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