#vaccination mandates

[tomorrowusa]

Max Kennerly on Twitter.

Another high profile COVID-19 death suicide by an anti-vaxxer. Kelly Embry was 46 at time of death.

California prosecutor who campaigned against vaccine mandates dies of Covid Kelly Ernby, who recently ran for the state assembly, was unvaccinated at the time of her death, husband says

If a bunch of Trumpist anti-science Republicans want to commit suicide, who am I to say no to their free-dumb to do so? But they should at least choose a method which doesn’t spread disease to others and unnecessarily take up needed space at hospitals.

2022 could be the year that the US Supreme Court hands down more multiple bad decisions than in any year of this century – and that’s saying a lot. The backlash may be a lot worse than what the Republican majority on the court expects.

EDIT: Yet another dead anti-vaxxer. I could start a blog entirely devoted to reporting the deaths of high profile anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers – but then I would have time for absolutely nothing else.

QAnon Star Who Said Only ‘Idiots’ Get Vax Dies of COVID

Actually, only idiots don’t get vaccinated. Maybe that’s why so many Republicans are anti-science anti-vaxxers.  😉

The Republican Supreme Court seems eager to boost the death rate in the US. Hopefully only dumbo Republicans would be affected. 

[cathnews]

Bishop mandates jab for Townsville Diocese workers

Bishop mandates jab for Townsville Diocese workers

Townsville Bishop Tim Harris has mandated all Townsville Diocese agency employees and volunteers, excluding staff of Townsville Catholic Education schools and colleges, be vaccinated against COVID-19 by December 17. “The safety and protection of our parishioners, employees and volunteers continues to be a high priority. We’ve seen witness to this over the past 18 months through the challenging…

[thejewishlink]

Los Angeles OKs One Of Strictest US Vaccination Mandates

Los Angeles OKs One Of Strictest US Vaccination Mandates

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles leaders on Wednesday approved one of the nation’s strictest vaccine mandates — a sweeping measure that requires the shots for everyone entering bars, restaurants, nail salons, gyms or even a Lakers game. The City Council voted 11-2 in favor of the ordinance that will require proof of full vaccination starting Nov. 4. The move came after the council postponed a vote…

[cathnews]

Get jabbed, or get suspended

Get jabbed, or get suspended

The Archbishop of Brisbane has issued an ultimatum to clergy in the archdiocese – they must be double vaccinated within a month, or be suspended. Archbishop Mark Coleridge sent a letter this week to all priests and deacons to comply with double-dose vaccination by December 15 or stand aside. In a strongly worded letter on Monday, he warned that unvaccinated clergy “present a risk” to…

[tomorrowusa]

Vaccine mandates do work.

More than 96 percent of Tyson Foods’s employees have been vaccinated against COVID-19, the company announced on Tuesday, just days before its deadline for all its U.S. team members to be inoculated against the virus.

“We couldn’t be happier to say that, as of today, over 96% of our active team members are vaccinated – or nearly 60,000 more than when we made the announcement on August 3,” Tyson Foods CEO Donnie King said in an employee memo. “This is an incredible result.”

Of course Tyson offered a positive incentive in addition to a negative one.

King unveiled the vaccine requirement in August, contending the shots are the “single most effective thing we can do to protect ourselves, our families and our communities.”

The company also offered a $200 bonus and up to 20 hours of paid sick leave to vaccinated employees.

At the time, King said less than half of the company’s employees were vaccinated against COVID-19.

This is good business – not just good public health. The amount of worktime lost due due to sick employees will be lower than that of competitors. Tyson’s medical insurance costs for employees will not explode through the roof. And the company ends up receiving a lot of good publicity which likely translates to better sales. People generally prefer to buy food from companies not spreading COVID-19.

[tomorrowusa]

This is just a guess, but I suspect that anti-vaxxer cops are more likely to be racist, abusive, authoritarian, and generally unprofessional than their pro-health colleagues.

The anti-vaxxing cops are being encouraged by Fox News which hypocritically has a strong internal corporate vaccine mandate – even while they are making sure all their viewers get infected.

[W]e’re seeing extremely performative acts of refusal, in which a cop posts a video proclaiming that he won’t get vaccinated, or when a small group of police and firefighters walk up the steps of city hall to turn in their boots. They’re both products of the Fox News propaganda that convinced them to do it, and participants in that propaganda’s ongoing production. They know — or at least they hope — that their act of defiance will turn them into right-wing media stars.

So give these bozos the boot ASAP. If a law enforcement agent is willing to overlook basic scientific evidence, he or she certainly isn’t doing well at detecting criminal evidence.

[tomorrowusa]

Need any more proof that the GOP is the pro-disease party?

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbot issued an order banning all vaccine mandates in the state – including those by private companies.

Remember the pre-Trump era when Republicans claimed that they would never get in the way of private businesses? It seems that Abbott is telling businesses in Texas that he wants their employees to get sick or even die.

There’s a broader strategy here. Republicans want to keep the pandemic going as long as possible because they think it would hurt Biden to do so. The “pro-life” party is happy to see you die if it helps them score political points.

