It’s just so frustrating when I hear arguments about personal freedoms and other arguments when this is still happening.
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@twoinanddone, I don’t think it is correct that people have a right under the constitution not to get vaccinated. They do, I think, have a right not to take actions that are violation of their religious beliefs, but even that has been limited. For example, polygamy is not OK even if it is a core religious belief. I doubt ritual sacrifice of virgins would be OK.
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This is the core question the Supreme Court needs to answer as regards a federal vaccine mandate/requirement. It appears they already answered it as far as the power of the states to require it via public health.
It is interesting that no governor has issued such a mandate yet for the general public, unless I missed it.
Correct, in 1905 (Jacobsen v Mass), the Supremes clearly said states have authority to mandate a vaccine. But SCOTUS has never ruled (or asked to rule?) on whether the federal government also has that legal authority.
btw: the upcoming cases against OSHA (which have to wait until the rule is actually published), will hinge on two key items, not just one: 1) the first will be whether OSHA exceeded its authority by issuing an Emergency Order for the federal mandate without going thru the normal rule-making process (as required by the APA); 2) the second will be whether OSHA has the authority at all to issue a federal mandate (on employers with 100+ employees).
There are plenty of legal folks who say 2 will prolly pass muster, but the EO is questionable, as it requires proving “grave danger” (which itself has never been defined) in the workplace, absent a vaccine.
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So by extension in order to compel people will citizens ultimately have to provide proof of vaccination to participate in our democracy and vote?
I am all for both getting people vaxed and voting rights but curious to see how far you and other posters would go to compel people to get vaccinated.
Yup. Various animal sacrifices outlined in the Torah have also been nixed.
It’s mindblowing to me that we come down harder on COs who refuse to go out and kill people than we do on people who go spreading a bad and highly communicable disease because (they say) their sky fairy of choice has told them to avoid preventing that at all costs. Literally, that’s the reason. “My local rep for my fairy of choice has said it’s bad to do it.” And what I love about the sky-fairy business is that despite all the talk about respecting “faiths”, what’s really meant there is Christianity. I can still remember my divorce lawyer’s shock when, in the midst of negotiating Jewish holidays, I said that of course I’m not religious, it’s not like I believe in God*, and her head exploded and she started yelling at me never to say this anywhere near her again. Why? Because the only definition of “religious” that suits courts here is a Christian one staked like a goat to faith in a God that’s close enough to the Christian God to be recognizable to Christians. Likewise, forget “all these holidays nobody’s ever heard of.” (She had heard of Passover and Chanukah. After all, she had Jewish friends!) The terrible thing was that she was correct, as others who’ve gone looking for custody exemptions for non-Christian holidays have found here.
Likewise, good luck refusing the “Jewish Christmas” narrative. I did that once after being a good sport for years, told the teacher that if she wanted someone to come in and explain a Jewish holiday for the children, we’d do one that’s actually important at the appropriate time of year. She was a nice young woman and didn’t know how to refuse, so I came in with apples and honey and explained the reason and the wackadoo calendar year (as they all are, fancy deciding when time starts for everyone and calling it a stone-cold certainty), and a lot of small children managed not to get honey on the carpet, they all had a good time, and that was the very last year I was asked to come in and talk about Jewish celebrations.
As far as I’m concerned, if you have some wack reason for not wanting to be vaccinated, fine. Live it up. But you’re going to have to live on lockdown like you’re immunocompromised, not for your own protection, but so that you can’t become an efficient vector and endanger other people, including the actual immunocompromised. If you have minor children, they’ll be living with someone vaccinated for their protection; you don’t get to abuse children that way. And if there are enough of you out there like that? Lockdown could go on for a very long time. We’ll work with your employers to see that you can work remotely. But no, sky fairy != license to ill.
*while rabbis are generally fine with this and don’t see it as their business anyhow, we did have a rabbi at one point who was a very seeking type, also a baseball rabbi not much for reading, which was an amusing mix. He got very irritated with me at one point because I looked at him like he was a nut when he said – to a bunch of Jews, mind – that we all need spirituality, and asked me if I didn’t feel a need for something bigger than myself. I asked him if he’d ever been outside. It’s pretty big. Then there was more conversation. It was the first time I had a view like that into a mind that genuinely did not notice the world around it much: he thought about himself, his circumstance, people around him, and then…a choice between a vasty void in which he felt frighteningly tiny and a benign presence. Nothing much inbetween. He didn’t really know why he felt that way. The world, universe, all the stuff that’s not us just didn’t move his needle. Me, on the other hand…I remember going to a Rothko show at…must’ve been MoMA, before the giant addition and the throngs, and they had the black paintings set up in a room that, without placard or instruction, became a sanctuary. And that guy knew what the vasty void looked like, all right. Went all the way down and touched the bottom of the existentialist pool. One of the most moving things I’d ever seen.
