Your work, depressing as your story is, is orthogonal to the question of getting vaccinated. Still, that's a fascinating angle I hadn't considered. You deserve hazard pay, and vacation, same as everyone else. Whether or not your vaxxed doesn't change that. That you haven't received any is the fault of your employer and our brand of capitalism, not that any of us have any real choice in that matter.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
'It's the best protection we have against serious illness'
The best protection each person has is to remove their comorbidities including being obese and having no lung capacity. Maybe eat less and exercise.
'not that any of us have any real choice in that matter.'
Go fix your own machines.
Three months... but it's not just the pay.
By the grace of God, the genius Satoshi Nakamoto, and my willingness to get in earlier and deeper than most, I now have some agency. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56049234-thank-god-fo...
In some ways, John Galt said and exhibited 'my body, my choice.' https://aynrand.org/novels/atlas-shrugged/
Capitalism wouldn't have shut down borders preventing airlines from taking on passengers. Government action led to airlines taking massive losses.
It's not about entitled or not. It's about the fact government action directly harmed them, whether or not justified.
No, it's not.
I am guessing like many he is angered at having to choose between his job and taking a vaccine he may not want to take. This same employer didn’t likely give a single shit about his safety before.
Logic says just take the shot, but people like to feel like they have some agency in life other than their employer forcing treatment on them so they can continue to be good little drones.
This was a theory that the entire vaccination program was predicated upon. The theory was, "We can't prevent infections, but if the body is primed to have a less severe reaction to the virus, it will do a better job of clearing it quickly and the viral load will be lesser, thus bringing r0 down."
It didn't turn out to be totally true. It clears quicker but it has no meaningful reduction in peak viral load on average.
So now, given that we don't have good reason to suggest that the vaccine results in lower viral loads, it stands to reason that the majority of asymptomatic "superspreaders" going forward are more likely to be vaccinated. The unvaccinated are more likely to get seriously ill and isolate.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v...
There is a disconnect between the thinking of those who make policy, seemingly many of the work-from-home formerly worked at office workers, and people who regularly toil in the field and have dirty fingernails.
Each dose of the vaccine likewise introduces new short term and long term risks and reduces future risks from covid. More so if you’ve never had covid, but still nonzero if you have had it and recovered. (Lots of people don’t really want to acknowledge one part of this or another)
The problem is how big are each of these risks and what is your tolerance for taking a certain risk (a vaccine) to prevent an uncertain risk (potentially contracting covid again)
Lots of people take sides and emphasize one set of risks as “known” and sort of pretend the other set doesn’t exist.
Covid has certainly killed a whole lot of people.
A very very large number of people have taken vaccines and a very very small number of them have had negative outcomes.
There is a risk to taking a vaccine and there is a risk to not taking a vaccine. How big is that risk and when do you decide one risk is worth the other?
One thing is for sure, whatever your opinion is, there are a lot of people out there trying to make money by reenforcing that opinion with “facts”.
Taking the vaccine is, if anything, a very small risk compared to many other risks you take every day (demonstrable by just how many people have taken it already and comparing it to, say, traffic accident statistics). The risk protection you have from surviving covid is also definitely decreasing with time.
It is hard to find information because so many people are pretending these risks are known. They just aren’t, there are bounds of uncertainty. Not huge bounds, quite a bit is actually known, but there is still uncertainty and you have to decide for yourself which risk to take and when.
There's no method to report adverse event, unless you go to VAERS and report it. Since coverage of negative effects will reduce the effectiveness of the propaganda being pushed, there's little coverage of adverse events, enabling the narrative to continue.
The CDC also doesn't consider people as fully vaccinated until 14 days after the 2nd injection, enabling them to skirt attribution of hospitalization or deaths that occur after the Jab.
Look at the VAERS charts of adverse events & vaccine deaths reported in 2021 VEARS compared to all other vaccines, as a starting point...
https://vaersanalysis.info/2021/12/25/vaers-summary-for-covi...
Moved to place with nice community hot tub which I have time to use with other unmasked people. Helped teach a friend machine safety while excavating at his house. We also extensively talked about how he can raise his prices and I joined him on a job bid and helped him bid it. I even wore blue coveralls!
