Good point.
I’ll be surprised if this survives the courts though.
I do think one question is whether this is good as a matter of policy.
And it is not setting a precedent in terms of requiring a vaccine.
A separate question is whether this is a good precedent from a separation of powers perspective. And if it is not (and it probably is not) then is it worth it?
Then I also think that these times feel unprecedented. It feels like the fabric of our society is fraying. Allowing covid to continue to drag out may create its own irreversible changes even worse than a bad precedent.
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Way too much beep comes out of DC via EO.
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Blood and urine tests can detect nicotine; I know of a company (that doesn’t hire actuaries, AFAIK) that tests for it as a condition of employment. Not sure if they test current employees or not.
My company charges extra for health insurance for smokers, but I think that’s only an attestation for now, not tested as a part of our annual blood work (which isn’t required but can be used to lower our insurance premiums).
I think it would be a bad thing, requiring a flu shot to be employed I would consider to be significant government overreach.
“That’s not MY cigarette smoke Boss. It’s secondhand smoke from my spouse/parent/kid/roommate/dog.”
Do you get nicotine in your blood & urine from secondhand smoke exposure?
I dunno, I’m not an expert on the various tests available, but five seconds of googling found this: How Long Does Nicotine Stay in Your System?
Exposure to second-hand smoke is usually not enough to trigger a false-positive result, but being exposed to frequent or very high levels of second-hand smoke may cause someone to test positive for nicotine use. Such results are likely very rare, however.
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I’m on board for employer requirements. The executive order thing makes me a little uncomfortable. Employees should have a safe working environment, and sometimes it’s government’s interference that makes that happen. Still uncertain on this.
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The executive order is the latest in a sequence of “pandemic things” that challenges my inner libertarianism.
On the one hand, this feels like government overreach. On the other hand, I am a believer in “addressing things that the free market isn’t fixing on its own” as a legitimate use of government power (in my watered-down version of libertarianism, at least), and we do have a problem with health care systems being pushed to failure or near-failure by people not getting vaccinated and not taking other measures to reduce the problem of contagion.
It’ll be interesting to see how OSHA regulations handle WFH employees.
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I’m fine with this executive order, but it just barely crosses the line for me into necessary. I would not be OK with the same type of order for the regular flu shot or anything in between. Basically, if we have a pandemic that is this bad or worse with a vaccine with a decent level of effectiveness, I’m in.
I think I’d like to see some sort of criteria for this level of order. It is a widespread public health and safety issue affecting most sectors. It seems like businesses were pivoting to vaccination, although likely to decrease costs and/or liability vs responsible members of society. I think N95s and twice weekly surveillance testing for unvaccinated (can decrease once community levels fall to a certain level), with vaccinated being able to also have access to both.
If the claim is workplace safety, then requiring permanent WFH to vaccinate seems silly, but if that employee ever meets with others that the company is involved (meetings, conferences), then it’s different. However if a business wants to require it of those who WFH to decrease medical costs, I’m fine with that.
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Good stuff.
Regarding the proposal to make the Child Tax Credit contingent on the kids being vaccinated… they referred to it as a carrot.
But the CTC has been around for so long that losing it would feel like a stick. It also doesn’t address unvaccinated adults. Also, rich people don’t get the CTC.
Maybe they need to bring back exemptions and make the exemptions contingent upon vaccination. For everyone, not just kids.
Although I have no idea how I’d go about proving that I had a polio vaccine when I was a kid. I did, but the paperwork was long ago lost and I’m sure the doctor whose nurse gave me the shot is long ago retired.
So maybe only for people born after a certain date or something. But fix the date so that eventually it’s everyone.
My company was already requiring vaccination if you wanted to step foot in an office.
But they were fine letting people be un-vaccinated idiots if they decided to work from home indefinitely
That makes a good case for the legality of vaccine mandates in general. Of schools requiring vaccination. Of Disney (or cruise ships) requiring vaccination. Of employers requiring vaccination.
I’m still uncomfortable with the president requiring private employers to do this. But maybe there’s more legal precedent than I realized.
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That’s OK, by the time it gets through the Courts to SCOTUS, it will have been in force long enough to ensure those people working for employers with more than 100 employees will all have been vaccinated already. But then we will all know that it wasn’t legal for the government to force all those people to get the shots.
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Won’t that depend on if there are injunctions imposed?
Obligatory - IANAL
That might be the best possible outcome. Get everyone vaccinated just this once and then say oops, we weren’t supposed to force you.