With the exception of healthcare I don't think a lot of companies have mandated vaccines. My wife works in healthcare and there was a tuberculosis shot mandate for specific jobs at her hospital. There was a flu shot mandate of sorts, but it was tied to a small bonus.

You can't point to a small sector that has mandates and say it wouldn't be a significant change if suddenly 100% of all workers everywhere were subjected to it.

Millions of people in various sectors outside healthcare (by the way, since when is healthcare a "small sector"?) have had vaccines required as a condition of employment. , mostly people with plenty of risk like teachers, the military and some people working in the travel industry, but this is not always the case. I was required to get the flu shot (or an exemption) in my last job at an electrical engineering firm.

On a broader note, I think (coming from the US) workers should have stronger protections against being fired, but everyone I've personally talked to who does not believe your employer should be able to fire you for not getting a vaccine is also opposed to "state controlled employment" or almost anything else that exerts control over the employer-employee relationship. You can be fired for almost any reason in the US, being fired for not getting a vaccine does not seem any worse to me than being fired for any number of awful yet totally legal reasons.

As a counterpoint, when I worked for a private university (unrelated to healthcare) I was required to have up-to-date vaccinations. I was also not allowed to smoke on campus.

These kinds of workplace safety rules may be more common than you think.

Any business doing work with the US government will have to mandate vaccines.

My employer already went this route, something about a fed mandate for their contractors... and we have a lot of those. They extended it to everyone lol

Should companies also require their employees not be overweight because they are less likely to miss work due to illness?

I don't think weight is a protected category, so yes this is fine. For example insurers will discriminate based on weight. The military discriminates based on weight. Hooters discriminates based on weight. Etc.

Well I hope we don't end up in such a world. Even if I personally won't be affected negatively. Sounds incredibly distopian.

You already do. Just because nobody writes an articles talking about how they try to avoid hiring overweight people doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Or to be sterilised so they can't get pregnant or make their partner pregnant. Having kids leads to missing work after all.

An employment policy interfering with employee pregnancy, in particular, is illegal (but only because it was explicitly made so in 1978 - https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/pregnancy-discrimination-act-1...).

In general, when an employment discrimination is not specifically forbidden via the Civil Rights Act (or interpreted as equivalent to something explicitly forbidden by the Court), it is legal to discriminate based on it in the United States. Beyond that, the Court and the legislature are (from a political philosophy standpoint) generally willing to let individual employees and employers (or employers and unions) hash out the messy details.

> Companies are requiring the vaccine because they make employees less likely to miss work due to illness.

Then if I don't want to get a vaccine, I'll sign an agreement that if I get sick and miss work, I don't get paid, and that's the end of it.

When I miss work, it costs the company much more than my salary. Otherwise what would be the point of hiring me, if I cost exactly as much as what the value I bring to the company?

And that's not even accounting for the fact that if you get sick, you might infect others in your company.

That’s not how infectious diseases work. You can be getting other people sick. Vaccines aren’t 100% effective so prolonged exposure in indoor spaces increases chances. Some people also are immuno compromised and can’t be vaccinated so you’d be putting them at risk too. Are you going to start paying for their sick time too and signing away that you’re personally liable for deaths?

> You can be getting other people sick

You must be missing the part that vaccinated people transmit the virus just the same. This is not a sterilizing vaccine we are dealing with.

That's not boolean: vaccinated individuals transmit _less_ than the unvaccinated. It's not as good as we'd like but it's better than doing nothing and given how quick, easy, and cheap vaccines are it's like mandating seatbelt usage even if you know that some people will still be injured.

Not for a while now.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

"In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated)."

No difference in infectiousness. And with it, no logical justification for mandates. But this is Google and factions within it will certainly not give up a chance to get rid of what remains of the conservative/libertarian part of their workforce.

That's not incompatible with my point: vaccines are not 100% protection, as medical professional warned us about since before the vaccines were deployed. Household transmission is the worst-case scenario because you're talking about very long periods of unmasked shared airspace, often with poor ventilation, and close contact.

