Not at all. Vaccine mandates date back to George Washington, if you look at it the right way.

I grew up overseas, and got poked on a regular.

Every time I traveled, we had to have "our shots."

These were 100% mandated by the country we were coming to. Since my "home base" was in Africa, we had some fun bugs, and I had to get a whole battery of shots.

I have several vaccination scars on my body, and I developed a lifelong fear of needles, as a result of the giant horse needles they used for the thick sludge they'd jab me with (which left me feeling like I'd lost a fistfight with a gorilla).

When I got my COVID vaccination shots, I didn't even feel it, as the needle was so tiny.

Just because there is precedent doesn’t mean it’s not overreach.

How'd you arrive at that being the key demographic for the unvaccinated?

Isn't this very different, though?

Historically, mandated vaccines weren't mandated before we knew they were safe longer-term. We're still awaiting FDA approval for a majority of the available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in the US, yet many folks would be mandated to receive one.

Many folks will see this as being mandated to be a test subject, which is why there has been substantial legal pushback against the mandate less than 24 hours after Biden announced it.

Always interesting to ask “who would benefit from this most” and that would be………… Pfizer! Their competitors can’t sell vaccines if they’re too late!

George Washington carried out an inoculation campaign against the wishes of the continental congress.

I'm not in the US so I can't speak for y'all, but the regulation isn't a bad thing.

While you might not be affected personally, because you've been successful, it's better for the government to have your back than it is to entrust it to the free market. There's a hell of a lot of misery because the gov. doesn't step in enough, doesn't take care of its citizens.

This was learned the hard way in 1929 and, for whatever reason, was quickly forgotten.

That said, I can see why it's undesirable to some.

I don't see how the gov't respond to an economical crisis has anything to do with modern authoritarianism. Regulation without oversight and checks and balances does lead to tiranny, more often than it doesn't

Of course, but I'd contend that regulation without oversight/checks and balances is tautological. Regulation in and of itself is the oversight, or the check and balance, and that responsibility is delegated to a specialised agency or department (that has a longer term scope than a single election cycle) rather than being directly managed by the administration in office at the time.

An authoritarian regime isn't going to spin up a bureaucracy like that to do regulation-without-oversight, it's just going to lower its boot onto the population's collective face. You can hardly call that regulation.

Perhaps we're just debating semantics here, but I think there's a distinction between regulating corporate behaviour (you must do X Y Z if you want to run a business in this country, for reasons A B C) and introducing a totalitarian regime (you must do X Y Z because I said so).

Absolutely not.

The US legislature has the right to regulate commerce in the US according to the US Constitution. Healthcare of workers and the overall impact of covid are two things directly affecting the economy.

The legislature already has the former of these covered by the creation of OSHA in the 1970s. OSHA is a regulatory agency under the Department of Labor, which is part of the executive cabinet.

The executive is now using these powers granted by the legislature to ensure workers are protected in their work environments.

How is this different from requiring hard hats? A hard hat won’t save you from getting a cut on your head from a dropped hammer but it will save you from having it break your head in two. Should OSHA stop requiring PPE?

A hard hat isn't a medical procedure. Some die from this vaccine.

I weighed up the options and decided it was by far the lower risk option.

I think people need to be free to make that choice.

Freedom is so valuable.

Great point, thank you for letting me know a hard hat isn't a medical procedure. If my aunt had wheels, she'd be a tea cart. I'm sure I can find someone who died BECAUSE they were wearing protective head PPE - a hat strap got caught and strangled them, whatever.

The more important point that you ignore is people are horrible at weighing relative risk. You're obviously intelligent and aware of the biases inherent in judging vaccination risk. I'm sure you know crossing the street is far more risky. There is a consistent pattern of unvaccinated, dying covid patients claiming they underestimated the risk of the illness and wish they had gotten vaccinated. People are literally unable to make that choice for themselves. There's proof.

What's the point of "freedom" if we're all stuck in our houses hiding from variant after variant because we refuse to acknowledge that our government needs to make a decision that will save lives [1] when our actual survival is at risk.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/covid-19-vaccines-sav...

I don't think people shouldn't be educated and encouraged to get this vaccine. I don't think the government should stay out of that.

