If you're in a business where that's likely, guess what, mandatory HIV tests.
But often prohibited during work, and when not generally not a job requirement, and when it is a requirement of a (legal) job, there's also a whole lot of intrusive requirements that would generally be considered peivacy violations in other work.
Breathing the same air as coworkers, though, is a practical requirement of in-office jobs, not something that might occasionally occur as an extracurricular activity during working hours despite being generally prohibited by policy or, if not, outside of requirements.
Do see now how requiring a vaccine because it would mitigate disease transmission risk in real world scenario that's a requirement of in person work is reasonable, vs requiring it because two people might sneak off to the head to get the leg over?
My belief is completely the opposite: Vaccination should NOT be a personal preference: A vaccinated population is a social good. People NOT being vaccinated (against polio, mumps, covid or even influenza) puts the population at risk. If providing the vaccine is cheaper for the government than the having certain amount of population sick, then vaccination should be enforced.
But then again, I live in a country that has a more socialist approach to governance, and I also was educated more towards this ideology.
Historically, we've seen that making arguments like this on the basis of costs, numbers, and science leads to eugenics.
It must be a moral argument, which has gotten harder to make in modern times as commonly-recognized sources of moral truth (religion, mostly) have been on the wane for some time.
Choose to be vaccinated, or choose to stay off campus, so you're not in close proximity to other people for extended periods of time.
I don't make the parent comment claim that "not wanting to be vaccinated is idiotic." It does seem uninformed, unless there's a very clear reason to support that point of view. While the law supports religious exemptions, I'm less sympathetic. And science really seems like it supports vaccinations, not only for personal protection and quality of life, but very importantly, for helping to prevent the continued transmission and mutation of a virus that has taken over 4 million lives.
Not wanting to do lots of things that contribute to public health or workplace safety that have a small personal cost/risk, and small expected personal benefit is fairly normal.
Refusing to do them, OTOH, is different than not wanting to do them.
If somebody thinks vaccines just protect themselves, now that's a real idiot, because it is not how they work. They work by preventing you from spreading an illness that could kill other people, specially those that for any given (serious) reason cannot be vaccinated.
You can still be contagious, though less so, since you're having less severe symptoms
For example, in my area two years ago, measles made a return because of anti-vaxxer Facebook mommy groups. I needed to bring my days-old infant to the pediatrician for checkups all the while knowing measles lingers in the air for two hours and a pediatrician's office is the most likely place to harbor the virus. Fun times as a parent and a big shout out to all the selfish people endangering newborns with literally no immune system based on junk "science" when the facts are overwhelmingly clear in favor of vaccines.
If I can make my house fireproof (analogy of being vaccinated) then I would not worry about my neighbor house not being fireproof catching fire and spread.
If your "freedom" negatively affects the safety and welfare of the other participants of a community then it's the best interest of that society to either coerse you comply, or expel you.
Selfish personal liberty should never detract from the freedoms of the commonwealth. Not getting vaccinated because someone believe biology is a political decision unilaterally detracts the freedoms of others.
A whole lot of people's newfound official freedom to smoke the stinkiest pot and have the smoke travel through the vents to neighboring apartments does negatively affect very young children and elderly in apartment buildings.
Yet, here we are. Clearly, some negative effects on some people's safety and welfare are not considered as important -- oftentimes by the same people who are really adamant about making everyone else comply with their demands.
It's been so many years since polio and earlier vaccines that people have forgotten the power and importance of collective action. Hope we can turn that around.
The ability to oppose forced medication is a right enshrined in many constitutions. The ability to go as fast as you want on a road is not.
Speed limits and building codes pretty much are "personal preference" in wide swaths of the US. Prior to some federal shenanigans many states had highways with no particular speed limit. Many rural areas do not enforce any building code for noncommercial non-dwelling structures and many exempt dwellings if they are being constructed by the property owner for themselves. And beyond this there are even more areas where laws are on the books but you're free to disregard them and enforcement will ignore you unless you do something so unreasonable they can't justify ignoring you.
Here in New Mexico, where there was no building code until the 1980s, we now have a tasty legacy of houses built not to code that are being sold to 2nd, 3rd and even 4th owners-after-building, and the stories are not great. People calling out contractors to fix this and that to be told that the entire plumbing/electrical system needs replacing to meet code. I own a copy of "The Owner Builder and the Code" and several other books from the heyday of the owner-builder "movement". I want people to be able to construct their own dwellings in ways that liberate their creativity and imagination. Decades on, however, I have to concede that this does have some downsides that need to be addressed.
A bunch of otherwise healthy people have died from the vaccine. You can argue that it's a numbers game, and that getting vaccinated is still less risky, but the decision should not be forced on anyone.
The latter has a several orders of magnitude higher death rate than the vaccines. So which option should the employer go for? Mandate everyone to get vaccinated or mandate everyone to mingle with the unvaccinated?
Since the number of deadly outcomes or side effects to the vaccine is so low the breakthrough cases in vaccinated individuals become significant when you compare the risks.
We should be strongly demonstrating that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks, distance, etc so that there are clear benefits to being vaccinated.
