BART workers fired for refusing COVID shots on religious grounds awarded $1.3M | Hacker News Reader

BART workers fired for refusing COVID shots on religious grounds awarded $1.3M

nypost.com

14 pointscempaka19 comments

It was unscientific to not allow evidence of past infection (a positive test result) to suffice here.

So many things were unscientific.

It will take at least a generation for the government to regain some of its reputation after spreading so much mis-information and forcing social media to censor mal-information.

"I know better than them", says someone who never had to manage any viral outbreak, with the benefit of hindsight, four years later,Nd who is still miffed to have been temporarily inconvenienced in his life while people were dying and emergency services personel was working extra hours weeks after weeks after weeks...

Here was my HN comment in July of 2020 with a few months of hindsight referencing research from March 2020:

“I am still shocked: months after research has shown that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne stable in aerosol form for over 3 hours, we still aren’t telling the public that room air purifiers are a ‘good thing’ (for making indoor air like outdoor air - in regards to virion density per cubic air volume)

The filter technology is essentially the same as in the N95, orders of magnitude more effective than cloth masks.

Put these indoors, multiple per classroom/working space to help the air refresh in sub 5 minute intervals.

…

Aerosol transmission is leading cause for indoor superspreader event, ergo N95 masks are required when someone is indoors for an extended period of time. The govt. response failure is from the fact we weren’t making N95s at full production for the past decade plus to prepare for this.”

My expertise is adjacent to this area, so it was easy to see through the incompetence. It might just be the government doesn’t pay enough to hire competent scientists who typically go straight to industry.

The test results had a high false positive rate but a antibody test would be very certain about a real previous infection. Unfortunately they silenced the antibody test to push the PCR test.

I hope it was just pure intellectual incompetence and not financial motivation…

Antibody tests weren't available in sufficient numbers, and testing centers were already overloaded with PCR tests (on top of the usual medical testing and labor shortage due to infections)

It wasn't unscientific, it was about avoiding to create a perverse incentive: encouraging people to get infected instead of getting vaccinated.

Why does it matter? Previous infection provides only temporary protection. BART wouldn't be able to say "keep getting infected as often as you can if you don't want vaccination".

Doesn’t the vaccine also only provide temporary protection? That’s why I thought booster shots were a thing.

Yes, but requiring a regular booster is entirely different from requiring a regular reinfection.

It was unscientific to impose any mandates for COVID vaccines whatsoever. Aside from the fact that the virus itself was not particularly dangerous to the vast majority of people, the vaccines themselves were already well known to provide very little (if any) protection against infection or transmission before any mandates were even imposed. To say nothing of the fact that it was not possible to have proven their safety after less than 2 years since their invention.

Why are you booing me, I'm right!

Pure ignorance and stubbornness on their part.

If they admitted they were wrong, they'd have to do serious self-reflection and reform their worldview, it's insulation.

There's people that recognize you're right.

> It was unscientific to impose any mandates for COVID vaccines whatsoever.

Not only was it unscientific, to the point that they had to censor their opponents and coordinate the institutions to shun any dissenting scientists and experts, the mandate was found to be blatantly unconstitutional.

There is no such thing as religious grounds to refuse COVID shots. Religions are traditions and practices built up over a period of time, and COVID shots were brand new. They were within their rights to refuse to take those shots, but this could not possibly be a religious objection.

The claim was around stem cell usage.

I work (in one of my personas) in healthcare. The hospital group I take most of my patients to addressed this by requiring people who wanted to claim a religious exemption also had to attest that they would and do not take [list of about 20 other fairly well known, fairly common medications] that also utilized stem cells in development.

> The claim was around stem cell usage.

It was not about "stem cells". Who told you that?

Several of the vaccines were manufactured using aborted fetal cell lines, such as HEK 293. Other Coronavirus vaccines were tested using these cell lines.

Some were morally unobjectionable, and our bishops assured pro-life people like myself that vaccination is "an act of mercy" towards our neighbors.

https://www.heritage.org/public-health/commentary/the-covid-...

Pro-life Christians have no objections to adult stem cells, but the cell lines in question here are not "stem cells" but directly cultures from murdered children... without knowledge or consent (see also: Henrietta Lacks.)

Sounds like a very vindictive policy in service of a mandate that ultimately turned out to be essentially useless at reducing the incidence of first-time COVID infections.

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