Those Who Can’t and Those Who Should Know Better

 

UPDATED 10/3/2021

“To Serve and Infect”

Pfizer-Biontech has submitted its very positive clinical trials of a reduced dosage COVID vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds, that last mass of school-aged children who have yet to have a qualified and available anti-coronavirus injection. We know that both Johnson & Johnson and Moderna are also on a successful clinical trial path. We also already know that pregnant women who have received one of the approved vaccine tracks pass the resultant immunity to their unborn child.  Children represent 25% of new COVID infections

That expansion of eligible 5- to 11-year olds will leave, for the time being, the youngest of the young still exposed… a grouping that is more easily contained than those who attend school, work or gather with others (in events large and small) or are forced to be in close quarters with others (inmates, hospital patients, nursing home residents, detainees, those who depend on mass transit). There are also too many parents of school-aged children, supported by red state governors banning any school mask or vaccine mandates, who continue to pledge resistance even when the relevant vaccines become available for their youngest school-age children. Children have been required to be vaccinated for various diseases for decades as a condition of school attendance. Will that practice continue against COVID? Or do science skeptics prevail?

We have been living in an era where scientific facts roil with bad news. Pandemics. Man-induced global warming. Intrusive digital data collection. A replacement of so many jobs, white and blue collar, by automated systems often governed by artificial intelligence. Changing technology and reduced demand for certain goods and services, with a large, pressured downgrade on the fossil fuel sector. A rising requirement of greater skills and higher education for even the most basic jobs. Educated elites generating disproportionately more and more wealth from these changes.

With the advent of highly-biased news services and unbridled social media brimming with conspiracy theories and false narratives, it is too easy for too many to pretend that these problems do not exist – a little ostrich in the sand time, with blind hope that all this cannot be true – that those giving us fact-based warnings are from simply out-of-touch ivory tower liberals and out-of-control bureaucrats… and to find large segments of our society to blame. Immigrants. Science. Educated people (“elites”). Deep state bureaucrats. China/Asians. Non-whites, non-Christians. People who do not work with their hands, respect the earth God gave us. People who want to take what is ours… to “replace us.” A trend that began well before the advent of Donald Trump; he just figured out how to embrace their political power. 

There seem to be such simple solutions for exceptionally challenging, changing and complex issues. There are even many parents of school-aged children, supported by red state governors banning any school mask or vaccine mandates, who continue to pledge resistance even when the relevant vaccines become available for their youngest school-age children. Mythology and political fealty still trump common sense and facts.

With a political system that is not geared to defend against a carefully orchestrated attack on a more purely majority rule democracy… in a nation that skewed in favor of farmers over city dwellers (as with the limit of two US Senators from each state regardless of population), we are now fundamentally divided into three camps: blue, red and those in the middle. So far, it is the battle of the squeakiest wheels that captivates the headlines. Symbols are now flaunted – masks and civil rights protests on the left of center, brazen vaccine/mask resistance and MAGA hats on the other side – culture wars controlling what we teach and what we hold dear and a willingness to decimate the hallmarks of representative democracy to get “our way.”

Meanwhile, experts predict that despite a momentary respite, particularly in states that have adopted the most stringent COVID preventative measures, the coronavirus will still surge again this winter. We will easily pass the current aggregate US COVID death toll – in spite of some states (like Florida) attempting to label COVID deaths as due instead to a symptomatic aspect of COVID (e.g., COVID-infected people who succumb to pneumonia being listed only as a “pneumonia” mortality statistic) – of 700,000 and will probably be hitting close to 800,000 in the very near future. You can actually determine which states have the worst per capita COVID infection and mortality rates, the lowest vaccination rates and the greatest exhaustion of hospital resources by the way they voted in the 2020 election. Those states that carried Donald Trump uniformly have the worst numbers… by far. 

With over three quarters of eligible adults in the United States having received at least one anti-COVID vaccine, we seemed to have hit a wall of stubborn denial among the rest. Fed up with vaccine and mask resisters, supported by most red state governors, the federal government and more than a few blue state and city governments, have resorted to mandatory vaccination in vast categories of workers. Mostly large companies and federal vendors, the military, and most notably unvaccinated first responders, from uniformed police/fire services to healthcare workers.

As my September 28th blog, Private Sector Vaccine Mandates – Job or No Job, explains, employers have a reasonable basis to require their workers to be vaccinated as a condition of employment… and may even be held responsible for creating a COVID-risk workplace that infects their employees. My September 17th and 18th blogs, Attitude Shift – When Over 75% of American Adults Have Received At least One Vaccine Shot and Living in a Parallel Universe, respectively, cite Supreme Court rulings that crush the notion that there is some individual right, supported by the constitution, to refuse a vaccination during a serious medical crisis. 

