Workers have the right not to be vaccinated, and employers have the right not to employ unvaccinated people. Perhaps these workers can find work with employers who don’t care whether their employees are vaccinated. If they can’t, too bad for them.
I believe that is what the broad federal mandate is supposed to address - if every employer has a mandate then there is really no where to go, and employees will grudgingly get vaccinated and stay-put, and not create staffing shortages. We’ll see if it works out that way.
I am pro vaccine, my family is vaxxed, and I think it’s crazy to not get vaccinated.
That said… I was neutral on the mandate at first, but now I’m opposed. It’s become too authoritarian, too punitive, and it’s not working. If anything, it’s creating an even more virulent anti-vax movement. Also, it’s going to exacerbate the economic problems that are growing by the day.
That said, I’ll make an exception: I’d fire every Goddamn teacher who demands that children be vaccinated (who need it the least and are most at risk of side-effects) but refuse to be vaccinated themselves. I find that attitude absolutely disgusting. They should be ashamed of themselves.
The same goes for any other union that has carved themselves an exception from vaccinatiin while demanding everyone else be vaccinated. Screw them.
Not working? It’s motivated millions to get vaccinated. That means it’s working.
Yeah, that line from Sam is just false. In NY, for example, only a handful of cops ended up staying unvaccinated.
I know it’s the oddballs and the crazies that make the news, but just to let you know: I know a LOT of teachers and not a single one refused to be vaccinated.
Right, there was hardly an anti-vax movement before the mandates. It’s been 2/3 of a year and more since the vaccines became available, so let’s not pretend these people were right on the verge of getting vaccinated only the evil mandaters stopped them.
While mandates have caused people to get vaccinated, that’s a side benefit. They are to protect co-workers and the public first.
Talk about a lazy argument-no matter what is done, that will be used as the excuse people use to oppose vaccination. 
SF police department just laid off 70 employees for failure to comply, 54 of them cops. Out of 2,747 employees. 97.5% are now vaccinated vs. 76% of the general population in San Francisco. Of 35,000 city employees overall 98% are now vaccinated, compelled or voluntary (most were voluntary, but even a month ago there were many holdouts).
Call hard mandates draconian, authoritarian, paternalistic - I am not entirely dismissive of those arguments as pro-vaccine as I am. Slightly dismissive, but not entirely 
. But ineffective they are not. At least in major urban centers cold hard economics is over-riding principles (when such exist and it not just bullshit stubbornness, determined ignorance and blinkered ideology).
Just curious, but does that include those who either switched to another police force or retired? I know from my own experience that layoffs aren’t the only thing going on, and a lot of police forces are poaching from each other just because of the retirements, not even taking into account Covid mandates (we have them for first responders where I work, but most of the losses are due to folks going to a different agency or retiring at this point).
Agree. My wife survived a brutal cancer battle through a brutal chemo protocol (the McGrath protocol) in Nova Scotia 10 years ago. If this was happening now, in Alberta or Saskatchewan, she might not survive thanks to anti-vaxxers.
Possibly not. The SFPD website reports 2,117 filled positions as of October 5, 2021. The report a day ago says 2,036 were fully vaccinated, 13 were partially vaccinated (and may cease to be laid off if they get a second shot), 41 were unvaccinated. That’s a total 2,090, leaving a discrepancy of 27. Those might be your retired/quite between now and then. I suppose there might be more reaching back to early August when the union first started opposing the new mandate.
I doubt it is a huge number though for realistic reasons.
Do you think the anti-vaxxers would have taken the vaccine any day now if not for the mandates?
Like I know that in the right-wing media the idea that “I would have taken the vaccine if the gov’t had just asked nicely, but I won’t because they mandate it” is circulating. But this is total BS, right? Like, the gov’t did ask. For months and months and months and months and months and months, and response was:
- The vaccine is poison!
- It isn’t a pandemic it is a plandemic! COVID is fake.
- I have an immune system/God will save me.
- It is just a bad flu. It will be over any day now/when it gets warm/in April/etc.
- But but but the economy!
- The left-wing is secretly trying to kill the right-wing by promoting a vaccine that they know will save people because they know we won’t take it if they promote it! Those scheming BASTARDS!
- Don’t take an experimental, unproven vaccine. Instead take hydrocholoquile/invermictin/etc. that has been unproven to prevent/cure COVID.
What was the gov’t to do exactly? Just shrug their arms and go, oh well, I guess there’s nothing we can do but let our ICUs continue to run at 150% capacity until enough people die that we have sufficient capacity?
