OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce • Hacker News Board

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

#811

Post by jasonlaramburu » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

kbos87 wrote: post #754

The number of comments here that fall back on some sort of a slippery slope argument, based in a worry about government overreach, is really disheartening. If COVID has proven anything in the US, it's how little control the federal government actually has. They've barely been able to enforce mask mandates. The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water here. I think we can look at the facts - 700,000 people dead, hos…

There seems to be consensus that the delta wave won't end until the US reaches at least 85% herd immunity (either through vaccination or infection). It's clear from polling that there is a large enough minority of American adults who won't take the vaccine voluntarily (under any circumstances) to achieve this level of immunity, so that leaves infection. Letting covid 'rip' through the remaining unvaccinated population will bring tens or hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths, even with wide availability of current therapeutics.

If you want the pandemic, masking, lockdowns etc to end for good, it seems a vaccine mandate is the only way forward (absent some as-yet-to-be-invented technology). What am I missing here? Is there some other way to 'convince' anti-vaxxers to take it? Is 100k+ Americans dead an 'acceptable loss' to maintain some perception of 'medical freedom?'

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

#812

Post by kbos87 » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

Madmallard wrote: post #773

kbos87 wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many conveniently chosen facts and holes in your argument that I don’t even know where to begin. The CDC dataset you cite above only reflects death, not the serious illness and disability ~30% of people end up with. Yes, vaccinated individuals can spread COVID, but this is dramatically less likely if you are vaccinated. You assume you’ll be less likely to spread delta because you’ll quarantine, but you i…

Show the evidence that young adults are getting severe long term effects 30% of the time from covid.

I didn’t say young adults, though there is mounting evidence that even children can and do suffer from long term effects.

For anyone who doubts the prevalence of long COVID, it isn’t hard to find the growing pile of credible research -

The University to Arizona study is recent, and while it wasn’t an age specific study they cite 67% of people having symptoms after 30 days - https://news.arizona.edu/story/many-mild-covid-19-infections...

Chest CTs are abnormal in 75% of asymptomatic(!) COVID diagnosed individuals - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846889/

This is a year old, but for 18-34 year olds it cites 1 in 5 hadn’t returned to their usual state of health 2-3 weeks out… https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930e1.htm?s_cid=mm...

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

#813

Post by niij » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #805

niij wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi dang, thanks for the hard work. I want to point out this is not a dupe of the "Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers" thread. This thread is talking about private employers with 100 or more employees; not necessarily federal employees.

It's the same announcement and therefore the same story. The titles picked different details to emphasize. Of course that affected the threads considerably, which is why I didn't merge them.

The private employer story is much more impactful/news-worthy IMO than a federal employee mandate. Also the whitehouse.gov link seems more authoritative than NPRs coverage of it.

I understand the need to keep flamewars down, but hiding this thread doesn't feel right to me. Just my 2 cents.

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

#814

Post by unanswered » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #755

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…

It's not about you dying. It's about you catching it, passing it to someone who might need to be hospitalised and fucking up the whole healthcare system. Stop thinking with your ego.

The vaccine does not stop you from catching the virus and spreading it. This has been settled science for months and months. Stop spreading disinformation.

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

#815

Post by missedthecue » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

moritonal wrote: post #136

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read an interesting article a while back, which asked... why were so many of the doctors in Nazi Germany willing to engage in sterilizing mentally deficient people, and other atrocities?[1] The answer was because, healthcare was viewed as a collective good. Doctors did not treat a patient for their own benefit, they treated a patient for society's benefit. And I see echoes of that here. [1] - https://www.tabletmag.…

How about that, a textbook case of Godwin's Law and it only took three comments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

" In less mathematical terms, the longer the discussion, the more likely a Nazi comparison becomes, and with long enough discussions, it is a certainty."

Seems like a silly "law". In mathematical terms, the longer the discussion, the more likely literally any comparison becomes. With a long enough discussion, every possible comparison being mentioned is a certainty.

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

#816

Post by lax4ever » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #686

lax4ever wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being that people's general livelihoods are not being affected by these campaigns and requirements. The choice is still available to people even if there are restrictions on use and distribution. That is not the case with the vaccine.

