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With omicron bearing down on Boston, officials say they had little choice but to require employees to get Covid-19 shots
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Why not both?
Given the excellent points made by Dr. Ojikutu in her affidavit, I'd hope that police and fire employees are getting tested several times a week as well.
Vaccines to reduce the chance of infection, testing to catch it if it happens. (And, of course, masking to reduce the chance of transmission in between.)
Except
Except the same is true of vaccination...as we have ample evidence of now.
not a zero sum game
<100% efficacy against infection =/= 0% efficacy
And seatbelts don't prevent car crashes
so I guess why bother?
Hell, why do I even have this fire extinguisher? Better throw that out too.
And vests don’t stop bullets
Why do cops even need tactical vests if they can still get shot and die?
Well, at least someone was
Well, at least someone was worried and concerned before this wave hit.
Based on what criteria?
If "requiring employees to get vaccinated" is your threshold, than the Biden administration deserves the same praise.
Yes, it does.
Yes, it does.
The law is extremely clear on
The law is extremely clear on this and has been for a long, long time. The City will prevail and the officers and firefighters who still refuse should be dismissed.
"public service"
This pandemic really taught me that a lot of folks in public service don't see themselves there for much more than a paycheck and a pension, particularly fields that are supposed to protect the public (police, fire, etc.). I say this as someone who recently left military service.
Thank you!
You get the impression that the military is miles ahead of public safety orgs on discipline, judgement, gun safety and more.
Question
Not an anti-vaxxer, have had all 3 shots. What exactly is the purpose of the vaccine mandate? It’s pretty clear that the vaccine doesn’t stop the spread. I guess aside from protecting yourself you’re also not clogging up the HC system, but still seems like it should be a personal choice.
It doesn't stop the spread in part because ...
There are so many unvaccinated people ambling around out there.
But in any case, it does help reduce the spread (the fully vaccinated are infectious for shorter periods of time and "shed" fewer viruses) and reduces the odds of somebody dying or needing intensive care. Those are good things, especially when it means fewer people requiring large amounts of hospital care and being able to get back to work sooner.
For funsies, you might want to Google "polio" and "breakthrough." The polio vaccine wasn't 100% effective, either (no vaccine is) and yet it worked, in part because of such widespread adoption, in an era when both parties acknowledged that, hey, science is not political.
science is not political.
Science is not political, but policy is totally political. "Science" and "policy" are not the same thing at all, the same way that science and engineering are not the same thing.
Comparison to polio doesn't hold up either. Polio (and diseases like measles, smallpox, plague, ebola, mumps, cholera, rabies, tetanus which people vaccinate against) has a very high mortality rate compared to COVID. That makes COVID vaccine policy a matter of balancing your appetite for risk against your tolerance for intruding on individual liberty. Reasonable people disagree about where that balance lies.
One of the most nutso things going on is that this Omicron variant is so different from COVID-19 that it should probably be called COVID-21, according to science. But from a policy point of view, that's not going to happen because then it becomes a hard sell to tell people to get vaccinated for COVID-19 when the bug going around isn't COVID-19 anymore.
Huh?
Citations needed.
I too love personal liberty
But all the other people who profess to love personal liberty seem to profess that love to justify their recklessness, stupidity and endangerment of others. See for example guns and covid vaccines.
(Not unlike all those people who profess to love Jesus Christ but violate all his teachings.)
You are mistaken about polio
If you just do a quick search, you will see fatality rates for polio quoted in the single and double digit percentage range. But if you look closer, you'll find that only about 0.5% of cases have paralytic symptoms, and those numbers are percentage of THOSE cases. About 70% of people with polio have no symptoms at all. Covid is more deadly.
"Not political"
Policy based on science is not political. Opposition to science-based policy is political, unless said opposition is based on religion.
No kidding, but any engineering that denies science is shit engineering, and any policy that denies science is shit policy
Not an anti-vaxxer...
But let me regurgitate anti-vaxxer rhetoric.
Some people have been misled by propaganda
and it's OK to engage with them on that basis.
This is a teachable moment.
technically true, maybe, but misleading
The vaccine doesn't completely, 100%, stop the spread. It does reduce the spread, by a lot. A vaccinated person who gets sick despite the vaccine won't spread the virus to as many people as an unvaccinated one.
This is all multiplicative: if you gave the virus to half as many people as your unvaccinated neighbor would have, and each of the people who caught it from you gave it to half to half as many, who also gave to half as many....in a few weeks there would be only one percent as many cases as if nobody was vaccinated.
That healthcare system is full of very tired people: "not clogging it up" makes a big difference.
Virulent
doesn't mean infectious. It means harmful. Omicron appears to be less virulent than other strains (but more infectious). I had made the same mistake so I thought I'd pass on my new understanding.