As other posters have pointed out, that depends on your definition of “working”. Vax mandates have in fact prompted millions of unvaccinated people to get vaccinated. If the expectation of the mandates is to substantially increase vaccination rates, then they’re working pretty good.
If, on the other hand, the expectation of the mandates is to persuade paranoid and ignorant anti-vax covidiots to stop opposing vaccination, then they’re not working well at all. But I think that would be a highly unrealistic expectation, and I don’t think that that’s what the mandates were implemented to do.
I don’t think anything seems likely to persuade paranoid and ignorant anti-vax covidiots to stop opposing vaccination. Hell, Donald Trump, the guy that many of the covidiots proclaim their undying fealty to, explicitly recommended getting vaccinated, and he got booed for it.
The anti-vax covidiots are probably just going to go on grumbling about the annual COVID shots for each year’s mutant strains that their stupid obstructionism will have helped make necessary, and refusing to get them, and consequently dying and infecting other people and encouraging the development of new strains of COVID. Hopefully at a somewhat diminishing rate, but I don’t see a path to large-scale self-awareness and reality recognition for these people.
Successfully pressuring millions of them to get vaccinated, even though they don’t want to, in order not to lose their jobs is a very poor second-best outcome, but it looks like the best outcome there’s any realistic chance of getting.
But by all means, Sam, if you can figure out a better way to get millions of vax-resistant covidiots to actually change their minds on their stubborn stupidity about vaccine resistance, bring it on and I’ll happily switch to supporting that instead of vaccine mandates.
If there are enough mandates from enough employers, then it will work really effectively. Where I am, you must be vaccinated to work in health care, local government, provincial government, airlines, banking, insurance, most retail (many signs in stores saying “all our employees vaccinated for our customers safety), police, fire, post secondary, etc.
So sure, quit your job so you are not “forced” to be vaccinated. That is your right. However, you are now unemployable. That is your consequence. Enjoy the poverty you chose.
A friend of mine recently was lamenting the New York MTA recently adding a vaccine mandate for the death benefit if someone dies of COVID-19. He was going on about how unfair it was, etc (probably heard about it on Faux News). A 2 minute google search brought me to the full detail - the MTA union got the COVID death benefit added at the start of the pandemic ($500K), since their workers were front-line, but added the vax mandate this last June (only families of vaccinated employees who die of COVID are now eligible), when vaccinations were already widely available. Thus, the MTA was simply limiting their risk at this point, and avoiding and avoidable expense. “Oh, that’s unfair! Unconstitutional!”.
I’d be in favor of an extremely stringent vaccine mandate - not only for COVID19, but for any disease for which we have an effective and safe vaccine. You don’t get to be exempt for any reason other than medical, and crack down on doctors giving exemptions without valid reasons.
Anyone not vaccinated is prohibited from being in public places, or visiting private places that are open to the public, or places of employment (where literally anyone is employed). And just to note, apartment/condominium hallways are considered part of that, so if you live in an apartment, putting a foot outside your door puts you in violation. Thus an unvaccinated person is limited to their own home, homes of those who will tolerate them, and…private clubs that are staffed entirely by members who are not actually employed by the club, I suppose. Going anywhere you can come in contact with members of the public incurs severe fines. And if you do not have a private place that fits the criteria of places you’re not prohibited to be in, then you don’t get to choose to decline vaccines.
If you really don’t want to get vaccinated, then get the hell out of society, as far as I’m concerned. You do not get to interact with other humans that have not explicitly consented to those conditions.
So far, they’ve laid off………wait for it………34 cops for refusing to be vaccinated. To be fair, they are still making a decision on some exemptions so that number may increase a little, but 34 is a really small number relative to the size of the NYPD
If anything, the situation is precisely the opposite; bringing the pandemic under control is the key to economic recovery.
Paul Krugman gets down to brass tacks (paywall):
…The expressed rationale for all this activity is that it’s about protecting freedom. In reality, while there are several reasons for vaccine resistance, politics is a significant driver of the agitation. A successful vaccination campaign could mean a successful Biden administration, and the right is determined to prevent that, no matter how many avoidable deaths result from vaccine sabotage. …
In sum, while my Catholic school education didn’t really take, enough of it stuck for me to recognize a textbook example of license masquerading as freedom (the coinage “freedumb” is often, and appropriately, used for this concept).
If it’s political, explain the redistance in Canada, France, the UK…
People are willing to lose their jobs over this. It’s a lot more than a political statement for many.