NY Supreme Court reinstates all fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay | Hacker News Reader

NY Supreme Court reinstates all fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

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32 pointstypeofhuman40 comments

The NY Supreme Court is not the highest court in NY. The NY Supreme Court is comprised of 62 local courts and this ruling came from one of them. The city is appealing this decision and it will next go to an Appellate Division court and after that can go to the Court of Appeals which is the court of last resort in New York.

I always find it weird that in some states the "Supreme" court is the lowest court. Why did some states (like NY) name their courts this silly way?

It's called "Supreme" because it can hear trials about anything, as opposed to things like traffic court. Definitely confusing, but it's also significantly older than the US Constitution, so I can't fault whoever named it too much.

Yeah. It makes much more sense to me in jurisdictions that call that level of court a "superior" court instead. Calling any inferior court "The Supreme" court just seems absurd.

I know, I know, the reason for smart people doing things that seem dumb now is always "learn the history", but still, it is just so strange.

The logic in these rulings is very weak: being vaccinated does not 100% prevent infection/transmission in the same way that being sober doesn't not guarantee you won't crash your car, it doesn't make drunk driving ok, especially for an employee...

It does not even discernibly prevent infection or transmission.

Citation needed I think. Aside from mortality, those are the 2 main things you need from a vaccine...

The many states and countries that had record outbreaks, the fact they were exceedingly well-vaccinated notwithstanding. (Vermont, Israel, etc. etc. this is pretty trivial to verify).

It just does not prevent transmission. We know what it looks like as far as transmission goes for vaccines that work (smallpox, oral polio, etc.) This is not it. Just isn't.

The further issue with a lot of this is that it was presented as having been validated as preventing spread from the beginning, which now Pfizer has stated did not transpire. It was pretty evident by early summer that it was not in fact doing that. It's a big piece of the narrative for forcing/mandating the vaccine and it's gone. Anyone questioning it immediately were lumped into the far right regardless of their reasons. It was bad medically and bad politically.

The reality is it was needed to help comfort and calm the populous, it provided some efficacy, but ultimately should have been a personal decision. There's 0 chance we won't see lawsuits for the foreseeable future and honestly i'm still on the side of personal choice.

You're right too, the vaccine never was on the level of "real" vaccines and we knew that, hence why they changed the legal definition to make it fit.

24% decrease in transmission, decreasing by 6% every 5 weeks after that.[0] So, not nothing, but it doesn't come close to stopping transmission.

Personally, I'm vaccinated. That's based on my own risk calculation. But forcing people to put a medication into their body that they don't trust, for such a meager benefit (and do it several times a year), doesn't seem right to me. Even if you disagree with their logic, it's their body. The benefit of the vaccines to other citizens is too little to impose this burden.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02328-0

Thanks for the citation. I didn't realise it was so low, however I would point out the effect can still be large and exponential:

If I have covid and no vaccine and meet 100 people,I infect 50. Those 50 go on to infect another 1000 because that's what people do in cities, before running out of steam. 1%, aka 10 people die. Plus all the cost of dealing with the rest of those hospitalised and the long covid and the injuries etc.

If I have covid and the vaccine and meet 100 people I infect 38 (24% less). only 760 people get infected as a knock on. So now only 7.6 people die.

2.4 deaths seems like a lot of deaths to just accept because otherwise someone might lose a job...

Both scenarios result in total human collapse; which we have not seen. So perhaps your math is wrong.

Why would 10 people per 1000 dying lead to "total human collapse"

While the point is correct, I don't think this reasoning is sound.

If exponential growth keeps going until you run out of people to infect, then you get to everyone in both scenarios.

What actually changes the total number of infections, is that when enough people are non-infectious or non-infectable by either vaccination or prior infection, the remainder no longer get exposed.

Or, alternatives, when the r value is less than 1; the r value is the empirical observation given all the things we do in response to the virus, including not only vaccinations but masks and WFH and lockdowns, as well as the virus itself. While this may result in going from exponential growth to exponential decay even just from the 24% that I've seen floating around, humans being humans means our behavioural changes due to the sense of security brought about by the vaccines also need to be accounted for.

The other society scale effect is that the slower infection rate (even in the absence of the primary benefit of the various vaccines) means the integrated utilisation of finite healthcare resources is spread out over time, so the instantaneous usage is lower, and as many places were at or above capacity during the pandemic that would also save lives.

When making these kinds of rulings, it is necessary to balance two competing interests; The benefits to public health of vaccination, and the harm of unemployment for the individual. Since the primary rationale of a workplace vaccine mandate would be to prevent workplace viral transmission, a vaccine having only a moderate effect on transmission would weaken the benefits. This makes it more likely that the harms of non-employment would outweigh the health benefits.

