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.
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.
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.
I'm vaccinated but this entire witch hunt against unvaccinated people makes me very uneasy.
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.
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.
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...
And sadly there are some people would get fired because of overweight in some fields.
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.
There's plenty of research showing that people tend to gravitate toward the weight of other people they are around.
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".
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.
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.
You’re also missing the higher-order issue of internalization overhead, but that’s a whole separate consideration.
For example, it would be okay for a state to ban drivking alcohol anywhere. Alcohol is a luxury. Breathing is not. Neither is working.
The authority to mandate vaccines is at the state and local level.
Then what's the FBI?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_power_(United_States_co...
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]
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.
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!
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.
I never said anything about federal laws being invalid. I said they are enforced by police action. Which is obviously true.
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.
Can OSHA mandate that employers create rules that employees must pass a physical fitness test? Must become vegetarian?
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.
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 if it was only true for 50% of the unvaccinated, would that still justify this approach? At what rate would it be justified?
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?
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.
>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.
> 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.