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United States Government Medicine

More Vaccinations, Less Pushback: America's Vaccine Mandates Are Working, Says Public Health Professor (seattletimes.com) 308

Last month U.S. President Biden issued "a mandate that all companies with more than 100 workers require vaccination or weekly testing," remembers the New York Times, and "also moved to mandate shots for health care workers, federal contractors and a vast majority of federal workers, who could face disciplinary measures if they refuse."

So what happened next? Until now, the biggest unknown about mandating COVID-19 vaccines in workplaces has been whether such requirements would lead to compliance or to significant departures by workers unwilling to get shots — at a time when many places were already facing staffing shortages. So far, a number of early mandates show few indications of large-scale resistance. "Mandates are working," said John Swartzberg, a physician and professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you define 'working' by the percentage of people getting vaccinated and not leaving their jobs in droves."

Unlike other incentives — "prizes, perks, doughnuts, beer, we've seen just about everything offered to get people vaccinated" — mandates are among the few levers that historically have been effective in increasing compliance, said Swartzberg, who has tracked national efforts to increase rates of inoculation...

[T]he pushback has been less dramatic than initially feared. At Houston Methodist Hospital, which mandated vaccines this summer for 25,000 employees, for example, only about 0.6% of employees quit or were fired. Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who is tracking employer mandates, said that, despite their propensity for backlash and litigation, mandates generally increase vaccine compliance because the knowledge that an order is coming has often been enough to prompt workers to seek inoculation before courts even can weigh in. Mandates are becoming more commonplace as several other states have imposed requirements for workers. In New York, Rhode Island, Maine, Oregon and the District of Columbia, health care workers must get vaccinated to remain employed.

The Times's article (original URL here) provides statistics from specific examples:
  • "When Tyson Foods announced Aug. 3 that it would require coronavirus vaccines for all 120,000 of its U.S. employees, less than half of its workforce was inoculated. Nearly two months later, 91% of the company's U.S. workforce is fully vaccinated, said Dr. Claudia Coplein, Tyson's chief medical officer."
  • "In New York, where some 650,000 employees at hospitals and nursing homes were to have received at least one vaccine dose by the start of this week, 92% were in compliance, state officials said. That was up significantly from a week ago, when 82% of the state's nursing home workers and at least 84% of its hospital workers had received at least one dose."
  • "As California's requirement that all health care workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus took effect Thursday, major health systems reported that the mandate had helped boost their vaccination rates to 90% or higher."

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More Vaccinations, Less Pushback: America's Vaccine Mandates Are Working, Says Public Health Professor

Comments Filter:
  • Fewer stupid people = better America.

  • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday October 02, 2021 @02:20PM (#61854245)
    It's not a vaccine "mandate". This is not about FFREEHHDDUMMM, and the use of the word "mandate" gets a lot of peoples blood boiling.

    These are simple if-then statements:

    IF you work for a company that I control, THEN you will be vaccinated ELSE you won't be working for me
    IF you want your kid to go to public school, THEN your kid will be vaccinated.
    IF you walk into a store that requires masks, THEN you will wear a mask ELSE you can be forcibly ejected from the premises.
    IF you choose to homeschool your kid, THEN you are free to keep your kids entirely unvaccinated.
    IF you choose to own your own company, THEN you are free to (require the covid vaccine) OR (only hire unvaccinated people) OR (something in between)

    Get the idea? Freedom cuts BOTH WAYS. I should have no right to push a needle into your arm. Equally true: you should have no right to aggressively spread your COVID to me and my kids. If you don't want the vaccine, fine, you've increased your odds of getting a well-earned Darwin award by a few tenths of a percentage point. That's on you. Just please do your slowly-choking-to-death-routine somewhere far away from me.
    • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday October 02, 2021 @02:37PM (#61854307) Homepage Journal

      In a nutshell, freedom isn't freedom from consequences; it's freedom to choose the consequences you'd prefer to live with.

      • Yes, but with the addition that YOU dont get to force the consequences of your choice, onto ME. You own them, and you have no right to inflict them on others. So, the unvaccinated dont get the right to go where they want, when they want, and cough into the faces of whomever they want.
    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      Here is what I donâ(TM)t understand. Conservatives tell us that we canâ(TM)t get workers because Biden has created a socialist American in which you can make more money off welfare than holding down a job. Conservatives feel that they have to give people an incentive to get a job because it is too easy just to sit home, smoke pot, and let the government checks roll in. So why are mandates working? It would that rational people would use this as an excuse to have a better life on welfare.
    • by mark-t ( 151149 )
      How does the fact that it's unlawful to discriminate against someone because of their religion or a disability stack up to that?
      • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday October 02, 2021 @04:46PM (#61854599)
        A thoughtful question from a conservative. Here's my answer:

        I'm all for disability exemptions. If someone has a real diagnosis, from a real doctor i.e. MD degree, licensed and practicing, that they shouldn't be vaccinated... then, yes, as a society we should be tolerating people with true disabilities and making accommodations for them. But a signature from some random fundamentalist evangelical chiropractor in Florida doesn't count.

