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OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce

whitehouse.gov

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

#781

Post by clairity »

tolmasky wrote: post #745
clairity wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “…but if I'm around something that has a 1 in 100 chance of killing me, I'm going to do everything I can to not let it, because those are NOT low odds.” then you should avoid any and all cars as you have a 1 in 100 lifetime chance of dying in a car accident. or birth, as babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth. covid suffers severely from availability and recency bias because our lives are so exceedingly safe…

I actually do try to stay away from cars. I think we are absolutely horrible at addressing risk accurately, and someday when we have some sort of carless society (or maybe self-driving cars?) we will not understand how we could possibly have accepted the mortality rates associated with cars. Not to mention the less immediate effects on long term health from exhaust, etc. Although I feel you were trying to make the op…

rather than being so dichotomous and partisan, my actual position is that we focus on the wrong problems because of biases and fallacious thinking, both individual and systemic. death by car is a real problem, but we’ve long accepted that and similar risks to our lives (as an aside, cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases are more pressing, to which auto pollution does contribute). covid is comparable to that level of risk and yet there’s no constant uproar and heightened emotion around car deaths. we need to couch novel threats in relation to existing risk tolerances developed over millennia rather than the other way around (because those exist already for good reasons, à la chesterson’s fence).

the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy.

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

#782

Post by q1w2 »

julianlam wrote: post #373
the-dude wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think it is different in other countries?

Canada achieved a high vaccination rate without resorting to lotteries (in most provinces, anyway), or mandates (until this month).

The rate might be higher, but we have our share of anti-vax people - including some violent protests at the Prime Minister lately, causing him to cancel rally events.

In our office, we have a number of people I know aren't vaccinated.

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

#783

Post by op00to »

xupybd wrote: post #149
op00to wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different from requiring hard hats? A hard hat won’t save you from getting a cut on your head from a dropped hammer but it will save you from having it break your head in two. Should OSHA stop requiring PPE?

A hard hat isn't a medical procedure. Some die from this vaccine. I weighed up the options and decided it was by far the lower risk option. I think people need to be free to make that choice. Freedom is so valuable.

Great point, thank you for letting me know a hard hat isn't a medical procedure. If my aunt had wheels, she'd be a tea cart. I'm sure I can find someone who died BECAUSE they were wearing protective head PPE - a hat strap got caught and strangled them, whatever.

The more important point that you ignore is people are horrible at weighing relative risk. You're obviously intelligent and aware of the biases inherent in judging vaccination risk. I'm sure you know crossing the street is far more risky. There is a consistent pattern of unvaccinated, dying covid patients claiming they underestimated the risk of the illness and wish they had gotten vaccinated. People are literally unable to make that choice for themselves. There's proof.

What's the point of "freedom" if we're all stuck in our houses hiding from variant after variant because we refuse to acknowledge that our government needs to make a decision that will save lives [1] when our actual survival is at risk.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/covid-19-vaccines-sav...

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

#784

Post by geofft »

ecommerceguy wrote: post #672
geofft wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no degeneracy here. It's a perfectly defensible line of moral reasoning. The constraint is, there simply is not enough capacity to treat everyone. If there was, there would be no problem. So should you prioritize care for people who are intentionally making themselves ill, or those who aren't? You have to choose one, after all. Are you advocating that people with illnesses other than covid should get delayed…

>>The constraint is, there simply is not enough capacity to treat everyone. If there was, there would be no problem. So should you prioritize care for people who are intentionally making themselves ill, or those who aren't? You're missing the point, floors closed create the deficit in operational capacity.

No, I addressed that. Ideally you stop the trolley or you untie people from the tracks. But if you can't, you have to choose where the trolley goes. Ideally we reopen the floors and have sufficient capacity to treat everyone. But if you can't do that, then you're making some judgment on who to treat.

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

#785

Post by dragonwriter »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #780
disneygibson wrote: post #479

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.

That is certainly one theory of government, but it is not the only one, or probably even the most popular one. For instance, we have many laws that infringe free speech rights, and the great majority of people are perfectly fine with that. Your platonic ideal of “rights” isn’t the way rights actually work in the real world.

> For instance, we have many laws that infringe free speech rights, and the great majority of people are perfectly fine with that.

I think you'll find that most people who are okay with the laws you are referencing likewise disagree that those laws infringe free speech rights, rather, they view them as operating in a space outside of the proper conception of the right to free speech; the complexity isn't as much in the operation of rights as in the parameters of rights.

