Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 722 posts

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

#391

Post by wanderingmind »

blub wrote: post #370
wanderingmind wrote: post #348

No matter which end of the vaccine debate spectrum you fall on, this is free market at work. These are private corporations that can do business with customers and employees as they see fit within the laws. If people strongly disagree, they need to vote with their wallets and either change jobs or need to start a new company.

Two more options: * lobby for laws which forbid corporations from violating employee's privacy and mandate medical procedures. * move to a country which already does the above

Yes you can try to lobby although the chance is virtually non existent in this case. I still think very few countries cherish individual rights and privacy as the US

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

#392

Post by rdaystrom »

selphy1 wrote: post #379
patrec wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have not gotten the vaccine as I prefer the known, extremely low risk of contacting COVID Your risk of getting Covid if not vaccinated (and leading a remotely normal lifestyle) is close to 100%. With an R0 of 6 you can't just free-ride of people who take the "unknown longitudinal risk", because even if a lot of people take the jab it's extremely unlikely we will achieve herd immunity any time soon -- even if the…

Not OP but if he has not gotten it so far with his lifestyle in 16+ months then it could be easy to think you won't get it for another 16+. Other's just don't care, me for example. I lived in a heavily lockdown country and then said fuck it, travelled to somewhere with (near) 0 covid rules and went nightclubbing almost daily till I got it. Wasn't that bad for me. And my preference is to have it again than being coerc…

If an employer mandates it, then the employer is liable for anything bad that happens, the employers don't have immunity like the vaccine manufacturers. This of course assumes that there is rule of law.

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

#393

Post by [deleted] »

n_io wrote: post #220
n_io wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for all the downvotes. Guess this one runs too deep for some people… not enough abstraction. Hypocrites.

[deleted]

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

#394

Post by cactus2093 »

ReadEvalPost wrote: post #222

I'm really upset with this decision. I have not gotten the vaccine as I prefer the known, extremely low risk of contacting COVID over the unknown longitudinal risk of the vaccine. My right to make these personal decisions regarding my bodily autonomy is extremely important to me. Under no circumstances will I yield that decision to my employer! Their demand only further reinforces my desire not to take the vaccine. W…

Maybe this is part of the point? Clearly you have poor decision making skills, if you quit your job you get to make a statement about freedom and the average level of intelligence on your team surely goes up!

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

#395

Post by machinelearning »

bawolff wrote: post #371
machinelearning wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The details are the important part here. If you understand why people are against the vaccine, it is because they are not convinced that the vaccine results in the greatest public health. Whether this is right or wrong, trying to gloss over the differences in the details doesn't work here since the conflict is at the level of details. And no I don't agree with your point about vaccines being "different for every cont…

> most vaccines developed in the recent past have either been recombinant, attenuated/inactivated viruses or adenovirus vectored vaccines If you list every other type of vaccine other than mRNA, then yes the majority of vaccines are one of those. I mean, you even listed adenovirus which is extremely new and only used in covid & ebola vaccines, which makes me suspect you don't actually care about the underlying techno…

> "adenovirus which is extremely new and only used in covid & ebola vaccines"

So you are agreeing with me that there is prior evidence that adenovirus vector vaccines are safe and efficacious? Because that is exactly what I am trying to say. If you feel that there isn't enough evidence, feel free to omit that from the list and the point still stands. Perhaps even more so for OP's point about school-mandated vaccines.

> The start of that movement was with the smallpox vaccine, which was quite a dangerous vaccine as far as vaccines go. Seems a weird comparison to make.

You completely lost me here. No one is making the claim that the covid vaccines are net bad nor that it will always be so. From what I understand the vaccine hesitant population includes medical professionals and many well informed people who are simply waiting for more evidence about its safety. The smallpox vaccine today is understood to be both safe and efficacious and has been approved by many advisory administrations including the FDA. So if you are trying to make the point that vaccines can initially start off being unsafe and further developments can make them safer over time, you are basically voicing the perspective of those who would rather wait it out than rush to take the vaccine.

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

#396

Post by tpm »

jeofken wrote: post #369
tpm wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prevention of obesity is a bit harder than getting vaccinated. Also the data you link to is about heart disease. Many people will have some sort of heart disease as they age even without being obese. The #1 risk factor of heart disease is age. Age is not preventable.

