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Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

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Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#171
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No “papers please” to allow me to participate in normal society where the group in power gets to decide if I’m acceptable. What are your thoughts on individuals contracting and spreading a disease that has killed millions already due to their refusal to comply with the most basic health and safety precautions? Do you believe that someone's refusal to comply with basic sanitary precautions should take precedence ove…

Imagine being asked to show a driver's license before renting a car!

Last I checked, I didn't need a license to go outside or buy a coffee.

That's the future I want to avoid, you want the screaming majority to dictate if you're allowed to do anything outside your home, go ahead and continue to advocate social control with this metaphor.

Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#172

It's honestly fascinating to me that this is going to be the way we meet Privacy vs Security face to face more broadly. Intrapersonally, they might go hand in hand, but in the group setting, they seem almost at direct odds. Security (or safety) requires some social contracts to be fulfilled. When these social contracts aren't enough we start to see polices and law take up the slack. Our existing privacy laws and regu…

HIPPA is absolutely not too strict, it has many fundamental holes which need to be plugged. I am vaccinated but the only place I am willing to prove it is at an airport or a medical facility. There is a developing liberty/security divide which is going very much in the direction of far too far. Going along with the irrational ways so many people talk about vaccination I am not willing to give up an inch of liberty to…

Did you attend a university in the US? If so, you almost certainly disclosed your vaccination status to them when you attended.

Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is routine drug testing universally considered acceptable? If I'm going to be a pilot, maybe. For a developer job, I would never consider one that asked for a drug test (I don't use drugs just to be clear, my objection is to a company having any say in what people do on their own time). People complain about having to do a coding test during the interview process, but somehow it's ok to verify that you don't smoke po…

I've been drug tested for corporate programming jobs before. I wouldn't say it's the norm in our industry though and this may be even less common now, IDK. But I do feel like there's a distinction between a urine test and a vaccine, since it's impossible to have a negative reaction to a piss test. As a fully vaccinated individual, I still dislike the idea of having to disclose this fact. Not for any logical reason I…

> But I do feel like there's a distinction between a urine test and a vaccine, since it's impossible to have a negative reaction to a piss test.

I feel this jab is disingenuous.

The goal of a drug test is to test whether you took recreational drugs. The goal of vaccination is to ensure the odds you contract and spread a disease is low to none.

What I find mind boggling is that the concept of a drug test is extremely intrusive, as it tracks whether you took a recreational drug sometime in the recent past, like in your personal time very far away from the company's offices and while not on the job. Why is that encroachment deemed acceptable and normal by antivaxers but the simple and extremely safe act of taking a vaccine is somehow a major problem?

Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy it, even if there was 90% vaccination, which I think we can get to, people want to see obedience. This is as much about calling out heretics as it is about health, especially at companies like google. If broad vaccination was the goal like for other apolitical diseases, there are lots of measures google could support to get us there that don't involve invasive tracking of health information. Let's try to…

"This is as much about calling out heretics as it is about health" No, you're wrong, this is about saving lives. Around 300 people died today from a disease that we can stop. 300 more will die tomorrow. Are there perhaps others sub-agendas that some people are pushing under the cover of the pandemic? Yes, obviously, just like with literally every other catastrophe. But the primary agenda is stopping a preventable dis…

About 1800 people died today from another disease we can stop…

But it’s all fine because obesity is as American as apple pie.

https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm

Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#175
post #54
post #38

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Unclear how different this is from the draft.

You raise an excellent point. When you sign up for the US military you give up a lot of your rights. This is definitely bad from a perspective of individual rights, though I can see arguments for a draft being a matter of addressing an existential threat. Do we as a country feel like COVID is an existential threat? I’m definitely concerned about how we handle future, potentially worse pandemics before we figure out w…

Half the country thinks it is an existential threat. Half the country thinks it's a bad flu. About 612,000 people have died from it, that's more than WW2 which lead to the modern international political and economic systems. So yeah, change is happening IMO.

What we're doing now is proving the efficacy of using a mRNA vaccine platform to rapidly deal with a pandemic at a speed that has never been done before. So far the vaccine has worked great. Now we need to establish global distribution chains and make sure that in the event of an even worse pandemic we have options to vaccinate against it.

Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#176
post #33

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They are required if you want to immigrate to the US [1], so I sure hope citizens-by-birth also have to follow similar rules. Maybe you don't need to prove anything because by default people would already either be vaccinated, or had to obtain an exemption? [1] https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-8-part-b-chapter-...

There are vaccines required to attend public school, but if your parents just say "I refuse" they are not going to kick you out. These hard-core antivaxxers are pretty small in number though.

>but if your parents just say "I refuse" they are not going to kick you out.

Fuck and yes they will. Plenty of school districts will kick you out at this point and forget about going to a university without vaccines.

I needed to prove vaccine status to go to graduate school.

Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#177
Can someone explain the “I won’t get it until it’s fully approved by the FDA” logic to me?

Unlike usual vaccine trials, these vaccines have been deployed worldwide with hundreds of millions of people across many different conditions. Europe stopped using some due to an extremely rare blood clotting episode that was tens of people out millions. That suggests that rare, acute side effects have been (mostly?) discovered.

AFAICT, the FDA rules for full licenses seem to require a six month trial, as well as more information on process / manufacturing / quality control.

That just doesn’t seem that important compared to the massive, real-world “trial” data. What am I missing?

Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is routine drug testing universally considered acceptable? If I'm going to be a pilot, maybe. For a developer job, I would never consider one that asked for a drug test (I don't use drugs just to be clear, my objection is to a company having any say in what people do on their own time). People complain about having to do a coding test during the interview process, but somehow it's ok to verify that you don't smoke po…

> Is routine drug testing universally considered acceptable? If I'm going to be a pilot, maybe. For a developer job, I would never consider one that asked for a drug test Not to mention it would strike many positives thanks to prescription amphetamines being prevalent among developers. Then one would have to disclose psychiatric diagnosis (ADHD) to prove not being a druggie.

Do you have to disclose that to the employer or only to the lab so they wouldn't include the positive result in the report? I am genuinely curious.

Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#179

I work at google and am vaxxed but this pisses me off. I decided that the vaccine was worth the risk and for the best overall but if someone makes a different calculus I can understand and respect that. IMHO they gone way outside the reasonable scope of an employer - this is a cultural decision at the society level - why the fuck does my employer give a shit about this. Unless the employees are only commuting back an…

There is a counter point to yours, just as valid, where folks don’t want to be around unvaccinated folks. Maybe they have an immunocompromised relative or child at home. Maybe they don’t feel safe with unvaccinated folks around.

This is a game of odds. People keep acting like this is binary. You’re statistically more likely to have and spread covid without the vaccine.

I would be delighted if my employer enforced this policy but in Finland it’s never going to happen.

Re: Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

#180
post #38
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m all for getting everyone vaccinated as well, but I’d be really concerned about the precedent this sets. The reasons governments are reluctant to do this is they it sets a precedent for them to dictate what a person can do with their bodies. Saying someone must have an injection, regardless of how well intentioned it is, requires you to be able to dictate what goes into their body. Pretty much the same set of powe…

Unclear how different this is from the draft.

Worst take in this entire thread.

The draft - get sent to war against your will, potentially die, get maimed or get tortured.

This - get the vaccine tens of millions of people around the world have already got, or work remotely (or very worst case give up your cushy tech job and find another cushy tech job).

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