Hike. Snorkel. SUP in river. Ski. Catch up on news by talking to tourists on chair lift. Research where to go to get a couple hundred days on a surfboard.
I feel like while I might be willing to go back, nobody cares about dirty greasy blue-collar people like me. What I did regularly involved real physical hazards while working on small to $1M÷ 'large' machines which were typically broken in sometimes undisclosed ways. An extra $5/hour is not going to do it.
It won't get better until there is a general strike for about six months and a couple crop rotations. It would need to be long enough to affect the new private charter jetsetter class. The American experiment of self-sovereignty and individual choice is done for most people who are now just debt slaves.
This is a super misleading statistic, because people aren't evenly distributed between states or employers. Consider 100 restaurant companies, only 1 of which imposes the mandate. If the 1 is McDonald's and the other 99 are mom-and-pop restaurants, the fact that the 99 are the vast majority is irrelevant.
Here's an example from few days ago, on a Delta flight https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1474606759146708992?s=2...
While OSHA mandates are all the rage, MSHA actually does safety and did not mandate. Wearing a bacteria-breeding mask becomes unhealthy and is dangerous to wear because it blocks vision down. In general, people would learn a lot about safety and prevention by working under MSHA rules for awhile. I did.
No cases of SARS-CoV-1 have been reported worldwide since 2004
I suppose in the present case we could try to slaughter all of the potentially infected animals. Some humans would likely resist.
We've never had a coronavirus get as widespread and to persist as long as to require a vaccine to combat it.
So the problem with masks and vaccines is that it is quite profitable for people to turn it into a battleground and not so much to help people understand risks and rewards of various strategies and choose their own risks. Not to mention the huge sense of satisfaction many humans get from being “right” and letting everyone know how right they are.
The more you exaggerate and the harder you squeeze, the more opposition you get. The conclusion that comes from this is apparently that more exaggeration and authoritarianism is the solution.
Sometimes I wonder if a certain subset of the population is just naturally like this. The more authority applied the more people resist, even if they intended to do the action they authoritarian insists they do to begin with.
If you tell me to do something my automatic reaction is to say no. Childish I guess and find myself having to evaluate why I have this impulse from time to time.
One has to wonder if the media/social media shut the fuck up about the vaccines/mask arguments compliance rates would be actually higher…
If you find yourself in the position of stubbornly refusing to do what people insist you do, the good thought process is realizing they aren’t the boss of you whether you’re making your choices to go along or against what they want.
If you do exactly the opposite of everything someone wants you to do, they’re still controlling you.
Q: "Why won't people just get the vaccine?" A: "Fear of Democrats."
Back in 2020 when this was all new, I encouraged them to wear masks while shopping, because that's what I saw people in asian countries doing and figured it wasn't unreasonable. They wanted none of it!
Them: "The CDC says we shouldn't wear masks." Me: "Fuck the CDC! They don't know what's going on any better than we do. Wear masks, they will probably help"
Now, they conveniently have no memory of that exchange and regularly evaluate others on whether or not they're properly 'masking'.
After all the BS around this, I don't at all begrudge people their choice to not get vaccinated, even though I recognize that is probably responsible for hospitals hitting capacity.
I'm aware this isn't perfect and I'm not invulnerable - it's not a bunny suit with PAPR. I coast on my glasses taking care of most face droplets (similar to how I coast using many power tools), and admittedly haven't done the work to go beyond that.
It's definitely an impediment to appearance and speaking, and in medium-engagement social situations I do have an N95 I fall back on to not be too obtuse.
Close friends and family I've come around to wearing no face covering (vaxxed) - you're kind of already committed by being in each others' homes - and separating such visits by time. I agree that heavyweight masks don't really work for medium social engagements (like say a hobby group, or incidental conversation when picking something up from someone, etc), which is why I've moved towards the N95 on that front. I hate their small tight bands though. At least it's not a KN95 with the over-the-ear straps.
I got vaccinated and boosted, but had I known it would have become such a political virtue signalling game, I might have opted out.
What is this referring to?