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I wish my employer _had_ instituted a vaccine mandate, and I'm disappointed in seeing Google reneging on theirs.

It would have improved my relationship with my employer, increasing my trust in them. I've been disappointing in their slowness to respond to a public health crisis.

3 comments

Care/harm is not the only moral that exists. Many people think it’s just as immoral to force individuals to inject something into themselves in order to remain employed.

You don't have a moral right to spreading of a deadly disease onto your coworkers (which you may be doing knowingly or not, with much higher probability if you're unvaxed). So you either accept rules that are acceptable to the affected people around you, or stay away from others.

This isn’t the goal of the vaccine. You can and probably will still get mildly ill with newer variants and remain contagious. Vaccination will prevent you from getting seriously ill.

Many people should stop listening to the blathering of right-wing idiots and get with the public health programs of the past century.

Forcing a vax mandate on everyone isn’t fair to people who are genuinely at risk if vaccinated, but the alternative should be WFH where possible or that you move to a different job if WFH physically won’t work. This is literally a public health crisis.

There is a libertarian argument that this is bad for individual liberty, and I am also sympathetic to that. We generally give up some liberty in exchange for living in a society with other people. I can’t walk around my place of employment naked and smoking a blunt without getting fired. You can argue that that’s wrong too, and if so that would mean you’re not a hypocrite, congrats, I salute you.

> This is literally a public health crisis.

Was and could be again. Not “is.”

Right. This is a trade-off.

1. Piss off the anti-vaxxers by having a mandate. 2. Piss off everyone else by giving in to a paranoid fringe.

They did not solve this problem, they just moved it around into a more complicated form. Instead of dealing with people who want to stay remote so they don't have to follow the mandate, it's going to start with someone who has an immunocompromised family member and discovers an unvaccinated person on their team came to work with a cough.

Believe it or not, but there are quite a few people who are very much pro vaccine and have taken the covid vaccine that are opposed to the mandate. The idea that anybody who does not support a mandate is anti vax is ridiculous. The majority of the people I have talked to about the mandate who have taken the vaccine are opposed to it.

These people don't understand public health. The point of the mandate is to make it faster for us to transition to endemic Covid. Once immunity rates are high enough, the healthcare impact of Covid becomes equivalent to the healthcare impact of seasonal flu. Without a mandate, you have to continue to deal with a pandemic until enough people get natural immunity, which is very costly, or until supply of treatments is sufficient, incurring the cost of pandemic measures on the economy the entire time. After the government exhausted its incentive policies for increasing vaccination-based immunity, the only policy left is mandate, the threat of which worked to get us to where we are today.

I don't disagree with what you wrote, but

> the healthcare impact of Covid becomes equivalent to the healthcare impact of seasonal flu

Unfortunately, and again, I agree with what you wrote, but I think we're going to find out that COVID is and will continue to be much worse than the flu and maintain an ongoing strain on the hospital system. Being endemic has nothing to do with how mild or destructive a disease is, just its prevalence. For example, the spread of HIV has done nothing to reduce its virulence or ultimate death rate (it's still near 100% fatal, we just have better anti-virals now). COVID is going to be a slow burn on society, raising death rates and debilitating side effects for years, maybe decades. We aren't going back to 2019 for a loooong time.

Mandates had nothing to do with that. Proper education and information helped the UK to achieve good vaccination update especially among elderly while many countries with strict mandates lagged behind.

Vaccine mandates however can caused considerable friction in the society. Just see Canadian convoy protests with hundreds of millions of damages.

It's far too late to educate people who are 40+ who gobble up misinformation. The "friction" in society comes from this uneducated group. If you have a proposal for educating these people to get them to vaccinate, the world's public health agencies are all ears.

Vaccine mandates and the threat of vaccine mandates in the US in particular have successfully driven up vaccination rates and allowed removal of pandemic restrictions earlier than would have been possible otherwise.

This view is wrong and that is the primary cause of problems with antivax.

The studies show that giving better information helps to undecided. Whereas vaccine mandates do not help much for staunch antivax.

The real world example (for example, the UK) also shows this in practice. No vaccine mandates are really needed to ensure high vaccination rates.

Vaccine mandates may have improved vaccination rates in certain groups but those groups are not most at risk. The total impact on vaccination rates and public health may even be negative as with more elderly have refused vaccine due to mandates than without the mandates.

> The studies show that giving better information helps to undecided.

I think you're discounting an incredibly powerful distortion field created by malevolent misinformation by some very sick and confused people.

I'm vaccinated but anti-mandate.

I'm finding myself similarly... Feel free to gloss over this, I'm processing if nothing else.

I made my own decision early on that vaccination wasn't significant for me. I had been exposed [and a very mild case] due to forced travel during that window where we knew COVID existed, but acted like it had not yet entered the country.

Natural immunity plus the fact that I live alone, never go out, and have been remote since before the pandemic... it wasn't a high priority for me. I felt reasonably safe and unlikely to spread it should it find me again.

It was all to comply with federal mandates for contractors - my employer decided that this should apply to all [including remote] employees.

It was more than a little inconvenient going out of my way to get vaccinated for arguably little gain. I might even say added risk in my case.

The reporting process alone made me miss several deadlines. Asinine things like not being able to confirm my vaccination status until it sat in my veins for two weeks.

In the early days I was all for it, especially when it looked like vaccinated people would not be spreading this thing, but more recently we have devolved completely into irrational hygiene theater. The mandates will not move the needle and serve no purpose at this time.

Same here - I was all for it, encouraged many people at risk to get ahead of it.

Your comment combined with mine made me realize... I (and the people I work with) played a big part in this theater.

As a federal contractor, when the federal mandate came down... those employees had to be vaccinated. The employer conveniently pushed this policy to the other 200k+ employees.

It was all a scheme to boost the vaccination rates and push this cart along faster -- the results never mattered.

It facilitated this... 'everything is normal/okay, the unvaccinated are the ones to blame' narrative.

Woefully lacking in attention in so many ways

>> played a big part in this theater.

May I extend a big "Thank you" to you and GP for recognizing and admitting this. You have now contributed to the restoration of trust in society in a great way. At least for me, personally :)

To be clear, you were in the full right to choose whatever treatment you wanted for whatever reason. The blame here is squarely on those who threw the wrong reason (threat of force) into the mix - they should have thought more about unintended consequences of their mandates.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when we fired all of the unvaccinated nurses amid the Omicron spike, and then CDC lowered the quarantine to 5 days and hospitals made sick workers come to work. So yes, let's fire folks that want to work, but force sick (contagious) people into work. It makes 0 sense.

That's good to hear! The best possible endgame is if all the people who oppose the mandate got the vaccine and just oppose the mandate on principle.

I've heard from other offices that tried to go that route, have a decent percentage of people who declined vaccination, and are now having these problems.

Google is interested in reducing employment costs. A vaccine mandate makes sense when supply of Covid treatments is low. When supply of Covid treatments is no longer constrained (due to a combination of high enough vaccination rate and high enough supply of treatment), the cost of enforcing the mandate is higher than the cost of Covid.