If the vaccines reduce the disease to nothing more severe than a cold or mild flu, we should be back to the same daily routines we had when those things were an ordinary risk at the workplace.
Besides, most people have enough life experience to intuitively know that there's no certainty in life. Being honest with people will do more to gain their trust than enhancing the truth for their own well-being.
I work from home but manage small sports club. I would never ask anyone for their vaccination status nor requiring them to be vaccinated to join.
Here's my take on that. Yes, some young, healthy people have died after taking the vaccine. Small numbers of young, healthy people die for no apparent reason all the time, but because vast numbers of people were not all getting the same vaccines at the same time, there was never a plausible common thread to tie them to.
It's not like this is the first time a vaccine is introduced.
I just don't think anybody should force anyone to get a shot. That should be a personal decision.
Most of them are from elderly people, but there are also a bunch of young people who have likely died from side effects. PEI reports 21 people under 40 who died from thrombosis after Astra Zeneca.
Biontech and Moderna had other side effects (myocarditis for young men), and also a bunch of young deaths.
Johnson is not common enough in Germany to make any reasonable judgements.
Severe side effects (not deaths) are around 0,2 per 1000 shots. (reported side effects, actual number may be higher)
Source (in German): https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/newsroom/dossiers...
I know there's a lot of misinformation about the vaccines going the rounds, but that doesn't mean that all reports of side effects are made up or statistical noise.
If people had refused vaccinations against Polio in this way, we'd still have people living in iron lungs.
- You need food.
- Well, not _this_ food and not necessarily at this moment in time.
Whether these particular vaccines are saving any lives is an open question. Given that 1) Given the number of deaths in the two major waves in the U.S. (Spring 2020 and Winter 2020-21) and the timing of most of the vaccinations, it is not clear how much of the improvement is due to vaccination and how much of the effect is due to a wave burning out.
Over the long term, are these going to be as effective as measles vaccines? There is no way to know. However, there is some indication that the time between the first and second injection is particularly risky.
Also, I would love to see a breakdown of how many of the "unvaccinated" are people who had their first shot and waiting for the second, or people who had their second shot, but two weeks have not passed.
It is not unreasonable for people to want to wait and see before diving head first into the "volunteer for experimental treatment" end of the pool.
In no world is this statement justifiable. It is obvious from hospitalization & fatality rates of unvaccinated vs. vaccinated people that the vaccine has already saved many lives and was also probably a strong contributor to that "wave burnout" in the first place, especially looking at a country like Canada
> there is some indication that the time between the first and second injection is particularly risky.
There is no indication that getting one shot puts you in a "particularly risky" position. It is clear the vaccine only achieves partial effectiveness in this time, but that is not "particularly risky", that's slightly reduced risk against the null hypothesis of being unvaccinated. I challenge you to post any literature which shows anything about increased susceptibility of one shot vs no shots.
> It is not unreasonable for people to want to wait
Tell me, what numbers have you set in your head to make it reasonable to "trust" the vaccination? To me, seeing the Phase 3 trials without significant side effects was plenty. Now, we have probably 10+x that data over 2-3x the timespan, and the risk picture has not changed. What tipping point(s) will you consider?
Note:
>> For this surveillance, a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after receipt of all recommended doses of an FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.[1]
Officially, the "unvaccinated" is a mishmash of three groups: a) received no doses; b) received one dose; and c) received two doses but less than two weeks passed since second dose.
Therefore, the comparisons of the "vaccinated" and "unvaccinated" rates are confounded by the fact that the latter group includes substantial numbers of people who have been injected with the vaccine.
Note that the breakthrough infection rate seems to be about 0.01%:
> A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, 2021.
...
> As of April 30, 2021, approximately 101 million persons in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
If memory serves me, the "eager to get the shot" crowd were not very eager to circulate in the population by April 30. I do not know how many break through infections have occurred since then and there isn't much clarity around the question of side-effects.
Also, note that while breakthrough infection in measles-vaccinated individuals result in low viral load[2], the exact opposite seems to be true for the Covid19 vaccines.
I have an idea. What if we did a randomized control placebo group and compared death rates. That is the gold standard, right? Well they did that, and the placebo group and vaccine group had the same death rate (their next move then was to end the placebo group).
I would be surprised if it turns out the vaccines don't save lives, but I haven't seen any clear cut proof that they are, given that the one experiment that would have proven it conclusively didn't, and then was ended early. So I think it's a perfectly justifiable statement and point of view.
Who is "they" and why did you not source this claim?
Regardless, given the current state where 99% of people hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated, I find it nearly impossible to imagine the idea that "death rates are the same between vaccinated & unvaccinated" wouldn't just immediately fall apart under your proposed experiment.
Long-Term Studies Of COVID-19 Vaccines Hurt By Placebo Recipients Getting Immunized[2]:
> Tens of thousands of people who volunteered to be in studies of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are still participating in follow-up research. But some key questions won't be easily answered, because many people who had been in the placebo group have now opted to take the vaccine.
Pfizer and BioNTech speed up timeline for offering Covid-19 vaccine to placebo volunteers[3]:
> Pfizer and its partner BioNTech plan to offer their Covid-19 vaccine to any clinical trial volunteer who received placebo by March 1, several months earlier than initially planned.
