I not have the right to be a nurse as well, regardless of my qualifications?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com