Yet still, anti-vax protestors cite their legally unsupported individual right not to be vaccinated. As the federal district court judge said in a lawsuit by vaccine-resisting healthcare workers at a hospital in Northern Kentucky, "If an employee believes his or her individual liberties are more important than legally permissible conditions on his or her employment, that employee can and should choose to exercise another individual liberty, no less significant – the right to seek other employment." 

In bright blue Los Angeles, a significantly large group of unvaccinated firefighters and police officers are suing to prevent the city from imposing its vaccine mandate on them as a condition of their employment. The September 29th Los Angeles Times tells us: “[Despite a city vaccine mandate, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel] Moore said that as of Monday [9/27], a total of 3,142 LAPD personnel had tested positive for the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, out of a current workforce of 12,152 employees… He said 7,380 — or 60.7% — had been fully vaccinated, compared with the 68% of L.A. County residents 12 and older who are fully vaccinated, according to county data… [The Los Angeles Times noted that] repeated coronavirus outbreaks had struck police and fire agencies across L.A. County since the start of the pandemic, including 37 identified outbreaks accounting for 1,061 cases within the LAPD.”

Teachers and healthcare workers in blue states and cities face comparable local vaccine mandates as pockets anti-vaxxers among them also threaten to resign. In New York, the Governor made it clear that the state vaccine mandate for healthcare workers will be enforced with suspensions or termination, even if it requires calling up the National Guard to replace those refuseniks. In New York City, a local mandate requires proof of vaccination just to enter a business or public venue. Recently, Brazil’s unvaccinated President Jair Bolsonaro, in New York City to address the United States General Assembly, was forced to dine on street vendors’ fare when he was not allowed to enter a restaurant. The entire state of California extended the vaccine mandate to all healthcare workers, with exceptionally high compliance even with skeptics threatening to resign.

Still, in states where employers require workers to be vaccinated, threats of resignation if forced to vaccinate are everywhere. Many anti-vaxxers don’t believe they will be fired if they fail to comply with these mandates. Many have also asserted obviously bogus claims of religious/personal beliefs to avoid the needle. But as Michael Hiltzik points out in his September 28th OpEd in the Los Angeles Times, despite the significant attention accorded to these refuseniks in the press, when push came to shove, the number of workers who actually refused the shots at the risk of losing their jobs was significantly lower than anyone expected. In short, the vaccine mandates appear to be working. Hiltzik reports: 

“One lesson arising from the actual record of resignations over mandates is that talk is cheap, but action is expensive. Promises to resign are common, but when push comes to shove, the majority of holdouts get their shots… So let’s look at how vaccination mandates are working out. To begin with, we should note that these mandates are getting tougher.

“Just this week [last week in September], New York Gov. Kathy Hochul put her foot down on her order that all healthcare workers were to receive at least one shot by Monday or face termination… Hochul’s order didn’t provide an escape clause allowing workers to undergo regular testing instead of vaccination.

“Hochul was prepared to allow professionals licensed by other states or countries to practice in New York if the mandate produced staff shortages. Her administration also warned that healthcare workers who were terminated for flouting the order wouldn’t be eligible for unemployment benefits.

“Northwell Health, New York City’s largest private hospital system, said it fired about two dozen workers Monday for refusing to get their shots. They were the last holdouts among a few hundred unvaccinated workers who had been warned to meet the state’s deadline. Northwell has 73,000 employees, so the terminations represent about three-hundredths of a percent of its workforce.

“Similar outcomes have been reported across the country. In Massachusetts, where the union representing State Police troopers asserted last week that ‘dozens of troopers have already submitted their resignation paperwork,’ the police administration says it has received only a single resignation.” 

So far, this anti-COVID effort has been most effective in blue cities and states where these mandates exist and are taken seriously. Where President Biden has control of federal employees and vendors, even in the reddest of the red states, there is measurable progress. But where there continues to be statewide support for the vaccine resisters, those horrific COVID infection, mortality and hospital overcapacity rates continue to skyrocket. While there is new hope with a Merk/ Ridgeback Biotherapeutics oral anti-viral symptom-reducing COVID treatment drug, molnupiravir, which is in clinical trials, vaccines still remain the most dependable and consistent COVID containment strategy. Mandates work!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it does appear that vaccine mandates just might be the only near-term path to containing and defeating this horrific and continuing pandemic plague, at least in the United States.