> They were fired for cause, namely, insubordination

The idea that you can order someone to perform a medical procedure because they work for you is disguisting.

Where does this end?

Not at all. We require school children to undergo medical procedures before they may participate in city-funded education. The tone of alarm is unwarranted. This is not a slippery slope situation.

> This is not a slippery slope situation.

I think it is. Governments aren't that trustworthy if you ask me.

The paranoia is a bit too late. Emergency powers were established by Congress a century ago, and at least 60 national emergencies have been declared since. In New York State, a state of emergency declaration permits the governor to direct local officials and state agencies, and to suspend state and local law or regulation to facilitate disaster response efforts. If there ever was a slippery slope, it has long since been descended many times.

I am negotiating my life, not the ones of my great-grandparents.

Then you should have been there back in March of 1789. Government is for those who participate, not those who whine about it after the fact. You certainly aren't required to abide by laws or social contract if you don't value the liberties and protections granted by the Constitution and US citizenship.

Were you?

I was in the cafeteria selling smokes.

> Where does it end?

It ends with your survival. Vaccination isn't surgery, it's an extremely minor medical procedure that reduces or eliminates the risk of contracting a disease. During a deadly global pandemic, refusing vaccination is nothing short of suicidal. 97M Americans were infected and more than a million died. There were over 630M cases globally, and over 6.5M died due to COVID. The People have the stronger right to not be infected with COVID by you than your right to be infected. No one ever has any right to spread infection, not even libertarians.

>It ends with your survival. Vaccination isn't surgery, it's an extremely minor medical procedure that reduces or eliminates the risk of contracting a disease. During a deadly global pandemic, refusing vaccination is nothing short of suicidal. 97M Americans were infected and more than a million died. There were over 630M cases globally, and over 6.5M died due to COVID.

Way to dodge the question. Also, I think you're missing the point. I don't think OP or most other anti vax mandate people think that the covid vaccine is a risky procedure, or that the public is better off on net for it. They're against it because it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures.

>No one ever has any right to spread infection, not even libertarians.

You literally do, though. It's not against the law to get on a packed subway while you're sick as a dog, for instance.

> They're against it because it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures.

This is just a part of what is so ridiculous about their objections and reveals ignorance and a misunderstanding of law. The government isn't required to establish precedent here because it is already the law of the land.[1][2][3] That said, precedent has been very well established for a very long time.[4]

[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title50/cha...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Emergencies_Act#Emerg...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Service_Act

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...

> it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures

Does it, though? Just because the government can mandate employees be vaccinated as a condition of continued employment, doesn't mean they can mandate employees be sterilized (for instance). No reasonable person would say the second follows from the first. Law isn't code.

> The People have the stronger right to not be infected with COVID by you than your right to be infected.

The proper branch of government to decide this is Congress passing a law, not each major making it up as they go along.

It is definately distopian for employers to decide anything on this matter -they are not sibject to dempcratic scruitiny.

And there are many methods of reducing covid infection avaliable - installing air purifiers, improving ventillation in schools, Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI).

If situation is so serious, whu are none of those being mandated? Now we know current vaccines give you immunity for like 6 months and new variants appear very rapidly.

> The proper branch of government to decide this is Congress passing a law, not each major making it up as they go along.

Congress did decide this already by passing legislation a century ago granting temporary increased powers to the executive in event of national emergency and its declaration.

> It is definately distopian for employers to decide anything on this matter -they are not sibject to dempcratic scruitiny.

Government employment is already dystopian and private employers can have any requirements they like short of discriminating against religion, race, disability, etc. There are no federal protections for political disposition.

> And there are many methods of reducing covid infection avaliable - installing air purifiers, improving ventillation in schools, Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI).

The virus was already circulating due to unpreparedness and slow reaction by the administration in office. Had we seen a two week stay home order in February, the crisis would likely have been averted, but the executive was overly concerned about the economy, which tanked anyway regardless of putting 300M+ Americans at risk of infection, illness and/or death.

> If situation is so serious, whu are none of those being mandated? Now we know current vaccines give you immunity for like 6 months and new variants appear very rapidly.

Again, COVID was already circulating by late February 2020, and if two vaccinations a year are required from now until the end of time, it is still a very small price to pay, a minor inconvenience at worst with the benefit of increased resistance to infection, severe illness, hospitalization, and/or death.

> private employers can have any requirements they like

The term used was 'insuburdination' - disobeying legitimate command of employer.

If employer can command you to vaccinate, then they can alsi command you to have windom teeth removed. They can command you to tatoo a barcode on your forehead.

False analogy and exaggeration fallacy, as wisdom teeth are neither deadly nor contagious, and requiring vaccinations does not mean they get to require orthodontics. All employers have wisely required their employees get vaccinated, as one sick employee can decimate the whole company and put it out of business. You don't have to comply if you're antisocial and don't care if you get sick and die nor who you take with you, go ahead and revel in your entitlement, but you'll no longer work there while you do it. Employers usually have dress and grooming codes also, this is nothing new, so they may require a haircut, shave, bathing, etc., but none will require a barcode tattooed on your forehead, but even if they did, you could always refuse and quit. There is no problem here other than narcissism, and no employer will require you to be evaluated and treated, but you may avail yourself of the health insurance your employer provides to treat your mental illness and mitigate the obvious issues with ego that strain every relationship in your life.

What happens when a virus comes along that kills at a higher rate, say 35%? You're saying people should be willing to work alongside others when there is a 35% chance of a pandemic level virus killing you because a peer thinks science is dumb?

