Live data from Hacker News

OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

whitehouse.gov

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#571

For those of you arguing against getting vaccinated, please go volunteer at a local hospital. I'm currently in the hospital in the "red" part of my purple state. I had an acute appendicitis, and had to wait in a temporary, crowded, understaffed holding area in the ER for over 18 hours before getting admitted for treatment. My roommate in the hospital has an infected foot, and waited over 24 hours to be admitted. He m…

My sister is a nurse in a "red" state. During Covid they CLOSED 3 entire floors of the Hospital due to inactivity, she was PISSED because those floors could have easily been used as overflow.

And yes thay are "full" now because operational capacity has been significantly reduced.

>>"I almost wish that the anti-vaxxers would just stick to their science-rejecting principles and reject all health care, not just the vaccine. If they were to just die at home instead of clogging up the health care system unnecessarily, the vaccine would not be such a big deal."

Comments like this are just pure disgraceful and disgusting. What sort of degenerate would wish this upon others blows my mind.

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#572
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, all 50 states have some type of mandatory vaccination for public schools ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_policy_in_the_Unit... ). Most, but not all, allow religious or similar exemptions; some (including California) only allow medical exemptions. I think your point--which is spot-on--is that a lot of the outraged reactions appear to be from people who are unaware (or unwilling to acknowledge) t…

> I think your point--which is spot-on--is that a lot of the outraged reactions appear to be from people who are unaware (or unwilling to acknowledge) the very long history of compulsory vaccination (and who probably had such vaccines themselves as children). I think this is a strawman argument as virtually everybody is aware of past childhood vaccine requirements and acknowledges that they existed for a long time. W…

> why isn't Covid antibody testing a suitable substitute for vaccination?

As I noted elsewhere, in many jurisdictions it is, as is testing.

In fact, as the very article upon which you are commenting notes, under the new OSHA rules those who do not want to get vaccinated can simply take a test once a week instead!

I admit, some mornings I have a bit of dry mouth, but after my morning coffee I always have enough spit to hock a loogie into a cup. For science and the greater good.

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that isn’t how rights work. They are guarantees that cannot be violated, no matter how democratically popular they are.

aside from the trade-off discussion above, it looks like you also have opinions about the constitutionality of this move it is, of course, totally okay to have an opinion on that, but an opinion does not necessarily grant decision power, or even veto power, so ultimately you aren't the one who gets to decide what constitutes a right, and you aren't the one who gets to decide what constitutes a violation or an infring…

No I’m simply rejecting your framing of the discussion. Rights are not a question of votes. It is not up for deciding democratically. To frame the question this way is to fundamentally misunderstand how rights work.

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those ancestors would switch places with us in a heartbeat. You are romanticizing.

No, they wouldn’t, considering that they explicitly set up difficult lives for themselves according to their values. And no, you can’t read the minds of long dead people either. Is it really so difficult to consider that we live in a scared, lazy age?

The idea that people made their lives intentionally harder in the past is absolutely ludicrous. Almost every person in history would swap places with me right now in a heartbeat.

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#575
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting element is my choice vs choices put on me. There is another angle people talk about... The building I work in was designed and built by others. Regulations mean they can't cut corners in their impact of me. A vaccine that protects me from getting the virus or getting a serious case. It's a difference between others work impacting my safety and my own choices impacting my safety. This is an area worth p…

Indeed. People who raise this argument tend to ignore the fact that the most important impact of the vaccine is the systemic protection it offers against the irresponsibility of individual choice. The vaccine does not in fact guarantee person X will not be infected or hospitalized. Widespread vaccination does result in systemic reduction in community spread. Ponder that.

> The vaccine does not in fact guarantee person X will not be infected or hospitalized. Widespread vaccination does result in systemic reduction in community spread.

We aren't going to wipe out COVID. It's here to stay. From people to animals. At some point most of us will likely get it. There has been a fair amount written on this.

If we look at past times we had pandemics (e.g., pandemic of 1889-90) we can see patterns. There the virus hit people and was bad the first year and gradually was less and less until they stopped tracking it. When we get hit the first time we get some immunity. For the virus from that pandemic it happens today as kids. Antibodies fade over time (while T cells remain). That means our nose and throat can easily get reinfected but after the first time we usually just get a simple cold (and first time is usually a simple cold, too).

That situation moved from pandemic to endemic. The same will happen here.

Yet, every year ~40k people in the US die from cold/flu.

We can't stop it. How we treat people along the way will say a lot about us and impact our relationships once we hit the endemic stage.

We'll get to endemic without or without the vaccine. The vaccine will help. Forcing people is going to create enemies and the side effect will live beyond the pandemic.

Just a thought to ponder.

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. My vaccination status is my own damn business. I am prepared to be fired over this, if needed.

except it's not really since you can kill other people if you're not vaccinated.

On the contrary it's the vaccinated people who are sick but don't know that they're sick who are spreading the virus.

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize that, but you're probably right. The point I was trying to make is that neither I, nor my roommate (the only other patient I've had a conversation with) realized exactly how bad of shape the hospitals were in until we showed up at the ER and experienced it in person. The relentless media coverage is easy to tune out after a while, but actually experiencing the effects of a COVID surge personally brin…

Did you go to an emergency room in 2019, by chance? Waiting many hours to be admitted has been the norm in American healthcare for a very long time.

Thank you for this needed comment. ER wait times were a problem before Covid. I've experienced waiting in an ER with a loved one who was convulsing, it was extremely scary and sobering to see how long we waited (about an hour or so). This was before covid.

Emergency Rooms were scary and full before Covid!

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except it's not really since you can kill other people if you're not vaccinated.

On the contrary it's the vaccinated people who are sick but don't know that they're sick who are spreading the virus.

Mostly to people that are unvaccinated... If 90% of people were vaccinated r would be less than 1 and there would be no spread.

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#579
post #203

Whether or not you agree if there is legal authority for mandates for this vaccine or this pandemic, where does it end? The trajectory we're on is for all people to be monitored by the State for compliance with the vaccine programs. Israel is already saying 4 shots (and more) will required [0] to participate in that society. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are quasi-police states [1] and will probably mandate vacc…

> Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are quasi-police states [1] and will probably mandate vaccination+boosters soon. Regardless of whatever metric you use to define “freedom” all of those countries rank higher than the US pre-Covid for “freedom”[1][2][3]. If your argument is that those countries are fundamentally “less-free” post-Covid due to public health measures, I don’t see the data to support that. To imply tha…

Those rankings are laughably out-of-date. People can't leave the house in Australia without a visit from the police. In any case, these NGO-compiled lists are suspect to begin with. So, you think federal Covid vaccine mandates are a small issue? What are the 'big issues' the country needs to solve, in your opinion?

Re: OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

#580
post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you go to an emergency room in 2019, by chance? Waiting many hours to be admitted has been the norm in American healthcare for a very long time.

People lining the hallways waiting is not the norm in American healthcare

FYI, here is an article from The Atlantic describing just that from 2015.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency...

It may not be the norm, but how unusual was it?

Post reply on HN