[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2033538
[2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/9691430...
[3]: https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/01/pfizer-and-biontech-spee...
The documents show that the placebo arms were terminated prematurely and the fact that there is agreement that they are still needed.
Here is Moderna[1]. If you look at Table 19,
Vaccine Placebo
Death* 4/15184 (<0.1) 4/15165 (<0.1)
Vaccine Placebo
Deaths 2/21621 (0.0) 4/21631 (0.0)
It's literally in the FDA reports (https://t.co/tIJN9pkE1B?amp=1).
The relevant line highlighted: https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1348080756921303041/p...
Again, I'd be surprised if it turns out they don't save lives, but I think it's a very reasonable position to be skeptical of that claim.
And you believe this based entirely on wildly outdated data that tracks deaths per cohort without tracking infections per cohort, despite this same literature showing a 0.01% breakthrough infection rate and the disease itself causing a higher death rate for 2020 than any recent year in spite of massive lockdown & social isolation efforts that almost eliminated flu?
I don't really understand this position even if I do concede that there exist a couple line items from 2020 that show two similarly sized groups with similar death rates despite being on opposite ends of the vaccinated or not spectrum.
To summarize: Placebo and treatment arms showed no difference in deaths. However, placebo arms were nixed prematurely and therefore we have no controlled and randomized studies comparing individuals who received the vaccine with individuals who did not receive the vaccine. That was the original claim. When you questioned that claim and you were shown evidence that the original claim was correct, you chose not to say "Thank you."
Instead, the downvote bandwagon is out because apparently facts are too much to bear. sigh
I concede it may be the only data comparing death rates in two randomly selected groups, but I completely contest that I "[was] shown evidence that the original claim was correct". I came into this thread to argue whether "these vaccines had saved lives", and a point we used to as a litmus test for that was if "death rates [due to COVID] differed in proportion between a fully-vaccinated population vs. a partially or unvaccinated population".
Therefore, if you were to show evidence that the original claim was correct, you would prove that litmus test. Instead, two data points were provided: a Moderna study where 4/~15k people died in both a vaccinated and placebo population, and a Pfizer study where 2 vaccinated died and 4 placebo died in a population of 20k. In the Pfizer case, it is especially unclear to me these deaths are related to COVID at all in either population [1];
I certainly have conceded this is a piece of evidence towards your argument, but I continue to believe the onus of "proof" in this case continues to fall to you, as multiple large pieces of evidence point to drastically better outcomes when infected as a fully vaccinated person vs. an unvaccinated, alongside other pieces of evidence showing reduced transmission to and from infected individuals. Therefore given the high infection and relatively significant mortality of the disease we already have these attributes to tell us that as time goes forwards it is virtually guaranteed that "deaths in unvaccinated populations will rise to a level proportionate to IFR and population size", while that outcome seems not true for vaccinated populations. Therefore it seems clear the null hypothesis is that the vaccine saves lives, because it would defy our intuition and known population effects were that to be false. Therefore two data points on small populations in the relatively distant past without associated mechanisms are not enough to prove the original claim correct without significant amounts of further evidence.
I also concede that perhaps in some sense these studies should have continued, and that it may be easy to take this discontinuation as a signal of dubious value of the vaccines; I personally hold that given the other data points at hand they became completely unnecessary and don't show anything statistically significant at all talking about total death counts on the order of 10.
The majority of the general population is getting vaccinated. I seriously doubt that there are disproportionately large numbers of vaccine holdouts working in positions at Google that are correlated with being highly educated.
It's more likely that these policies will be well-received by Google employees who don't want to be exposed to an extremely risky virus that is known to be highly contagious but easily stopped with a simple vaccine.
"and uncontroversial"
Morgan Stanley de facto did. Vaccination requires to enter the office. Office work required to keep job.
I’m sure there will be a job market for those who refuse to get vaccinated in low-density population centres.
It's illegal in many countries
So is taking a selfie with the Buddha. This is a bad metric for reasonableness.
Vaccination as a condition of employment probably is (especially with an EUA vaccine); vaccination as a condition of in-office work with continued permission for remote work...seems less likely to be.
But goog isn't going to fire a meaningful number of devs over it.
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
Not necessarily. You would have the employee represent and warrant to it. If they lie and it causes a problem down the road, they’re clearly liable, that’s fraudulent misrepresentation and the company is in the clear.
Is anybody proposing vaccine requirements for remote-only workers? The announcement this thread is based on literally carves out this exception.
I agree with this. I don't believe every employer has the obligation to support this choice. WFH has been largely normalised--if it's a requirement for someone, they can find their place.
I suppose they have the moral right. But if they get infected, the costs are on them. If they get others infected, their costs are on them. And of course, fraudulent misrepresentation and all that.
Drugs (per drug policy/theory) might affect work performance, and drug tests can be specified as a condition of employment.
Drug tests require information about the contents of your bodily fluids.
Unvaccinated COVID-19 infection is a health threat to on-site employees, and it is in the best interest of every employer to minimize this occurrence by keeping unvaccinated employees away from everyone else.