>it is necessary to balance two competing interests; The benefits to public health of vaccination, and the harm of unemployment for the individual.

I'm not sure the harm to the employee due to being unemployed has ever been an issue when considering labor law in the past, why should this be different?

An employee can be justly fired for violating safety policies.

In this context, it can be argued that the harm of being injured/killed outweighs the harm of being unemployed.

Yes, it is a valid argument in this case. However, the court has to consider the strength of that argument in relation to other arguments.

There are numerous aspects of American employment law wherein the harm of unemployment may be considered. For instance, it is relevant in cases of employment discrimination, and many states also have laws surrounding acceptable reasons for termination of employment. It is clearly not a priority of the legal system, but it is sometimes a relevant consideration.

I feel like this is still a weird decision:

The maximum harm from the mandate is a person losing their job, and in most states (inc NY) that's a harm any employer can inflict for almost any reason or no reason at all.

The maximum harm from no mandate is that many people get infected by that individual who otherwise would not have, they infect others on an exponential basis, and people die.

To me, that's a pretty easy harm vs harm decision. I wonder what the same court would do with a surgeon who likes a drink before operating and refused to do stop. Presumably his right to a job would outweigh his patient's right to an X% lower chance of dying?!

I know it can't be that crazy. I must be missing some killer legal principle here (other than "fuck society"). And it's not the court's job but it would be very very helpful if they'd explain their reasoning a bit better. The ruling mostly reads like a mix of the argument from the winning side repeated and snippets from the losing side proceeded by "the court does not agree that" etc.

C'est la vie I guess. Thanks for your comment :)

If the covid vaccines had strong efficacy you'd be right. What we know now - and many have known for a while but were censored - is the vaccines do not inoculate.

My point is that the 24% from the link above is a BIG effect when applied to infectious diseases.

Afaik the facts are covid vaccines dont prevent transmission _at all_.

This is incorrect. At least some vaccines have at least some effect on transmission while infected. What I saw was not amazing, but it was not nothing.

In the end, both sides got what was probably best for them. Many people felt unsafe being around people that were unvaccinated during an especially dangerous time and the mandate helped to provide some protection for them. The people that were unvaccinated had to go through a lot of hardship, but this ruling basically provides them a retro-active free time off. If you went back in time, this probably would have been the best option, even though both sides would have likely objected to it.

> but this ruling basically provides them a retro-active free time off

That is dehumanizing BS. No compassionate human being could possibly hold this view.

Going through the stress and humiliation of being fired for what turned out to be the wiser medical choice, and generally being unable to find a job for the same reason in a very uncertain economy, is not a vacation.

Avoidance was not (with very few exceptions) a wiser medical choice.

If the effect on transmission had been zero (it wasn't zero, but it was lower than anyone would have liked), then it would absolutely have been their (unwise) choice to make. But it wasn't zero.

24% reduction in further transmission from the first dose of some of the vaccines, more powerful with more doses, less powerful with time. I'm not sure what threshold I'd use for making it mandatory in general, though I would still have a different threshold for doctors and nurses — even in an alternate reality where the available vaccines had zero effect on transmission while infected and the vaccines has been weaker and had more side effects, the healthcare systems in many nations were severely impacted and needed as many people as possible able to work.

Link to ruling, pdf:

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

Interestingly, this ruling holds the Health Commissioner can issue vaccine mandates. What they can't do is create employment conditions, prohibit employees from going to work or terminate employees.

Procedurally, the Health Commissioner could have created the mandate and then had the various departments go through their due process. (Though based on the vaccine being non-sterilizing, that mandate may not have held either.)

Good. The Covid justice reckoning being unwound as expected.

Slowly but surely.

The vaccine-free are due a well deserved apology (and compensation) for all the hate, torment, threats, and financial loss.

Edit: downvotes without comments, feels like Reddit in here.

> The vaccine-free are due a well deserved apology (and compensation) for all the hate, torment, threats, and financial loss.

They deserve nothing.

Do not expect any apologies.

These people believe they are not only much smarter than you, they also have a moral superiority that was handed down from a state-run deity.

It's going to be interested to see how this impacts things like the national guard, whom are state employees. I expect lots of lawsuits in the coming years over mandated vaccination and the continued disclosures is going to make it worse. I fully suspect this is why the government agencies fought tooth and nail on releasing covid-19 vaccination test data.

I'm vaccinated, but it's very clear a lot of what was presented wasn't just incorrect but materially false. That should concern everyone.

Nice to finally see people coming around

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