In my state, if I work at a restaurant and I smoke indoors on the job that is against the law. A tremendous number of jobs ban indoor smoking among employees and will absolutely fire you if you don't comply.

Those same jobs:

A) Typically ban smoking indoors because the state has banned smoking indoors

B) Also typically provide areas for smokers outside the building in compliance with local regulations. Are those places generally outside? No. Is the onus of responsibility on the business should an employee smoke inside? No, the employee is the one that would face the consequences, including possible termination and/or criminal charges. A business doesn't have much in the way to worry about.

There is no such provision for the vaccine. You either need to get the vaccine to continue working there, get tested every week, or find a different job. This is also without taking into account two things:

1) While the testing is offered according to OSHA, with potential fines up to 14k per instance what are the odds that employers are actually going to offer that to their employees? You actually, as a business, face less fines for leaving a piece of paper in plain sight that has someone's SSN, Name, and Address than you do for not potentially following this regulation.

2) That we are also looking at good odds of the testing option going away. It's not an option for federal employees, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that it will be going away for those under this mandate in the near future.

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

#817

Post by halfjoking » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #722

a_conservative wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what about unknown long-haul effects from newly developed vaccines? Are we permitted to be concerned about those?

Of course we are. The long haul effects of COVID are partially known and are super bad. The expected long haul effects of the vaccine are pretty well known (J&J, AZ) or use well understood pathways (Pfizer, Moderna).

I had longcovid for 14 months and was active in the community. Something I saw regularly was people claiming the vaccines CAUSED their longcovid. They made their own subreddit for it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/vaccinelonghaulers/

So I don't agree the effects of either are well understood.

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

#818

Post by whymauri » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #612

commandlinefan wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> waiting for ICU beds Not saying this isn't happening, but the phrasing here is a little disingenuous - there are plenty of beds , just not enough doctors and nurses to staff them. And why is that? In many cases, it's because the doctors and nurses themselves refuse to take an experimental vaccine and are being furloughed or terminated.

Stop saying "experimental vaccine" because that's entirely untrue. It might have been true for barely reasonable interpretations of the term months ago, but it's certainly untrue now.

It's literally FDA approved at this point. My brain melts every time I read a COVID discussion on HN -- it's actually worst than Reddit at this point because people here believe they're _just so much smarter than everyone else_. Even more so than Reddit, which I previously believed was impossible.

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

#819

Post by tolmasky » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #781

tolmasky wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> yet there’s no constant uproar and heightened emotion around car deaths.

I think you may have a recency bias towards the mitigation techniques. The reason it seems like there's no hysteria around cars is because we've already gone through that phase and implemented the best safeguards we could come up with: the right analogy here is to see what a stickler our society is for having car insurance, which is the closest thing to a "car accident vaccine" we could come up with. Given the reality of the frequency of car accidents, and how they can potentially affect others just as much as yourself, we've implemented a system where it is a requirement to have a way to compensate the other person if an accident happens (not to mention the various laws we have around driving, the big deal that was Mothers Against Drunk Driving, breathalyzer checkpoints which could be seen quite analogously to covid testing, the fact that we need a license to drive and are tested for driving proficiency, the penalties for driving unsafely, laws requiring you to buckle your safety belt, laws around safety belts and airbags needing to be included in cars, etc. etc.). If we had an actual hypothetical "car accident vaccine," we'd probably just require you to have that instead of this tremendously complicated and expensive infrastructure around driving.

So I'd argue that what we actually don't see is heightened emotion around this onerous car infrastructure, to the point where you are essentially presenting cars as some sort of model for c'est-la-vie attitudes both from the general population and the government, which couldn't be farther from the truth. The reality is you've just gotten used to the burdens we've taken on to make our activities livable with respect to cars. Go watch the "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel and you'll see just how much of your life is actually completely governed around accommodating cars (and a big part of that is in making their presence safer).

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

Source?

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

#820

Post by everdrive » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

dmitrygr wrote: post #3

> OSHA will issue an Emergency Temporary > Standard (ETS) to implement this requirement Is this "temporary" in the same way that the PATRIOT act and our invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 were "temporary"? Well, I guess one should never let a good crisis go to waste...

>our invasion of Afghanistan in 2001

So it'll only be around for 20 years?