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NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

iapps.courts.state.ny.us

401–410 of 443 posts

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to see them held accountable. Every person who was affected by an unconstitutional law should have the ability to sue for damages arising from the intentional abridgment of their constitutional rights. Our rights would remain more intact if lawmakers actually faced personal financial penalties when they try to deny us the already very few rights afforded to us by the constitution.

How are you going to handle it when the Supreme Court reverses itself on decisions decades later? Or even just a few years later when a new Justice is added? Does all the money from damages get returned, with interest and accounting for inflation? Law is never settled and courts disagree and reverse frequently... So I don't think you've really thought this through... :) Including who is going to pay for all those dam…

you didn't read my comment in full, note the use of the word "personal" financial penalties.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social interaction which is based on mutual trust (whether from family or sustained direct interpersonal interaction) is not really what we're talking about here. Folk dance festivals do not feed the world. The social structure of modern society is, by and large, about interactions between mutually distrusting strangers and their agents as they negotiate the exchange and distribution of economic resources. Basically…

You’re talking about capitalism not social structure. The post above that brought up social structure is also a red herring. This is about legal power and the threat of coercion. It would be trivial to implement a law to punish (say) Eric Adams or someone else in or formerly in nyc government for what they did. There are probably some basic mechanical reasons that is not generally done (although I don’t mean to dismi…

>It would be trivial to implement a law to punish (say) Eric Adams or someone else in or formerly in nyc government for what they did.

Sure, but what, you're going to send the mayor to Jail (violence) over a political decision he made?

That would not be trivial.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to see them held accountable. Every person who was affected by an unconstitutional law should have the ability to sue for damages arising from the intentional abridgment of their constitutional rights. Our rights would remain more intact if lawmakers actually faced personal financial penalties when they try to deny us the already very few rights afforded to us by the constitution.

How are you going to handle it when the Supreme Court reverses itself on decisions decades later? Or even just a few years later when a new Justice is added? Does all the money from damages get returned, with interest and accounting for inflation? Law is never settled and courts disagree and reverse frequently... So I don't think you've really thought this through... :) Including who is going to pay for all those dam…

I guess the politicians at a loss could try to sue each individual plaintiff that was previously paid out, but that seems improbable. That would be a good thing in practice, if you toe up to the line so close that multiple courts overrule each other you lose regardless. That would help keep our rights intact.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple. They don't though. None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that. And only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID. If you're not in either of those camps, or have natural immunity the risk is negligible.

> only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID We should not make policy decisions as long as only the elderly and otherwise vulnerable are at risk?

Those are the exact people who should get the vaccine. It's great that it exists. Forcing people who are not at risk, to inject something into their bodies which will not help them is authoritarian overreach, even if the vaccine DID protect from infection. Now that everyone admits it does not prevent infection, or "spread", there is not even a bad reason to mandate vaccination.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#405
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I have more vaccines then the law requires because I went places where it made sense to get more shots for more disease. I have not touched the COVID shot because I did not trust it for these reasons: - vaccines take years to test not months - there were new untested biotech involved - in short order I was being told that it does not work for this flavor of COVID. And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or p…

> vaccines take years to test not months This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues. This time, there was a financial backer (the government) that was willing to fund development of a whole bunch of vaccine candidates, without any preconditions. That's never happened before. Normally, if you want to develop a vaccine, you have to go to investors, and convince them that your vaccine has a h…

> > vaccines take years to test not months

> This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.

This is not at all true. There is only so much you can parallelize things, as every software dev should know. It will always take 9+ months to figure out what the effects are for a mother that was vaccinated before conception, for instance. (Does this trigger autoimmune issues? Birth defects, like thalidomide did? And some birth defects - mental ones in particular - might not become apparent for years!)

> They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.

There's a decent bit of data now saying that having been vaccinated in the past increases your chance of infection after 12+ months.

> The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.

One problem is that the lives saved and the side effects happen in different and only slightly overlapping populations, and long-term side effects (for both covid and the vaccines) are not yet known or knowable.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID We should not make policy decisions as long as only the elderly and otherwise vulnerable are at risk?

