We were promised this wouldn't happen by our governments last year right?
It feels like the public are building their own prisons. Why are private companies stuck policing these absurd policies?
It feels like the public are building their own prisons. Why are private companies stuck policing these absurd policies?
We were promised that a company can't require a vaccine as a condition of employment? Seeing as some companies have required vaccines for as long as there have been vaccines, I think I must be misunderstanding you.
>Why are private companies stuck policing these absurd policies?
Companies are requiring the vaccine because they make employees less likely to miss work due to illness.
You can't point to a small sector that has mandates and say it wouldn't be a significant change if suddenly 100% of all workers everywhere were subjected to it.
On a broader note, I think (coming from the US) workers should have stronger protections against being fired, but everyone I've personally talked to who does not believe your employer should be able to fire you for not getting a vaccine is also opposed to "state controlled employment" or almost anything else that exerts control over the employer-employee relationship. You can be fired for almost any reason in the US, being fired for not getting a vaccine does not seem any worse to me than being fired for any number of awful yet totally legal reasons.
These kinds of workplace safety rules may be more common than you think.
Then if I don't want to get a vaccine, I'll sign an agreement that if I get sick and miss work, I don't get paid, and that's the end of it.
New rule: every googler who works near immunocompromised coworkers has to wear a mask.
You must be missing the part that vaccinated people transmit the virus just the same. This is not a sterilizing vaccine we are dealing with.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
"In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated)."
No difference in infectiousness. And with it, no logical justification for mandates. But this is Google and factions within it will certainly not give up a chance to get rid of what remains of the conservative/libertarian part of their workforce.
For an employer, this tells you that you can't rely on one thing to prevent spread but the combination of masks, vaccination, air filtration, etc. remains effective.
Probably hospitals and care homes are actually the worst-case scenarios for viral transmission because they're full of people who are already sick or have weak immune systems.
You've ignored the point about illogicality completely.
you will have to come with a citation needed to make that claim. I have seen studies showing exactly the opposite of what you claim.
You also have to factor the social aspect. Vaccinated people, thinking they are protected, are way less careful now and therefore have a higher propensity to transmit the virus.
That's not how vaccines against COVID-19 work. They diminish the risk of severe illness and death, not transmission rates.
> Based on evidence from clinical trials, in people ages 18 years and older, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.
If you’re prevent infection, aren’t you effectively reducing the R0 by definition? How is the vaccine making it harder to infect not reduce transmission rates?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...
> Reports of waning vaccine-induced immunity against COVID-19 have begun to surface. With that, the comparable long-term protection conferred by previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear.
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
> These results suggest that the vaccine is initially effective in reducing infectiousness of breakthrough infections even with the Delta variant, and that while this protectiveness effect declines with time it can be restored, at least temporarily, with a booster vaccine.
The paper you're looking at is analyzing waning immunity against the Delta variant.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.29.21262798v...
Well, at least within households[0]:
> Research reveals fully vaccinated people are just as likely to pass virus on to those they share a home with
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/covid-vaccinat...
And that's not even accounting for the fact that if you get sick, you might infect others in your company.
It's also not the doom scenario you describe. Yes they have to take extra precautions, and yes the people around then have to make a point to not be around when they are sick, but with a little consideration plenty of people with highly compromised immune systems live meaningful lives.
In general, when an employment discrimination is not specifically forbidden via the Civil Rights Act (or interpreted as equivalent to something explicitly forbidden by the Court), it is legal to discriminate based on it in the United States. Beyond that, the Court and the legislature are (from a political philosophy standpoint) generally willing to let individual employees and employers (or employers and unions) hash out the messy details.
Our choices are already constrained before we even realize it and yet people chose to die on the vaccination hill.
If you don't want to be coerced, you had better not be an employee with wages. Go out there and start your own business.
> don’t get it and you deserve to starve
It's not by chance that you have to make up ridiculous words and put them in my mouth to attempt to criticize the comment, either in this part where I quoted you, or in the weird assertion about no one having to work.
That's the part I've found so disappointing about this: a couple of decades of development and we have a massive breakthrough in our ability to rapidly create and update vaccines which precisely target near-arbitrary targets. Seeing what would have been a sci-fi technology when I was a kid being the target of so many conspiracy theories must be incredibly disappointing to all of the actual medical experts who worked so hard on this.
An absolute refusal to accept any legal liability for harms done by the product, whilst simultaneously insisting it's perfectly safe? Check.
Claims that anyone worried about long term effects is a crazy malicious person when Moderna was failing to progress beyond animal trials due to multi-dose toxicity as recently as 2017? Check. [2]
Fanatical insistence on forced vaccination, even when the logical basis for mandates has been invalidated by equal infectiousness? Check. [1]
Constantly shifting claims about effectiveness, invalidated within months yet all presented with absolute confidence? Check.