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

#786

Post by dntrkv »

flavius29663 wrote: post #735
robmccoll wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah what's next? Making other behaviors that have a small but established likelihood of endangering the lives of others or their property illegal at little to no cost to the liberty of an individual? Pretty soon I won't be able to drive my car under the influence, or without proper insurance, or while not wearing a seatbelt, or I won't be able to discharge my firearms in my 0.2 acre backyard in a suburban area. 650,…

Not saying I disagree with you, but all the examples you gave are about some things that are a privilege or just optional (e.g. if you can't build a bridge to follow all the latest standards, you can just postpone it). Working is not really a privilege, you have to do it in order to survive.

Driving is just as vital to survival as having a job in most of the US.

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

#787

Post by vikingerik »

burntwater wrote: post #474
disneygibson wrote: post #353

Inevitable outcome in a society that is terrified of everything. And to think that our ancestors sailed across the oceans into the unknown and faced diseases, war, famine, and worse. Now we are instituting a surveillance state in the name of a fairly bad flu virus with a 99% survival rate. We really need a new frontier. Hopefully space travel happens before human beings become completely domesticated.

I never understand this whole "99% survival rate" being presented as if that's low. I don't know about you, but if I'm around something that has a 1 in 100 chance of killing me, I'm going to do everything I can to not let it, because those are NOT low odds. It also conveniently ignores the known and unknown long-haul effects from Covid, which impacts a significant percentage (20%?). I, for one, like staying in relati…

I'll take a stab at that survival number, which is inaccurate information. Your risk is way less than 1 in 100.

First off, the baseline survival rate is much better than 99%, between 99.8% and 99.9%. That's already an order of magnitude lower, closer to 1/1000 than 1/100. 1% lethality was a bad estimate from early on, before we realized we were undercounting mild cases by a huge multiple.

Second, lethality is highly correlated to comorbidities, including obesity and vitamin D deficiency. 94% of Covid deaths had another condition. If you don't, then your own risk reduces by another factor of 15.

Third, lethality is highly stratified by age. Under age 50 incurs at least 10x fewer deaths than higher age brackets.

Fourth, the vaccines. That also reduces risk by a factor somewhere in the ballpark of 10x again.

Fifth, Delta variant is also less lethal, as seen by the low death rates in India and the UK, although we don't seem to have reliable numbers on that yet.

So if you are young, healthy, not overweight, and vaccinated, multiply all that out and your risk factor really comes to less than one in a million. You take bigger risks every time you drive in your car. You're losing more life-value worrying about Covid than you actually stand to lose from it.

That all said, there is the point to be worried about Covid not for yourself, but for the possibility of spreading it. That's a valid point, but that is a question of politics, of individualism versus collectivism, not of science and statistics.

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

#788

Post by zaptrem »

Hunter235711 wrote: post #687

I am not anti-vax, but I STRONGLY oppose this vaccine mandate. Looking at the CDC data here: ( https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex... ) there have been 3,043 covid deaths in the 18-29 year range out of 103,738 total deaths in that same age range. I'm 29 and in good health. I know I'm much more likely to die from activities I enjoy like rock climbing, farm work, skydiving, driving my car, but…

Saying “I’m not anti-vax” before parroting every anti-vax talking point and admitting you’re not vaccinated doesn’t make you any less of an anti-vaxxer.

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

#789

Post by ljm »

wikidani wrote: post #641
ljm wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in the US so I can't speak for y'all, but the regulation isn't a bad thing. While you might not be affected personally, because you've been successful, it's better for the government to have your back than it is to entrust it to the free market. There's a hell of a lot of misery because the gov. doesn't step in enough, doesn't take care of its citizens. This was learned the hard way in 1929 and, for whatever…

I don't see how the gov't respond to an economical crisis has anything to do with modern authoritarianism. Regulation without oversight and checks and balances does lead to tiranny, more often than it doesn't

Of course, but I'd contend that regulation without oversight/checks and balances is tautological. Regulation in and of itself is the oversight, or the check and balance, and that responsibility is delegated to a specialised agency or department (that has a longer term scope than a single election cycle) rather than being directly managed by the administration in office at the time.

An authoritarian regime isn't going to spin up a bureaucracy like that to do regulation-without-oversight, it's just going to lower its boot onto the population's collective face. You can hardly call that regulation.

Perhaps we're just debating semantics here, but I think there's a distinction between regulating corporate behaviour (you must do X Y Z if you want to run a business in this country, for reasons A B C) and introducing a totalitarian regime (you must do X Y Z because I said so).

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

#790

Post by flavius29663 »

dntrkv wrote: post #786
flavius29663 wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying I disagree with you, but all the examples you gave are about some things that are a privilege or just optional (e.g. if you can't build a bridge to follow all the latest standards, you can just postpone it). Working is not really a privilege, you have to do it in order to survive.

Driving is just as vital to survival as having a job in most of the US.

but not driving drunk...you choose to drink, which is entirely optional. Driving drunk is something you choose to do. Getting a vaccine by mandate is something the state decides you have to do, with no way around it, if you want to continue working.
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