For an employer, this tells you that you can't rely on one thing to prevent spread but the combination of masks, vaccination, air filtration, etc. remains effective.

There's a substantive difference between none and "not 100%". Medical professionals didn't warn anyone about zero effectiveness < 12 months after deployment. They said, repeatedly, that vaccines were 95% effective and anyone who had any concerns about the trials were just crazy and unscientific.

Probably hospitals and care homes are actually the worst-case scenarios for viral transmission because they're full of people who are already sick or have weak immune systems.

You've ignored the point about illogicality completely.

> transmit _less_ than the unvaccinated.

you will have to come with a citation needed to make that claim. I have seen studies showing exactly the opposite of what you claim.

You also have to factor the social aspect. Vaccinated people, thinking they are protected, are way less careful now and therefore have a higher propensity to transmit the virus.

It's also not how other workplace safety rules work. You can't just sign a waiver allowing you to go without a hard hat on a construction job. Vaccination during a raging deadly pandemic seems to fall squarely in the "workplace safety" category, like banning smoking, which few people seem to have a problem with. Employers have a responsibility to take steps to ensure their place of work is not hazardous.

> That’s not how infectious diseases work. You can be getting other people sick.

That's not how vaccines against COVID-19 work. They diminish the risk of severe illness and death, not transmission rates.

I keep hearing this in this thread but I don’t follow.

> Based on evidence from clinical trials, in people ages 18 years and older, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.

If you’re prevent infection, aren’t you effectively reducing the R0 by definition? How is the vaccine making it harder to infect not reduce transmission rates?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...

Yes, these are the original data from clinical studies. Now, in real life, a few months later the efficiency has dwindled considerably [0]:

> Reports of waning vaccine-induced immunity against COVID-19 have begun to surface. With that, the comparable long-term protection conferred by previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear.

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

"Remains unclear" is very different from "no impact on transmission rates". Here's the follow-up paper from the same group [1]

> These results suggest that the vaccine is initially effective in reducing infectiousness of breakthrough infections even with the Delta variant, and that while this protectiveness effect declines with time it can be restored, at least temporarily, with a booster vaccine.

The paper you're looking at is analyzing waning immunity against the Delta variant.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.29.21262798v...

> "Remains unclear" is very different from "no impact on transmission rates".

Well, at least within households[0]:

> Research reveals fully vaccinated people are just as likely to pass virus on to those they share a home with

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/covid-vaccinat...

The first sentence of the article is that it's about "People who are fully vaccinated against Covid yet catch the virus". If the vaccines don't lower P(transmission|infection) but do lower P(infection), then they lower P(infection & transmission) (because that's the product of those two).

Are immunocompromised people exempt from the mandate? If they're working next to anybody, vaccinated or not, they're at risk of getting sick.

New rule: every googler who works near immunocompromised coworkers has to wear a mask.

The rule is likely that you have to keep wearing a mask indoors regardless of your vaccination status.

That covers you but what about the members of staff who actually have a genuine reason for not receiving the vaccine? Peter in ops recently received a double lung transplant and no longer has a functioning immune system. Are you prepared to also sign an agreement barring yourself from ever walking into one of our offices or attending social gatherings?

If Peter in ops has no immune system, he will get sick from non-COVID viruses or diseases regardless of what is done by other people. In that hypothetical situation it would be him who shouldn't go to an office, not other people.

I'm not sure why you immediately assume this is hypothetical. I know a couple people in similar situations. They exist and are not so uncommon as to assume the OP is making it up.

It's also not the doom scenario you describe. Yes they have to take extra precautions, and yes the people around then have to make a point to not be around when they are sick, but with a little consideration plenty of people with highly compromised immune systems live meaningful lives.

People with compromised immune systems need the shot even more

Which just leads to employees coming while sick, which is a pretty bad non-solution.