Those are the exact people who should get the vaccine. It's great that it exists. Forcing people who are not at risk, to inject something into their bodies which will not help them is authoritarian overreach, even if the vaccine DID protect from infection. Now that everyone admits it does not prevent infection, or "spread", there is not even a bad reason to mandate vaccination.

I did not ask about vaccine mandates.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the case. Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative. The UK is one of the few countries that kept regularly publishing case stats even after this happened and it showed that once the initial vaccine 'high' wore off, vaccinated people were getting infected more frequently than the unvaccinated. Omicron didn't change this. This sort of thing is unintuitive but has…

> Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative. Effectiveness against Delta did not go negative. Protection against infection decreased, but was still quite significant. A single booster also greatly increased protection against Delta, which is why many countries initiated booster campaigns in the Fall of 2021. > Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to ba…

Protection was falling steadily at the time delta disappeared completely, and continued falling on the same trend far below zero.

Your description of the trials is perfectly inverted! I wonder how that happens. The trials weren't designed to detect anything except reduced PCR test positivity i.e. infections. They didn't attempt to determine what a "severe case" was because that distinction was invented only after the falling effectiveness made it necessary to do so, and as for death, more people died in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm! They definitely didn't make claims about reducing the death rate because it was so tiny to begin with that they couldn't get a big enough sample of COVID deaths to make any conclusions, not even with 64,000 odd people.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#408
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why what? Can you elaborate a bit?

Sorry, why would he do this? If he wasn't doing it thinking it would help then what?

I’m not sure which person you are referring to, but it doesn’t matter if someone thought it would help. That’s not sufficient.

The rules vary somewhat from state to state, but in general a government order must be narrowly tailored to serve a legitimate government interest, there must be a rational basis for how the order will actually serve that interest, and it must not be arbitrary or capricious. It has to have all three or it’s out. Notably, “I thought it would help” isn’t quite on the list.

If you can explain why something might help, then that could form your argument for the rational basis test (although it would be better if you could explain how it _will_ help, rather than how it _might_ help). But the order had better meet all the other requirements as well.

There are often other requirements as well. The agency writing the order must have the explicit authority to do so. Some types of orders are limited ahead of time by legislation. For example, many states have a written maximum amount of time that any order based on a state of emergency can last. Etc, etc.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#409
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was arbitrary because small hardware stores had to close, while big ones could stay open. Also, because in most states someone in the governor’s office just went down a random list of professions or business types and decided on the spot whether to shut them down or not. That’s the very definition of arbitrary and capricious. It also fails the rational basis test, since the government hadn’t even come up with a ra…

I didn't know about small hardware stores being forced to close. That's the arbitrary part then. If it was a question of space, they should've been allowed to continue business with curbside pickups. Religion and community are important. But congregating inside a church building is not something that needs to be prioritized during a pandemic. Schools and daycares first.

> But congregating inside a church building is not something that needs to be prioritized during a pandemic. Schools and daycares first.

Not everyone puts priorities in that order. For many people, religion is much, much more important than daycare.

Plus, any order which treats businesses differently is going to be arbitrary. If you can go to a school but not a bar, then that is arbitrary.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm entirely in favor of making lobbying as expensive as possible, but I disagree that there isn't something to be gained from having people be in the same physical location to achieve a common goal. Some things just can't be done very well over Zoom. I do wish that more federal functions would be spread out throughout the country, in the same way that Germany does; many of their federal agencies are headquartered in…

>but I disagree that there isn't something to be gained from having people be in the same physical location to achieve a common goal. So then I assume you also reject Full time work from home? I can not think of a single reason why Congress needs to be in the same physical location to read a bill, take public comment on a bill, then vote on if that bill is good for their community or now. That is the SOLE and ONLY fu…

Full time remote work can be done for a lot of jobs, but even those you would agree that occasional in-person time helps. I'm not taking an absolute position one way or another.

> that is beyond their scope of work and should be curtailed

You and me both ;-)

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