I believe these are coercive tactics and the government should avoid coercion at all costs.

Right. What you want is anarchy.

No I think there are many times when the government must use coercion. I don't think this is one of them.

Has anyone died from Pfizer? I’ve seen cases of heart inflammation, but I haven’t heard of any deaths.

We have had one death in NZ.

We're a small population so it's significant.

https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/126225003/...

Yeah, I suppose deaths are always possible from anything. You could give out a million lollipops and someone would choke. Someone has probably had an infection just from the needle itself.

VAERS shows several thousand have died. Some estimate 45k based on a Harvard study on VAERS indicating a % that goes unreported.

“The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database contains information on *unverified* reports of adverse events (illnesses, health problems and/or symptoms) following immunization with US-licensed vaccines. *Reports are accepted from anyone*…”

Ignoring that VAERS is unverified data, and taking that 45k as "all these people died directly due to the vaccine", it's still only 45k out of 378M doses administered - 0.012%.

(For comparison, 2021 has 31k gun deaths[1] through September and 21.5k road deaths through the first 6 months.)

[1] https://www.gunviolencearchive.org [2] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/prelimina...

You’re going off topic. It is just a tool to track data. But here they are admitting that it suffers from underreporting. https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html

It also says "The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event."

Also, on the download page, "However, in general coding terms in VAERS do not change based on the information received during the follow-up process. VAERS data should be used with caution as numbers and conditions do not reflect data collected during follow-up."

Which is just different ways of saying "this data is probably unreliable", no?

That's interesting, my very official competing VAERS shows that the vaccine has caused several thousand people to have spontaneously come into existence! I welcome you to submit your data, as I accept any reports from anyone regardless of political axe to grind.

Please, cite your source.

Deaths on VAERs doesn't meant it was caused by COVID (I'm sure you're aware of this but the grandparent poster was probably not

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaers-9318/fact-ch...

Indeed. Baselining is important, even if an estimate.

Indeed. You should read some of these reports. It sounds like you haven’t. If someone gets the vaccine and dies the next day, sure it is very possible it is not the cause. But it should be reported. And when many people have the same symptoms after a vaccine, it becomes a common side effect.

I have read them -- and we are in complete agreement.

Here is some great information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfFeocgSKvU

From what others are saying, it's the unknown long term effects that are the difference.

What if, knowing what we do now about it, OSHA required asbestos-lined jackets?

Asbestos fire-proofing made a substantial difference. We did not - in fact - go from "Let's make things fire-proof with asbestos" to "Eh, asbestos is bad, guess everything will burn down instead" but instead moved to fire-proofing with new materials in countries that could afford to do that.

Lots of older buildings have asbestos that's preventing fires and won't cause noticeable harm so long as it's undisturbed. The fibres are a problem, but a sheet of material under a layer of plaster isn't breaking off fibres that can get into your lungs. If your job is to rip out plaster and re-model buildings then that's a huge problem, but if you just live in a building you're getting much more benefit from it not catching fire than you'd get from very minutely reducing your risk of lung damage from asbestos.

In fact even for a brand new building, although it's banned in some places, "Let's use asbestos" makes more sense than "Eh, so what if it burns down and a few dozen people die", so if those are the available choices you should go with asbestos.

So it is with the available COVID-19 vaccines. SARS-CoV-2 is very dangerous and, outside of New Zealand and a handful of Pacific islands, widespread, so you're just way more likely to get very sick or die as a result of not being vaccinated than suffer a serious side effect, known or hypothetical.

I am required to wear (chemical-infused) flame retardant clothing on oil and gas wells. Some people have to work despite the chemicals rubbing their skin all day.

Even if it’s overreach and struck down, it still will be yet another nudge for employers to have a mandate on their own.

I’m not so inclined to agree at this stage, and I’m a hawk when it comes to this kind of thing. (A few days ago I was downvoted for criticizing the Colorado pay transparency law as an overreach).

This is certainly the best way to keep workers safe during a pandemic and given the information we have on the Pfizer vaccine — billions of doses given, 1.5 years of watching for adverse long term effects, full FDA approval — this move strikes me as appropriate for OSHA. OSHA requirements are supposed to be aggressively protective of the worker.