        With regards to religious exemptions, I'm quite skeptical. The current conservative movement is ALL about defining everything as a religious issue, so they can do whatever they want. Actually, the current conservative movement is being amazingly LIBERAL about what they consider religion aka anything the feel like. And the US supreme court seems bent on allowing accommodating them. I think they should be careful what they wish for. The same strategy can work for left-wing ideas equally easily, and power swings back and forth in this country. I could see a future where some religion defines socialism as a religious imperative. Do we accommodate them? I'd prefer to keep religious exemptions quite constrained. Some people are pacifist because the bible says "thou shalt not kill". That's pretty clear cut. But there's nowhere in the bible where "and so Jesus sayeth thou shalt not partake of m-RNA vaccines for they are the work of evil so god speaketh hallelujah". Sorry, absolutely nothing in the bible about vaccines. No. No religious exemption for this topic.
        • Every religion *already* says to take care of the less fortunate.

        • by mark-t ( 151149 )
          In the bible itself, no. Not all religions use the bible, however. And there are some whose teachings could be interpreted to prohibit things such as accepting a vaccination.
          • The Old Testament can be warped and twisted in all manner of different ways. For example:

            http://www.clinlabnavigator.co... [clinlabnavigator.com]

            You can't give Jehovah's Witnesses blood transfusions. There are a few sects of Christianity that have used the same passages - and others - as a reason not to accept injections of any kind, including vaccines. Still other Christians obsess over whether fetal stem cells harvested from aborted fetuses were used in the production of a vaccine.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by colonslash ( 544210 )
      There have been 478 [cdc.gov] covid related deaths (probably all with comorbidities) for 0-17 year olds in the US, out of about 73M, which is about 7 in a million; vaccinating children is overkill. Even if you believe the vaccines are completely safe and will not have any unforeseen longterm issues, those vaccines could be used better in other parts of the world.
      • Kids are a huge transmission vector though, and were long before COVID was a thing.

        Schools and public transit, where contagions go to be fruitful and multiply.
        • And? Finish the thought.

          • by tepples ( 727027 )

            Even though children are not as vulnerable to severe COVID-19 as older people, vaccinating children on their 12th birthday is important to slow the transmission route of unvaccinated child to unvaccinated classmate to vulnerable grandparent.

          • And? Finish the thought.

            We should try and minimize these major transmission vectors?

    • IF your logic tree contains faulty logic, THEN debug until it's corrected - don't publish that buggy garbage as a major release.
  • The anti-vaxxers and 75IQ CHUDs who refuse to observe the annoying yet effective and necessary measures to control and end the pandemic are dying off in droves, serving as examples to everyone else: play stupid games, win stupid prizes -- like dying horribly. The only sadness in this are the total innocents who are the collateral damage of their stupidity, people who aren't stupid and don't deserve to die, but get infected by these idiots anyway.
    My only real regret here is the pandemic isn't killing off al
    • My only real regret here is the pandemic isn't killing off all the idiots, or the agenda-driven assholes who encourage them to continue being stupid, it's only killing off the stupidest of them.
      But this will, with any luck at all, serve as a teachable moment to everyone else: be stupid and you'll die.

      Does it make you feel any different lamenting that ALL the unvaccinated aren't dying to know that 18-24 year olds are the least vaccinated age group (increases with age), or that the majority of blacks and hispanics are unvaccinated [kff.org]? If so, why? Is this something you are already aware of?

      • I'm not talking about people who are 'uninformed' versus people who are 'wilfully ignorant' or people who are just plain evil and want to see to it that civilization burns to the ground. 18-24 year olds are technically adults so they can either stop being stupid also or become a statistic so far as I'm concerned.
    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      "The anti-vaxxers and 75IQ CHUDs who refuse to observe the annoying yet effective and necessary measures to control and end the pandemic are dying off in droves"

      I doubt they are dying off in droves. According to the stats, we've lost about 700,000 total since the start of the pandemic. That's not enough to scare the panties off the right wingnuts. It is enough for the government to try to put a stop to it. The right wingnuts response is more or less: we're not dead yet so you can't make me. The government's

    • I know many "front line/essential" workers who were driven into the Covid-19 miasma out of necessity last year (most of them in May 2020) and who have stayed there - unvaccinated! - for the entire pandemic, through Delta and all the other variants. Most of them are autoworkers in one of the few plants to stay fully operational throughout most of the pandemic. Those employees specifically have been wearing cloth or paper masks the entire time, often using the same mask for 10-11 hours straight. Many wear

  • Everyone with the intelligence to engage in self-preservation, and everyone with the basic sense of civics, is already vaccinated.

    And the carrot doesn't work on screaming oppositional defiant toddlers.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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