I think you've gotten your hypothetical scenario a bit scrambled.

Given a safe and effective vaccine, you and your vaccinated coworkers would either not become infected at all or would experience very mild symptoms and be left with supercharged immunity (immunity from your vaccine + immunity from infection). Your dumb, science-hating coworker would suffer much worse symptoms and maybe die (a little over 1 in 3 chance given the 35% fatality you postulate).

Your vaccine, first and foremost, is supposed to protect you.

But with covid that is not at all what we are seeing.

This was especially painfully clear in places with strongly-enforced "vaccine passport" regimes during the period they were in force before being abandoned. The vaccinated spent time with other vaccinated and were infecting and being infected by one another and birthing new, more transmissible vaccine-evading variants of the virus. Vaccine efficacy actual goes negative (i.e. vaccine recipients more susceptible than unvaccinated persons after a few months: "Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron or Delta variants following a two-dose or booster BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccination series: A Danish cohort study" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...) and vaccine recipients are infected and infectious for at least as long as unvaccinated persons (e.g. "Duration of Shedding of Culturable Virus in SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (BA.1) Infection" in NEJM https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35767428/).

A growing number of doctors have threatened to withhold treatment from the unvaccinated, sparking backlash from doctors and bioethicists who say such sentiments violate the Hippocratic Oath. Those critics are even more troubled by the silence from professional organizations tasked with upholding medical ethics.

The mandate should have never existed.

> The mandate should have never existed.

The mandate was legal. What should not have existed is demonstrably false and unsupportable claims from antivaxers and the anti-science and anti-education trend being advanced by radical conservatives. Every single antivaxer and nutty far right-winger have already been vaccinated for rubella, measles, mumps, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, etc., to their health benefit, as by being vaccinated they avoided contracting these diseases. This bizarre idea that refusing vaccinations is a personal right during a global pandemic put everyone at risk, and no one has a right to put everyone at risk of illness and/or death due to personal and unfounded political views. The sad irony is this insane agenda against vaccination, science and education, directly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Republican voters, which would have easily reelected President Trump had they just accepted a harmless vaccine.

Please be careful about spreading misinformation. Vaccines were not widely available until spring of 2021, after the election. Only select few essential healthcare workers were eligible in late 2020. During the 2020 election season opponents of President Trump were the primary spreaders of vaccine skepticism.[1]

[1]: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-press-rel...

Thank you for the correction. the resistance to COVID vaccination coincided with its availability. What was killing Trump supporters was his calling the virus media hype and hosting superspreader events, while he and his wife were among the first vaccinated before he left the White House.

>The mandate was legal.

says who? Another commenter has quoted a part of the decision

>This Court aggress that the Commissioner cannot enact a term of employment on City employees and has exceeded his scope of authority

Nice rant, but as per the ruling [1], I believe it is now scientific and popular concensus that the vaccine barely moves the needle on transmission if at all. At that point, any logic behind mandates vaccinations collapses.

[1] “ Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19”

[citation needed]

According to the CDC, HHS, Johns-Hopkins and every single medical school, hospital and scientific organization in the US, as well as 224M vaccinated US citizens, the COVID vaccines are effective at preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death.

I didn’t claim it wasn’t effective at those things as I’m sure you know. My comment was about effectiveness in reducing infection and transmission.

This is the only logical and “potentially” ethical (in some twisted peoples heads) basis for a vaccine mandate. It has now been totally debunked.

I literally quoted a linked article issued by the NY Supreme Court for your citation.

> My comment was about effectiveness in reducing infection and transmission.

This is not the same as

>>> "Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19"

Being vaccinated does not 100% prevent infection and transmission, but it does reduce the likelihood of infection and transmission by about half. The fact is the vaccines are effective in reducing infection and transmission. Your assertion that "the vaccine barely moves the needle on transmission if at all," is gross exaggeration at best and entirely false at worst. The science of immunology and vaccines is sound and well-established. The risk of adverse effects from vaccines is vanishingly small, while the likely benefit of reduced risk of infection, severity of illness, hospitalization and death is huge.

The COVID vaccines are nothing short of a miracle of modern medicine. The only grave problem here is laymen making uninformed medical decisions based solely on political tribalism and failed political ideologies, evangelizing their logically unsound and medically ignorant position, and refusing to cooperate with the interests of public health while needlessly putting themselves and others at significantly increased chances of infection, severe illness and/or death. This is the very definition of anti-social behavior, placing one's ego and whims above the needs of all others, and not caring whether others get sick, suffer and die.

If I told you that vaccinated persons have been found to shed replication-competent covid virions for about as long as unvaccinated persons and that the protection against infection from the vaccines went negative (i.e. vaccinated persons more susceptible than unvaccinated persons) after a few months and that the viral load reduction effect of the vaccines waned along with their protection, would you claim these facts to be misinformation or would you google for the relevant peer-reviewed papers and surprise yourself (especially when you noticed the dates and realized that these facts have long been known...though not to you)?

It was not debunked and it is not only ethical basis for the mandate (not overloading healthcare providers is also important).

The only thing that was "debunked" were ridiculous statements like "vaccine prevents transmission in 100% of cases".

>So quickly they've forgotten the piles of bodies of COVID victims in NYC.

What are talking about? What piles of bodies?

If you believe that punishing political dissidents is an acceptable way to operate, your just priming your political enemies to become brown shirts.