Lurker > MasterZeldaGuy

CyricZ posted...

And being their parent, would you attempt to correct your child on this?

That's the point I'm making. As a person responsible for another person's life, you owe it to them to give them the best information and direction they can get for their own decisions, and if you knew they were making poor decisions, resort to discipline when all else fails.

OSHA regulates your employer, not you. Unless you have a controlling stake in your place of business, believing you will shoulder these regulatory burdens is fallacious.

So in that sense, your employer is the parent and responsible for your health and safety while present at the workplace, and that includes making sure you don't willfully go against their safety policies. Doing so can result in disciplinary action up to and including termination, and that's true of every company in the US that OSHA applies to.

Unfortunately for your argument, the best you can do is present a scenario which I honestly don't believe is likely. I personally work at a firm that required the vaccine when the first doses were coming out back in early 2021. Everyone took it. They even had the carrot of having a big barbecue once everyone's vaccination was complete.

I don't feel this concern of people walking out and causing your own work to pile up holds.

As their parent, I can only do so much. At some point the burden of responsibility falls on them. If my kids were meth addicts or liked BASE jumping I would do everything in my power to get them to stop. But at the end of the day, short of restraining them, the decision is ultimately theirs. Id feel like a failure of a parent to be sure, but Im sure whatever therapist I ended up going to would tell me it wasnt my fault and that I did all that I could.

Now if youre trying to liken the government to being a parent, Id have to disagree with the premise, since being a parent doesnt come with monetary rewards for choosing oil over renewable or being in the pocket of a pharmaceutical company with a ceo that says we wont be free from COVID with less than 6 booster shots of a vaccine that his company produces.

Im sorry for not being more exact with my words, Im aware OSHA controls my employer and not me. Ultimately, though, whatever rules OSHA makes, my employer is forced to enforce on me, whether I like them or not.

As for you doubting whether people would quit or not, I cant be certain that would be the case, just as you cant be certain they wouldnt. Sure, people didnt quit en masse at your place of employment, but you dont necessarily work in a red state as a welder/spray painter/other blue collar job where people would do anything to keep the government out of their lives. And lets be honest, at least half the population is dumb as fuck and many of them actively make choices that run contrary to their best interests. Im honestly shocked you think so highly of people. Ive certainly seen people quit their jobs over less principled, hot button issue, stances.

thronedfire2 posted...

Testing requirements arent there to force people to get vaccinated, they exist so a business can do contract tracing and make sure infected people arent working.

I work in healthcare where the vaccine is mandatory but we still get tested every week because its the smart thing to do. When omicron was really bad and we were having an outbreak I was getting tested four times every week.

My dad works in health care so Im familiar with their practices and agree with them because they make sense in that setting. But my wife works for a company that employs 10k+ people. While they could absolutely afford all the costs associated with the testing requirements, you and I both know that a company that large is just going to force the employees to get vaccinated as the shareholders/execs wouldnt want to use their profits to cover said costs. And if little ol me can think of that, you can bet the people whose job it is to make these rules thought of it too.

CyricZ posted...

Yes this is the burden of compliance with regulations. For the goal of worker safety. Which is what OSHA was created for.

I didn't ask about your wife's parents, or any other relative in general.

I asked about your children.

And there's a reason.

Sorry, I think I misunderstood the point you were getting at.

If my kid was old enough to make their own medical decisions, chose not get vaccinated, ended up getting it, needed to go to the hospital, but was turned away due to their vaccination status, I would be upset at my child for making a foolish decision, not at the system for not forcing a medical decision on my child.

Osha can control what I do while at work, not while outside of it. They can enforce masks, cleaning, distancing and all that, but while those things can be discarded once off the premises, the vaccine cant. And again, while they offer an alternative, its a burdensome alternative thats only there to try to force vaccinations anyway.

I wouldnt be angry enough to quit on the spot if my employer did force vaccinations, but I realize that not everyone will think the same way as I do. And if other people did start choosing to quit and I was forced to take on more responsibilities because of it, you better believe Id be trying to find other employment.

CyricZ posted...

No that's not what the ETS was for. Reminder here:

https://www.osha.gov/news/newsreleases/national/11042021

Companies had the option for a mandatory vaccination policy or a combination vaccination and regular testing policy.

As has been talked about in this topic, this is a selfish attitude that goes against why people are in medical care in the first place.

To try to frame this in a way that hits more close to home, if one of your children refused the vaccine on personal grounds, would you accept that and leave them to die if they got infected?

