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

#661

Post by stjohnswarts » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

belltaco wrote: post #638

ecommerceguy wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those floors are still closed Drew, and my sister is still pissed off about it. You've been on all of the floors in that hospital? >>because people were AFRAID TO GET COVID and expected to get it when going to a hospital. Wrong, one of the floors closed was the 7th floor where heart attack and stroke patients go. They closed due to lack of patients having heart attacks and strokes. These floors could be open right no…

So hospitals should take financial losses(or get govt handouts to compensate) but people shouldn't need to get a jab in order not to end up in one?

Yeah, basically your freedom (to not get vaxxed) shouldn't overrule society's freedom as a whole to move on and get back to a decent semblance of what it was .

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

#662

Post by throwaway210222 » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #656

mfer wrote: 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…

> A vaccine that protects me from getting the virus or getting a serious case But if the vaccine protects you, and you have it, why do you care if I get it or not? By definition, the only people I could hurt are myself or other unvaccinated people.

> why do you care if I get it or not?

Because every infection is a chance to evolve a new variant that my (and my family's) vaccination does not protect against.

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

#663

Post by belltaco » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

mfer wrote: post #556

matwood wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the vaccine doesn't just protect you, it's also a layer of protection for anyone you might come in contact with. This is the whole concept of herd immunity. There are some people where the vaccine will not work, and others where it works but for whatever reason they are very susceptible to the virus. When you skip the vaccine you are now putting others at risk.

> When you skip the vaccine you are now putting others at risk. When you skip the flu vaccine you put others at risk. In a normal year 40k people die of the flu in the US. At what point do we draw what lines? I'm not suggesting what that point is. Just that we slow down, think about it, and understand the tradeoff. There is no perfect answer. There is also the element of the co-founding factors. Things like heart dis…

>In a normal year 40k people die of the flu in the US.

So we draw the line somewhere between 40k and the number of deaths from covid? Note, it's not 650K in the US, those are deaths after all the social distancing, mask wearing, etc and more recently vaccinations. The true number would have been in the millions just in the US if these precautions weren't taken. Actually the IFR/CFR would be at a higher rate than now because hospitals would have been completely pummeled so people who now survive due to hospital care would die at home or in an ambulance waiting for a bed. Not to mention long covid, organ damage etc. The economy would suffer even with everything open.

Are you saying that you would draw the line at more than millions dead in a year in the US for covid because we draw the line higher than 40k per year for the flu?

If anything can be learnt from this, I think the argument can be that we can do more to combat flu every year, make it socially necessary for sick people to stay at home or mask up in subways etc.(like in Japan), increase testing, increase uptake of vaccines, new better MRNA vaccines etc.

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

#664

Post by christophilus » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

dadoge wrote: post #253

christophilus wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s in fact the definition of fascism. Concentration camps aren’t unique to fascism, and you could have a fascist system without them. Edit: I think I replied to the wrong thread, actually. The thread I was on asked: “What’s the term for the fusion of state and corporate power?”

Ok, so the US was a fascist state when we did a polio vaccine rollout? Jeez look how far the US fell after the polio rollout (sarcasm) …

As I mentioned, I replied to the wrong thread. Requiring vaccines doesn’t make us fascist. The tight integration of big corporations and the US government arguably does. By that definition, we’ve been fascist for a long time.

But yes. I think the more intertwined business interests and government becomes, the worse things will get in the US.

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

#665

Post by geofft » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

ecommerceguy wrote: post #571

drewg123 wrote: post #426

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 vacc…

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 or denied care? Is that not just as degenerate?

This is a well-explored situation in other cases of shortages. Suppose that there is a severe famine and the government imposes food rationing. The Smiths abide by the rations and eat small but barely sufficient meals for a month. The Joneses refuse (for whatever reason), buy lavish amounts of ingredients, and throw out leftovers. At the end of the month the Joneses have blown through their ration cards and say they will starve the next month unless the Smiths share some of their rations.

The morally defensible answer is no, despite the danger that the Joneses may die, because if you say yes, now both the Joneses and the Smiths will be malnourished, this is an unacceptable harm to the Smiths, and being willing to answer yes will just encourage other people to act like the Joneses.

It's a trolley problem. You always want to just stop the trolley of you can or get people off the tracks. But if you can't, you have to make a choice about who it hits. Being in the position of making that choice doesn't inherently make you a murderer.

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

#666

Post by stjohnswarts » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #591

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are dying from simple stuff while waiting for ICU beds, but the anti-vaxx crowd doesn't really care. https://people.com/health/u-s-army-veteran-dies-of-treatable... https://www.ky3.com/2021/08/27/man-dies-waiting-icu-bed-fami...

> 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.

very few doctors and nurses are "getting furloughed". Pfizer is a fully approved vaccine by the FDA. Those people are just acting like children.

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

#667

Post by sitkack » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

mfer wrote: post #556

matwood wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the vaccine doesn't just protect you, it's also a layer of protection for anyone you might come in contact with. This is the whole concept of herd immunity. There are some people where the vaccine will not work, and others where it works but for whatever reason they are very susceptible to the virus. When you skip the vaccine you are now putting others at risk.

> When you skip the vaccine you are now putting others at risk. When you skip the flu vaccine you put others at risk. In a normal year 40k people die of the flu in the US. At what point do we draw what lines? I'm not suggesting what that point is. Just that we slow down, think about it, and understand the tradeoff. There is no perfect answer. There is also the element of the co-founding factors. Things like heart dis…

> many years of unhealthy eating

Which itself is an epidemic. There are multiple levels of cellular automata at work here, riding on each other like layers of foam.

The Meme of COVID being all of the AJ talking points. The antivaxxers are a surrogate host, they act in symbiosis. The mind virus and the cellular virus reinforce each other.

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

#668

Post by stefanwlb » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

This is hilarious, before this, HN was all for mandated vaccinations for healthcare workers because it didn't affect you. Now that it does, it's suddenly a moral/ethical issue. Hopefully you won't be one of the thousands who die from the vaccine or one of the million who have serious side effects, Good luck!

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

#669

Post by HWR_14 » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #509

rudolph9 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flu doesn't overwhelm hospitals in recent history. Covid-19 regularly causes governors to declare state-of-emergency in order to care for the massive number of people who need medical attention due to the disease. I can't help but think like your comment is more intended provoke heated responses than encourage constructive discussion.

The flu definitely overwhelms hospitals on a yearly basis. Try searching Google with a date filter before 2020 for hospital overcrowding and flu.

The flu definitely did something in 2017-2018 (although that was a standout year). However, that "overwhelming" was mostly dealt with by telling people to go home and take theraflu (and OTC medication). As in, literally a press at the ER/admitting, which resulted in people needing to be examined before they were turned away. And doctors/nurses had to work overtime to do that!

But the ICU beds never got overwhelmed. In hospital treatment never failed.

The response then was "if you have a flu, call your GP who will just prescribe you the medicine over the phone". The exact same situation that most non-COVID patients have been in for months.

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

#670

Post by stjohnswarts » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:03 PM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #652

exabrial wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Arguing against vaccination" Stop. You're intentionally skewing what's being said and making the problem worse. People are against _forced_ medical procedures by a government. A small minority is anti-science, but you give them a voice every time YOU do what you just did.

extremely important to clarify that only a small minority of "people" are against vaccine mandates, whereas the majority of people are not against vaccine mandates https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-mandate-work-poll...

Yeah most of the people refusing vaccines are conspiracy nuts and afraid of it because they've heard a talking head (that for whatever they trust) tell them not to take it.