While I agree that terminating employment is certainly justified, it is not likely that you or other members of the public will be fine with the results. The federal government backed off the firing option when looked like half of TSA won’t comply by the deadline. Easy to say just fire them until holiday travel is suspended due to a lack of security. Not everyone can be replaced, and they can’t be replaced quickly.
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I’m fine with it. If they stick to it, history has shown multiple times the vast majority will get vaccinated. If they give in of course it will fail, plus they’ve shown people no law or regulation means anything, not even for public health.
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We have begun losing employees due to the mandate. Those who have highly technical computer skills are difficult to recruit or retain on federal contracts to begin with, and they have plenty of other options. As always, the most skilled and competent will have the most options elsewhere.
This would have been a good idea in January 2021. By January 2022, I am not so certain.
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I don’t want to work with non-vaccinated people, so I don’t think I would have a problem with this! I am in a small office (<9 staff). Everyone is vaccinated, but I don’t know if we will have any type of vaccine requirement. But I am seeing in job postings in my (non-healthcare) industry that many employers are requiring it. I happened to live in a very highly vaxxed area so it probably somewhat of a non-issue.
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The federal contractor vax mandate applies to those working remotely as well, as most of ours do. These are people working from their own homes.
So S got vaccinated in Aug with the J n J which at the time was a one shot and done. He is out looking for work starting in May when he graduates and can say yes I was vaccinated. We all know that that vaccine immunity wanes over time. So at what point do we mandate boosters and manage that? He had some wacky side affects and I think he would rather live in our basement working remotely never leaving the house again , then getting a booster. Meanwhile my very pro vax D, who had covid a year ago, and then got the vaccines as soon as she can, is also booster hesitent. (My H and I just got our boosters). So does vaccine mandates become booster mandates at some point for employment? That really becomes sticky. I hope we dont come to that.
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Immune response to J&J(x1) may be more durable and stable over time, although at a lower level than initially seen with Moderna(x2) and Pfizer(x2). Boosting to J&J(x2) or J&J(x1)+(Moderna or Pfizer)(x1), while recommended now, is optional.
Why is she hesitant now? However, in her case, she probably has a very strong immune response, since studies have found that having COVID-19 and then getting vaccinated results in a very strong immune response in most people who had that happen. So she may not gain as much from a booster as some other people may.
The Green Bay Packers lost the services of their starting quarterback for this weekend’s game because he got COVID-19 after refusing vaccination.
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The recommendation on CNN (female doctor. Patel) was that younger men who got J&J should get a Pfizer or Moderna booster just in case myocardidis is an issue (also that women 16-49 should get J&J concerned about birth control reactions with Pfizer/Mod), but otherwise to stick with the one you started with.
nm read too quickly.
That’s odd because myocarditis is an issue for men under 30 with the mRNA vaccines.
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Still no tears from here. Honestly, I don’t care what the sob story is. Those choosing to stand fast to their freedom over other people’s health has caused me to really start to disdain them, and that’s putting it mildly. I’ve seen too many people mourning due to the misinformation spread out there.
FIL is really hoping the federal mandate will cause BIL to get vaccinated. Time will tell.
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Do you have a link to this, because I just read in an email that:
“updated federal guidance gives employees an extra month to either get the COVID-19 shot or opt in to weekly virus testing. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has published nearly 500 pages of regulations on how companies, federal employees, and federal contractors should comply with President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate. The regulations do not apply to those working from home or in outdoor jobs. OSHA stipulates that companies do not need to pay for weekly testing but must mandate masks for unvaccinated employees and offer paid time off to get vaccinated starting Dec. 5. The testing option does not apply to roughly 17 million healthcare workers under a separate Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rule.”
I don’t really feel like trying to read the updated guidelines to see if it’s really in there.
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Yes, I have read the OSHA guidance, it is my job. Unfortunately, the OSHA guidance expressly does not apply to federal contractors, who are covered by the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force requirements, which requires vax for all employees, regardless of remote, or approved exemption.
It is one thing to not care about firing the unvaxxed, but it is quite another to not worry about whether their work goes undone. Some of their work is indeed mission critical, and took years to acquire the necessary skills. We can still fire, but expect that the public will experience all sorts of unintended consequences.
The places no longer requiring masks for vaxxed feds? Alabama and Florida, due to very low community spread, per CDC. Still need to fire unvaxxed remote workers there if federal contractor. Date moved back to Jan 4th.
