Apple to require proof of booster shot from vaccinated employees | Hacker News Reader

Apple to require proof of booster shot from vaccinated employees

theverge.com

11 pointsdaenz14 comments

It continues to amaze me how people go along with this.

The shots don't do what was promised. For healthy kids and young people, it is absolutely counterproductive to inject them. It will cause more hospitalizations through side effects than they will prevent.

What's more, there is now mounting evidence that omicron favors people who have gotten jabbed. So any notion that you get the jab to protect others is now also in question.

Finally, it is now also clear that these shots could have never created herd immunity, because an intramuscular shot does not create an immune response in the mucus membranes, which is your actual first line of defense. So the entirely sales pitch for the shots is also in question.

All of this is easy to find if you just bother to actually look around.

Stop applauding this, it's unethical and it just serves to cover up the failed promises of shitty politicians, shitty scientists, and their hysterical fans.

> For healthy kids and young people, it is absolutely counterproductive to inject them. It will cause more hospitalizations through side effects than they will prevent.

Wrong. There have been documented side effects of vaccines, notably myocarditis, and even a few deaths that are the direct result of vaccination. But there are thousands of covid deaths of people in their 20s, and hundreds of kids too, a sizable proportion of them healthy. Because we are talking about one-in-a-million chances, maybe vaccinating kids is not worth it, maybe we should put our time and money elsewhere, but the benefit-risk ratio is definitely on the side of vaccination.

> What's more, there is now mounting evidence that omicron favors people who have gotten jabbed.

It is true that when you look at some country data, you see that the incidence rate for people who are fully vaccinated but not boosted is much higher than those who are vaccinated. You can make the effect disappear by looking closely (Simpson's paradox) but it still merits proper study. But for now, there is no evidence that omicron favors people who have gotten jabbed. At worst, without a booster, some vaccines are ineffective against mild omicron, that one seems to be confirmed.

> it is now also clear that these shots could have never created herd immunity

10/10 hindsight

> because an intramuscular shot does not create an immune response in the mucus membranes

[Citation Needed] Almost all of our vaccines are an intramuscular shot, including ones that were successful at eradicating diseases. If it wasn't an effective route of administration, I think we would have known by now.

> All of this is easy to find if you just bother to actually look around.

Yes, it is super easy to find crackpot websites. "Proofs" that the earth is flat are easy to find too. So if you think you have better sources, please share. By "looking around" for the most reliable sources, things are clear: omicron is pretty good at escaping vaccine protection, but the benefit/risk ratio is still overwhelmingly in favor of vaccines.

> cover up the failed promises of shitty politicians, shitty scientists, and their hysterical fans

Politicians are politicians. But the shitty scientists here are the ones who promote treatments after many studies proved their ineffectiveness (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin,...) instead of solutions that work (vaccines). Looking for alternative treatment, unorthodox solutions and challenging established practices is good, but disregarding further scientific evidence is not. And scientists don't promise things, they make studies base on current data, and draw conclusions, if the data change, their conclusions will too, it is not called failed promises, it is called doing proper science.

> hundreds of kids too

I keep hearing this statement, but I find it hard to reconcile it with hard data. For example, credible numbers from Europe https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps show that the excess mortality in the 0-14 age range was actually negative in 2020, and in a normal range in 2021 (slightly higher than 2017 and 2018 but lower than in 2019). Certainly by looking at the weekly 0-14 chart it is impossible to say that there is anything nefarious going on.

The US CDC site was harder to navigate, but last time I looked, it painted a similar picture.

On global statistics, the deaths of hundreds of kids is almost negligible, so you are unlikely to see much difference in excess mortality. Significant differences are most likely the result of school closure and lockdowns, most likely traffic-related.

But deaths by vaccines are even more negligible than deaths by covid.

> Due to waning efficacy of the primary series of COVID-19 vaccines and the emergence of highly transmissible variants such as Omicron, a booster shot is now part of staying up to date with your COVID-19 vaccination to protect against severe disease

I'm probably reading too much into it but: I buy the argument that you want employees vaccinated so they don't spread covid, but now they are asking their workers to do something "to protect against severe disease"? Such a motivation is well outside what is appropriate for an employer to have a say in. Maybe apple should also mandate employees don't smoke, or eat bacon?

Interesting choice of cropping out the first part of the sentence:

> Due to waning efficacy of the primary series of COVID-19 vaccines and the emergence of highly transmissible variants such as Omicron,

That would seem to undermine your entire characterization of this. Considering that you had to read the sentence to know where to cut it off, your choice of quote seems very deceptive.

I cropped it for conciseness. I don't understand what you think I was hiding, but if you think that preamble helps contextualize the point I was making that's fine, I've added it to my post now.

Agreed, Omicron is so infectious that any argument to 'protect others' is increasingly difficult to justify aside from reducing hospitalizations and by that token perhaps a general health mandate is in order, with monitoring of peoples daily steps, food consumption and drug use. I'm being hyperbolic, but at some point we need to draw a line.

Taking peoples livelihoods away due to their health status or beliefs is in my mind akin to fascism. It is discrimination

Never a call for nuance to call something fascism but I assure you that the characters demanding such mandates would be the first to adopt its tenets if politically convenient. Same with the fight against misinformation. People demanding censorship had no problem at all about being lied to about alleged Russian misinformation. It just happened to fit their interests.

Seems OK to me. I mean, you're an employee of a job creator. They don't owe you anything. I bet a lot of Apple employees are in at-will-employment states, too.

But would you say the same if they said all employees had to exercise daily or log how many vegetables they ate or whatever? In principal I agree that an employer should basically be able to dictate terms of employment and you take them or leave them and the market sorts it out. But there's still nothing wrong with calling out job requirements that are overreach or simply not part of the job, so other employees there can see they're getting a raw deal. Criticizing a policy doesn't mean Apple should be compelled to change it.

Pretty much, yeah. Their job, their terms of employment. Any employee can just leave if the terms change to something to onerous. There's lots of jobs open right now, if Apple asks too much, they will lose their best talent.

Would you also be ok if Government pressured your Employer to impose new conditions?

No, the Government has to stay out of business. The business of America is business, so Government should stay in its lane. I'd quit and find a new job if the Government imposed new conditions. Except for National Security reasons, like getting vaccinated. We need to have healthy people to go into the army if we get attacked.

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