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Comment by docflabby | Hacker News Reader

If we can't convince medical workers to recieve a vaccine from their peers we are doing something wrong.

Convince or compel? Do you expect all healthcare workers to receive any widely prescribed treatment? Is there no room for dissent in your mind?

If you can't convince, compelling doesn't tend to work much better, unless you threaten something worse. Given that unvaxed people are worried the vaccine may kill them, threatening career change seems a bit pointless...it would be far better to listen to their concerns and talk to them, threats only confirm the conspiracies and force positions to become entrenched.

We require healthcare workers wash their hands.

We require other vaccines.

There is plenty of room for dissent, but it stops being “dissent” when it is simply denying reality.

> There is plenty of room for dissent, but it stops being “dissent” when it is simply denying reality.

Ah yes of course, when the common view gets the label of “reality” dissent is no longer “dissent.” /s

If only everyone could see the line in the same place, but well if that were the case I don’t suppose there’d be any dissent at all.

... cool, so if I can produce measurable numbers of objective fact is that now an opinion that is up for discussion?

I mean that is a common refrain among the various anti-basic science groups, but I'm curious if that is the view you take

And it’s a common refrain of “follow the science” dogmatists to attempt to paint things as “objective facts” in a decidedly unscientific way. Just what “measurable numbers” are you referring to and what “objective facts” do you think they reveal?

You would be very hard pressed to find a self respecting scientist who calls any of their work “objective fact.” There are several ways to display views that are “anti-basic science,” and you are displaying one of them.

But to try and wrangle your question into what I think it was intending (though severely misled such that I needed the above preamble): Do I believe established high probability scientific consensus and recommendations can be discarded or disagreed with as mere opinion? Absolutely not. I am not at all “anti-basic science” in the way that you think I am. I think it’s quite possible to accept the scientific consensus on COVID as it exists so far and still argue currently against mandatory vaccinations in different settings.

This was my initial gut thought, but an employment lawyer helped me seee that most healthcare workers are not university or college educated and they are basically lower middle class.

In other words most healthcare workers share the same demographics as those who currently have low uptake on the vaccine.

Yep. For every doctor or nurse with 4+ years of postsecondary education, there are 5+ people with 2 or fewer years of postsecondary education, I'd bet.

The lower tiers of nurse only require 2 years, IIRC, and I think those are more like technical programs than typical liberal-arts-informed degrees. Then there's the clerks, the front-desk people (to include the ones at the "front desk" of each floor, department, or section of the hospital, plus the ones at the actual main entrance[s]) the cleaning and housekeeping staff (someone has to go around restocking supplies and such), the entire billing department, the people who come around to bug sick people about their insurance details, the security guards (hospitals have lots of them), and so on.

This assumes that only uneducated uninformed people are choosing to not get vaccinated. It couldn't possibly be that they understand natural immunity still provides immunity, or that the risk in their group and based on their health is very low, or that they've learned how bureaucracy can be used to influence the medical community... not like they had to learn about the atrocities committed by the medical community in the past, and how bureaucracy was used to promote things that are now seen as unethical and mistakes.

Or maybe they are aware of drugs that received authorization in the past and that the same companies that are making bank of the vaccines, don't have the best history with being honest and transparent.

If the vaccine were still as effective as it was a year ago, I'd agree with you, but it's likely that the current vaccine will have a muted effect on omicron variant, so I'm not as comfortable mandating a vaccine for a now-dead variant.

whether you think its right or wrong, its apparently not without precedence

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/flu-vaccine-requir...

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