Insistence that nobody look at the database of injuries and papers which do so should be retracted, despite it existing specifically to be analyzed? Check.
A million different non-vaccine explanations for the sudden spike in public heart attacks, none of which are remotely plausible? Check.
We could go on for many pages of this. The medical/public health establishment has consistently wrecked their own credibility and acted in untrustworthy, suspicion-raising ways. They don't then get to make a sad face and say "but sci fi". Let us know when Pfizer/Moderna can be taken to court for injuries and deaths caused by their sci-fi tech, and interest will grow.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
[2] https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
Your approach of dismissing and saying you are taking your ball and going home is not really a convincing counter-argument.
Also, really, I should be convincible. A few years ago I was quite like you. I even occasionally used anti-vaxx as a slur, a shorthand for crazy illogical conspiracy theorist, although I'm now ashamed to admit it. I didn't ever review their arguments because I already "knew" they were wrong. Well, and because it was irrelevant as there were no vaccines I was being asked to take. Things changed a lot in just two years.
Moreover, like many people on this forum, I'm a specialist who owes my position and status in society to expertise. I don't like the idea that huge numbers of specialized experts appear to be in the grip of some sort of mass hysteria or collectivist ideology in which the downsides of massive social interventions are simply taboo to discuss. That degrades respect for all kinds of specialism and expertise, in all fields, even if not equally.
Really the most concerning and effective anti-vaxx propaganda, as you put it, is exactly the sort of responses you're posting now. Not "here's evidence that point X is wrong" but rather, almost boastful proclamations that they aren't going to engage in the discussion at all because they are too intellectually pure to do so. It looks and sounds like a sort of fanaticism.
I'm not sure why you have been convinced of these falsehoods, or why you think anybody else could be swayed a bit by them.
For example if you don't believe the claim about legal immunity, maybe you'll believe CNBC?
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
At any rate, your comment is unsubstantive, which is against the HN rules.
HN used to be firmly anti-FBI/CIA and pro-Assange. Something flipped that around such that the FBI and CIA are Real American Heroes and Assange is some sort of Russian asset. The NSA is still a bit of a bogeyman here, but even that may not hold.
HN is also filled with people who were OccupyWallStreet or AntiWar types who now bloviate endlessly on portfolio management and advocate for the invasion of Iran/Syria/Russia/China/etc.
And don't even get me started on the cypherpunks, the phrack guys, etc. There might be one or two of them left who aren't actively wiping their asses with the CAM or Hacker Manifesto daily.
I suspect that evolving from eating Ramen and reading zines in a communal hackerspace to being paid $400k/yr to analyze the click habits of a billion people changes a person.
The anti-war/free love/hippie/flower power boomers did precisely the same thing, of course. Money and status will always kill lofty ideals. Always.
I have no underlying health conditions, but I've been bedridden by my 2nd shot and booster shots, with a high fever, fatigue, dizziness, and aches for at least 48 hours. My partner who is immuno-compromised is worse off, generally being very ill for 1-2 weeks after each jab. Her case is somewhat different though, as her situation is just all round unfortunate.
I'm not saying I won't continue to comply with all health advisories for vaccination or other public safety measures, and I'm not saying vaccines aren't worth it for society. But it's not "just" a jab.
Until it isn't. Then what are you going to do? Probably nothing except suffer debilitation for life or death (~20,000 that have been reported to VAERS, so probably substantially more).
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/full-hearings-ron-johnson-039...
Edit: spllng
And this is for a disease which has killed 821,335 Americans after infecting 51 million.
So if it’s absolutely perfectly safe and there is a roughly 5% chance of getting infected with Covid while waiting for the vaccine to take effect, it would look like this.
Not sure where you get that number. Also, the numbers for VAERS entry are very probably not even in the ballpark of all injuries because doctors don't often advertise VAERS or even enter patient data there. Why would they, it's basically extra work they don't get paid for.
https://vaersanalysis.info/2021/12/11/vaers-summary-for-covi...
>> ...killed 821,33 Americans...
I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
I get that it can be a serious disease for some, but it's rare unless you're already in poor health. The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html
Like I said, the VAERS site.
> The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
Last year the UK ran short of mortuaries and body bags.
On several occasions, hospitals have been unable to meet demand in various different ways, from beds (meaning staff for them rather than literally beds), to oxygen.
> I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
My condolences.
But it works both ways: If he’d had a recent vaccine instead of a covid infection, that would be listed on VAERS as correlated to the vaccine, from what I gather.