When I said essentially fining them, I meant through the cost of time, needing to pay people to administer tests, testing materials, etc. They were essentially told that if the individual company didnt make vaccination mandatory that the company would be burdened with a whole slew of hoops to jump through. Kind of like changing the legal drinking age. Sure it wasnt a legally enforceable federal law, but by taking away millions in tax dollars, they ultimately got what they wanted anyway.

And to answer your hypothetical, my wifes parents refuse to get vaccinated. Theyre both in higher risk categories, yet went on some trip with other unvaccinated people. Her mom got covid and ended up going to the hospital for it. My wife said while she didnt want her mom to die, it would serve her right and maybe convince others in her family to take it more seriously. I agree with my wife. All we can do is try to show them the error of their ways. We would be devastated, but ultimately I dont want to take away someone elses freedom of choice just to make myself feel better.

Giant_Aspirin posted...

i feel like we're just going round in circles at this point. i've addressed why vaccine mandates help everyone, primarily due to reducing load on health care systems.

To be honest, if theyre not vaccinated and they start clogging hospitals and preventing other people who didnt make a conscious choice to be where they are from getting necessary medical care, fuck em.

CyricZ posted...

This "should" of yours hasn't worked, as the recent death numbers have shown.

That was never its intention. It was to mitigate that risk by reducing the potential exposure people had.

What's your opposition to last year's OSHA ETS?

My only problem with it was that it was essentially fining companies that didnt require vaccines. It was better than a straight mandate, but not by much. Truthfully, though, I didn't follow it too closely because my wife is in HR for a large company so if theres a big policy change I hear about it from someone experiencing it firsthand.

As far as death numbers go, the vast majority are unvaccinated, correct? Sounds to me like theyre making the choice that the risks didnt outweigh the benefits, which is the choice I think everyone should have. And to be frank, if you choose to not get vaccinated and end up dying, thats on you. You also should be at the bottom of the list for medical care.

Giant_Aspirin posted...

even if the variants are "inevitable", we should still do everything we reasonably can to prevent or delay them from happening.

that argument is like saying you're going to refuse any and all medical care because we're all gonna die eventually. "Welp. there's no point in medical care because death is an inevitability"

Its more saying that I want to make the choice for myself whether I get the medical care to prevent my death.

If youre at risk of death from catching Covid and arent willing to accept the risk, you shouldnt be putting yourself in situations where you might catch it. Even if everyone that couldve gotten the delta vaccine in the US did, it was still already out there spreading for months before the vaccine tailored to that variant was available. Then omicron caught on and its not going to be until March that we have vaccines available for it. We likely wont ever get ahead of the mutations, so the people at risk are going to be perpetually at risk, regardless of how vaccinated the country is. Theres also the fact that even if youre fully vaccinated, you can still get it and spread it.

Issuing mandates wont change the fact that people who are at risk will continue to be at risk, which seems to be the main issue a mandate is trying address. If a mandate cant even accomplish its main goal, whats the point of having a mandate to begin with. At some point, people are just going to need to accept that life now has a new risk and that only they can decide what risks theyre willing to tolerate, as unfortunate as it is.

And before Im accused of being anti vax, my wife, children that are old enough, and I are all vaccinated and boostered.

CyricZ posted...

Thus the discussion about mandates.

Sure. The problem with with vaccine is that, unlike other vaccines like MMR, tdap, etc., its trying to prevent a disease that has shown be fairly mutagenic. That makes it difficult to get out in front of a new dominant strain before its caught on here.

I find it hard to support a mandate for something that appears to be headed for yearly variants like the regular flu. Especially when reports come out that they missed hard on vaccinating against the main flu variant this year.

Giant_Aspirin posted...

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/omicron-variant.html

sorry. the stance is still that vaccines are our best protection against covid, particuarly against preventing new variants.

Just to be clear, I dont disagree with any of that, though until the entire world is vaccinated or the US restricts travel into the country based on vaccination status and people here get the vaccine, variants are an inevitability.

Giant_Aspirin posted...

it absolutely does lower transmission rates. and while it doesn't "stop the illness", it significantly reduces the likelihood of the infection being bad. get the fuck out of here with your misinformation.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-variant.html?

That was updated 6 months ago. I thought we agreed that as scientists learn more theyre able to change their stances on previously held notions.

That also refers to a now non dominant strain.

ChopinList posted...

Wow. So many people got called anti-vaxers for saying that.

In this very topic, no less.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/cdc-director-covid-vaccines-cant-prevent-transmission-anymore/ar-AASDndg