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Hmm, 700k Americans dead in 18 months, yes, I think OSHA can meet the “grave danger” of covid requirement
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But were those deaths a result of transmission in the workplace? (Don’t forget, the vast most of the deaths were nonworking elderly pre-vaccine…)
And that will be the crack all employers wriggle through to avoid responsibility. It will not be patched by pointing out that it involves proving a negative: that the person did not catch it anywhere else. That is part of why finding healthcare and disability insurance for people suffering from long covid is going to be such a nightmare.
Well, many of the elderly died because unvaxxed workers in their workspace, nursing homes, infected them. Yes, I think the nexus is close enough.
Employers want clear mandates. Far preferable to testing and disruption associated therewith. Some employees will quit, but they will be replaced. Employers generally aren’t trying to wiggle out of anything; employees and unions may be.
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One employer’s “crack” is another employer’s legitimate question. Yes, early on there were reports of employee covid transmission at places that are/were essentially sweat shops, and such places could easily fall under an EO. OTOH, nearly every big tech firm has been WFH for well over a year. (Can’t transmit covid if the offices are still closed.) So the legal question is why they should come under such an Order when their employees are already protected?
Because they do like the option of reopening in person in the future. Big tech does not oppose mandates.
If your entire workforce is WFH and you have no control over their physical workspaces, then I don’t see why you should come under the order. But then it’s up to you, as an employer, to show that you do not control their physical work environment, and that if they’re telecommuting from Mars, it makes no difference to how they do their job.
Re the child abuse, 9 more kids are in the local hospital with covid in under a week.
Nine kids struggling hard enough to breathe and sick enough to be in the hospital.
Where do you find this data?
I wish all places had to report cases and vaxxed vs unvaxxed by age.
Despite our state’s effort to suppress covid data, we have a number of dedicated folks who devote a huge amount of time to collecting it from hospitals, nursing homes, school districts, local public health folks trying to do their jobs, and HHS. And to verifying it and exposing holes in state-offered data. Some of the hospitals and schools also run their own boards, updated daily or weekly. There are also people on twitter who become conduits for anecdotes and fact-checking from inside the hospitals and districts – obviously that info’s harder to check, but the whole volunteer enterprise of it is heroic work and they’ve been doing it for a long time now.
It probably helps that the remaining public-health people at state level aren’t very good at their jobs, so when they put stuff out that just looks wrong, it’s pretty obvious to epi/medical/public-health people who know what they’re doing.
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Many of the restrictions being imposed are to compel people to get vaccinated not because the physical presence of the unvaccinated is a risk but based on a broader social responsibility.
The most compelling rationale I have heard expressed for wanting the unvaccinated to get the shot is because their eventual illness will overtax the healthcare system and cause the “innocent” (Non-Covid illness who have been vaccinated) to not be able to access proper care.
I have repeatedly heard it explained that allowing the unvaccinated to get ill while Darwinian will impact society as a whole and consequently any actions to force vaccination are justified.
Even with ‘regular’ vaccines, you have the right to do nothing. Florida, for example, requires a number of vaccines to attend public school - MMR, Dtap. If you don’t want to get those, you don’t have to and no one is going to come to your home to make you get them (or make you give them to your kids). If you don’t get them, your life is going to be very restrictive - no school, day care, no girls and boys club, rec league soccer. Many employers require certain vaccines so you wouldn’t be able to work for them. There are people who choose not to be vaccinated and they home school or live off the grid.
Polygamy is actually against state law. You need a license to get married and the state is not going to issue one if you are already married. It’s possible to be double married in some states that have common law marriage but then would have to get the state to recognize the 2nd, 3rd marriage, and at that point you are violating the law, so probably not a good idea to bring those 2nd and 3rd marriages to the attention of the authorities. But you can live off the grid or have a TV show about polygamy, no problem.
Not getting vaccinated is not against the law, but just restricts what you can do if you aren’t vaccinated. I could have chosen not to vaccinate my born in the USA daughter. The first consequence would have been her pediatrician would have told us to find another doctor. She could have gone to school because Colorado allows ‘personal choice’ (didn’t have to be based on religious objection) but every time someone was sick at school she would have been sent home to wait out the outbreak. Inconvenient, but not illegal. When we moved to California, we lived 2 blocks from Dr. Sears, king of the anti-vax movement so still no problem going to school or getting medical care. Move to Florida? Ooh, no school for her! (except online or home school, so still doable).
California no longer allows ‘personal’ or religious exemptions from vax to attend public school. By state law, the only exemption allowable today is for medical reasons, certified by a doc. (And local docs will be audited if they provide too many exemptions.)
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