New York City to impose vaccine mandate on all private sector workers | Hacker News Reader

New York City to impose vaccine mandate on all private sector workers

ft.com

6 pointsbelter7 comments

As someone who has voluntarily been vaccinated (and had almost all of them over the years) I find these mandates to be somewhat counterproductive and help breed all sort of conspiracy theories. In addition, healthcare choices and outcomes are a choice normally and we do many bad things normally like indulge in gluttonous foods like brownies. Should we make private sector companies fire obese workers? In San Francisco it is mainly Blacks who are unvaccinated or vaccine hesitant if you want to be PC about it. There is strangely no uproar to isolating a minority group when it comes to vaccine mandates. Blacks are hesitant due to historical reasons like the government Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

As someone who is also vaccinated as has had the same thought re: other health choices, I think the convincing argument here is that indulging in junk food and being obese aren't contagious conditions. Although with early data on Omicron seeming to indicate that this variant evades antibodies from prior infection and vaccination, I'm not sure how much this specific mandate is going to help--especially considering that it's probably coming too late for NYC to avoid a massive spike this season.

Does an american city somehow have the power to impose something like this? I didn't see in the article what they actually mean. Is it a rule about workplaces, and do cities regulate workplaces in NY? Politics aside, I'm confused about what power is being used to do this?

Edit: part of what I'm wondering about is the practical terms... like are businesses registered with the city, can a city person come into a private office? What if you're a sole proprietor? What if your "employees" are subcontractors? I wasn't aware that, except for certain kinds of licenses for premises and maybe trades, that the city even had any legitimate interaction with or knowledge of businesses. Like you could be a deleware Corp renting some nondescript space somewhere eg. Just trying to picture what this actually means?

>> New York City's mandate, Pestana and de Blasio point out, is coming from the health commissioner, who both say have a legal right to enact such orders when there is a significant threat, credibly perceived or otherwise, against public health. The around COVID and its ongoing spread illustrate that threat clearly, they say.

per https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/is-nyc-private-s...

Well, the city is claiming to have the power to do so. We won't know whether it actually does until someone sues to block this, and the various courts decide.

What's going on is that the city wants to force people to get vaccinated, so it tries to make employers force them to get vaccinated. That may be worth it from the city's perspective; even if they lose the court case some years from now, it will push many people to get vaccinated before then. (Whether that is an ethical stunt or not is a question that I am not going to address.)

But don't look down on New York too much. They got slammed really hard in the first outbreak, plausibly because so many people take the subway to get everywhere.

There are written and unwritten rules about what powerful political entities can do and enforce in the US. In this case, if there's a public emergency the health leadership can provide orders which would be (theoretically, if not practically) enforced. There is a long history in the US around the ability of leadership to impose vaccine mandates. From George Washington to Supreme Court.

Fortunately, this disease doesn't represent a truly existential threat, or else the slow health response by the US (in terms of testing and vaccine mandates) could have been a serious problem.

https://archive.md/A157Q

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