There are many ways you can force your population or employees to be less fat. Google could ban fatties from coming into the office incentivising fat loss, you could force fat people to self isolate or not allow them to travel, also to incentivise healthy loving and make it shameful to contribute to the obesity epidemic. This is all ridiculous, but the moral logic would be similar. The same is true for driving and we…

The moral logic would not be similar at all, because obesity is neither infectious nor acutely deadly. Sure it probably will kill you, but it will kill you indirectly and it will take deveral decades to do that. But it will not kill your immunocompromised coworker and his frail parents.

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

#397

Post by consilla »

boulos wrote: post #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…

I have some sympathy to this argument, even though I agree with you in overall that based on what we know from the millions of vaccines being administered, they appear to be very safe. But points in favor of the FDA argument, which is mostly around emergency authorization requiring a lower standard of evidence:

- The pharmaceutical industry is notorious for manipulation of trial data to make their treatments looks as beneficial as possible, as they are incentivized to do so. In the current case Pfizer and others have still not made the trial data public, and probably never will [0][1]

- The main study on the Pfizer vaccine contained safety data for an average of about two months - on this basis the vaccine was declared to be extremely safe. Obviously longer term effects cannot be captured in this timeframe [2]

- Due to the requirements to generate a clear public health message, almost anything that may suggest a risk with vaccines is downplayed. See for example how VAERS data is routinely dismissed (with some reason)[3], whereas data on COVID hospitalization and death rates is largely unquestioned, despite containing some room for interpretation [4].

Again, the the totality of evidence suggests that the vaccine are safe and effective. But it is not crazy or evil, as some would suggest here, to question some of what we are being told and how the data is being presented to us.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01911-7

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/31/pfizer-resi...

[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

[3]https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaers-faers-idUSL2...

[4] https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-are-covid-19-deaths-c...

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

#398

Post by machinelearning »

novaRom wrote: post #387
machinelearning wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The details are the important part here. If you understand why people are against the vaccine, it is because they are not convinced that the vaccine results in the greatest public health. Whether this is right or wrong, trying to gloss over the differences in the details doesn't work here since the conflict is at the level of details. And no I don't agree with your point about vaccines being "different for every cont…

Both Google and Facebook are very powerful in delivering any information. Why they cannot convince people with simply pure data that vaccines are: 1) necessary, because here is the data: ... 2) safe, because here is the data: ... They create all kinds of funny web sites on any topic but not on this very important thing today. Just make a good web site and convince all the remaining skeptics with scientific arguments…

Google and Facebook are primarily platforms for user generated conent.

When content is something that's monetizable, people of all kinds are going to use this chaotic opportunity to make a quick buck. The more attention grabbing the title the greater the likelihood people will click on the link.

So its entirely unsurprising that a corp marketing team within google or facebook would be entirely powerless in creating a repo that cuts through the noise. Certainly they could censor all information except their official statement, however people would be highly mistrustful of that and will take any change in narrative as a signal of incompetence.

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

#399

Post by hef19898 »

grepfru_it wrote: post #289
throwawaysea wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then you'll need to homeschool them. This would be fair if the equivalent public school spending for that student were instead given back to parents as a voucher to spend on homeschooling or on a different education provider of their choice with different vaccination requirements. But otherwise there is a financial coercion into divulging health choices or giving up bodily autonomy that doesn’t feel right to me.

Remember when employer-sponsered healthcare plans tried to mandate how birth control could be used by women? I couldn't help but notice a lot of people arguing against their own rights.. and now here we are

Birth control and, for that matter, abortion is only affecting one, max. two, people. Vaccinations against a pandemic is affecting everyone. Big difference.

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

#400

Post by meepmorp »

adamors wrote: post #205
nomoreplease wrote: post #118

Current research shows that the previously infected’s antibodies are equal-to or better than the vaccine. So previously infected should be sufficient, yet I expect these companies not to care about that

Then how are multiple infections possible? I know several people who have been sick with COVID 2 times already.

If you're exposed to a pathogen, you'll get infected. Immunity makes it so that your body recognizes the attacker and fights it.

Vaccines and prior infection train the adaptive immune system to recognize pathogens so that the body can begin fighting the infection sooner. Some people's immune systems work less well than others, or due to situational factors, a person is more susceptible to infection and they become sick. People with immunity generally do far better at fighting the infection, being less ill and recovering faster.

Nothing is perfect. Vaccines are better than getting sick or doing nothing.

Post reply on HN