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This whole exchange started when you complained about how federal contractors were given an option short of firing which involved education and counseling. You called this an “absurdity,” and said it wasn’t your company’s job to try to get these workers vaccinated, but it is your company’s job to fulfill your contracts, and if it takes education and counseling (or higher pay for employees who will vax) than that seems part of the job. And while I understand your frustration, it is not the federal government that created this situation, is your anti-vaxxer employees. Covid isn’t likely going anywhere, so kowtowing to these employees now will likely set your company up for continued problems down the road.
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I think this is backward. As I understand it, young men who initially received Moderna or Pfizer should consider J&J booster due to myocarditis risk and young women who initially received J&J should consider Moderna or Pfizer if they are concerned about the clotting (CVST) issue.
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I think the delay in requiring the vaccines is going to hurt OSHA in the coming lawsuits. It will be difficult to claim grave danger in the workplace when COVID has been circulating now for 2 years, it took months to enact the regulation/rule and they just pushed the deadline back another 4 weeks. Not to mention there’s still a masking/testing alternative.
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This will be an ongoing issue. A good swath of the public has little to no idea what most employees do in their jobs and how the loss of those employees will affect the general public. Just look at the supply chain issues. Can we afford to lose more truckers, port workers etc?
Another recent example is the TSA. The loss of a percentage of those employees due to refusal to get vaccinated will have a significant affect on air travel as well as cargo/shipping. Same issue with pilots as we’ve already experienced.
The loss of these employees across many industries will have a ripple effect that will be difficult to quickly reverse.
I’m also perplexed as to why vaccinated people are afraid of unvaccinated people? Vaccines are protective to the recipient but vaccinated people can still get sick and infect others. Unvaccinated people have chosen to take the risk of infection without the protection of a vaccine and they aren’t asking others to protect them. It seems that if the vaccinated really want to protect themselves against infection they should be masking and social distancing since those seem to be the tried and true ways to limit transmission/infection. Vaccination alone doesn’t prevent transmission.
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I guess the question is what would happen down the road after those workers leave. In the long run, I’m guessing most of them need jobs. So, will they only take jobs that don’t require vaccinations? I’m guessing that if there is a glut of non-vaxxed workers, that will drive down wages for jobs that don’t require vaccinations. Is the effect of all this some short- to medium-term disruption and a repricing of jobs with higher wages for vaccinated folks? Or will non-vaxxed folks stay out of the labor market? That seems unlikely as very few Americans have saved for retirement let alone stopping work earlier in life.
@roycroftmom, I don’t understand the rationale for requiring fully remote workers to be vaccinated. Is the concern that some day they will be called in to a meeting?
@vpa2019, your argument seems to ignore the critically important next step: the differential effects upon others that comes from the choice not to get vaccinated. Unvaccinated folks are more likely to get infected, more likely to spread the infection, and more likely to require expensive hospitalization. Therefore, their choice to not get vaccinated creates risk and cost for the vaccinated above and beyond the risks they are personally taking.
You are probably going to correctly point out that vaccinated people can get infected and infect others, which is true, but the argument is simplistic because it neglects the probabilities. The probability of infection for vaccinated folks is lower, the probability of vaccinated folks who are infected infecting others is lower, and the expected costs of treatment are lower. So the effect on others of being vaccinated is likely to be far lower – or the effects of choosing not get vaccinated imposes significant costs on others (both unvaccinated and vaccinated) and not just upon the person who chooses not to be vaccinated.
Neither masking, social distancing (which people are not doing as far as I can tell), nor vaccination on their own prevent transmission. All three together lower the probability of transmission and the severity of illness if infection occurs.
Because I am focused on that next step, I don’t have a problem with mandating vaccinations for anyone who wants to be in a public place, use public transport including airlines, etc. They are putting others needlessly at risk. I don’t see that it is a whole lot different than requiring that people not drive when they are drunk. If they want to stay home and drink and not drive, I have no problems. If they want to drink and interact with the world, then I have a problem. The primary difference between drunk driving and not getting vaccinated is the exponential nature of viral transmission: Drunks can only injure/kill a few people while people infected with COVID can injure/kill many.
And, of course, there is the step after that. The longer we allow the virus to breed, the higher the probability of a yet more transmissible or yet more virulent mutation. So, choosing not to be vaccinated increases the probability of incalculably bad things later on. I suspect we’ve lost that battle already --I just read that COVID is spreading in dogs, deer, primates etc. (introduced by humans) where it will take respite and reemerge more transmissible/virulent.
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Unvaccinated people present a much greater risk to everyone, including the vaccinated.
Many still are. Unfortunately those most likely to avoid these precautions are the unvaccinated, thus further increasing the risk to everyone else.
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