The fact is that Republicans have a history of being pro-death. GOP-run Texas has been the execution capital of the US under its last three governors.

And just last year Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged senior citizens to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggests elderly should die to save economy from coronavirus

Republicans don’t care about your life or health. They should never be trusted with the power to do anything about it.

[tomorrowusa]

Remember when idiotic Republicans like Sarah Palin were complaining that Obamacare meant that there would be “death panels” in the US?

Years into Obamacare, Palin and her crew must feel disappointed. But the right-wing resistance to mask mandates and vaccination mandates have led to a type of death lottery in parts of the country resistant to common sense pandemic precautions.

The states with the worst outbreaks in confirmed cases per capita right now — Tennessee, Kentucky, Alaska, Wyoming, and West Virginia, according to the New York Times’s tracker — have either set new hospitalization records in the last several weeks or are near their previous highs from the winter wave. All of them have vaccination rates below the national average. Throughout the South, hospitals are reporting they have more patients in need of ICU care than ICU beds available, as the Times reported on Tuesday.

America, the richest country in the world, is not supposed to be a place where patients are left at the door to die. Yet that is exactly what’s happening now — 18 months into the pandemic.

It’s not just COVID patients who are suffering from the overcrowding of hospitals. Maybe you remember the case of Daniel Wilkinson.

In Bellville, Texas, 46-year-old military veteran Daniel Wilkinson was rushed to the emergency room. He was diagnosed with gallstone pancreatitis, which is treatable but which his local hospital was not equipped to treat, according to KPRC. The doctor called all over the region — to hospitals in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, among others — but could not find a hospital that would take him.

Mr. Wilkinson finally found a hospital that would take him – but it was too late. He died of pancreatitis which could have been successfully treated on time if hospitals in Texas were not overflowing with anti-vaxxing COVID patients

Daniel Wilkinson is certainly not alone in being unable to to obtain prompt medical care.

On Monday, the Washington Post reported that a 73-year-old Alabama man died of a cardiac emergency after being turned away from more than 40 hospitals. The closest hospital that would take him was 200 miles away in Mississippi. 

In addition to the overcrowding problems caused by anti-vaxxing morons, the US has no system to serve as a clearinghouse for available hospital space.

Other countries appear to have avoided unnecessary deaths because they have a real system to coordinate care. In Britain, hospitals are currently able to handle more emergency care than the average volume prior to the pandemic, according to recent research by the Nuffield Trust, though elective surgeries are still sometimes being canceled.

“Hospitals have been incredibly stretched but have always been able to offer urgent and emergency care,” Nick Scriven, a UK doctor and past president of the Society of Acute Medicine, told me. “People were not turned away if they needed a hospital bed.”

The pandemic laid bare how disastrously disorganized the US health system is. But that’s always been true. It just usually reveals itself in more subtle ways.

We have no such system in the US because the loony right would start braying about socialism or something like that.

Too much medical and pharmaceutical care in the US is still in the hands of entities whose primary goal is to make big profits – not to cure people. We’ve seen graphically how the plague of opioid deaths in the US has been caused by greedy drug companies acting as pushers.

The people who claim that the US has the best healthcare system in the world try to get you to ignore the fact that the US still has the highest number of deaths from COVID-19. As of Thursday morning the US had 666,618 COVID deaths. We’re still ahead of Bolsonaro’s Brazil with its 588,597 pandemic fatalities.      

For now, all we can do is encourage vaccination mandates. But next year there will be an opportunity to vote Republican COVID-19 Death Panels out of office.

[tomorrowusa]

I think it should be as mandatory as turning on your headlights on a car at night.

Actor Sean Penn on mandatory vaccination, quoted at MSN.

Penn refuses to work with any studios or production companies unless everybody working there is vaccinated.

If companies insisted that all their workers were vaccinated then maybe they would have an easier time filling open positions.

[tomorrowusa]

Colleges and universities are finally cracking down on vaccine slackers. The emphasis has shifted from pleasant incentives to unpleasant penalties.

The institutions started the summer by waving the prospect of scholarships, laptops, game consoles and more in front to students who got a Covid-19 shot. Now, as millions move back to campus, hundreds of schools are mandating vaccines and penalizing students who resist without a medical or religious reason.

[ ... ]

Quinnipiac University students who aren’t vaccinated will be fined up to $200 per week and lose access to the campus’ Wi-Fi until they get the shot. The University of Virginia booted more than 200 unvaccinated people from its rolls before the semester began. And Rutgers University, the first university in the U.S. to mandate vaccination for students, is threatening to disconnect email access and deny campus housing for students who don’t comply. Some colleges used similar tactics last year to get students to follow testing procedures.

The hard mandates, which put colleges on the front line of the nation’s newest culture war, could help decide when the latest resurgence of the virus subsides — and when the next one arrives.

Nobody has the right to spread disease. If you have no respect for those you live with or attend classes with then GTFO.

You can always transfer to Ron DeSantis’s  COVID-friendly Florida or some other state with an anti-science Republican governor.

Some states — such as Florida, Texas and Arizona — have laws banning vaccine mandates, leaving colleges with incentives as their only lever to affect vaccination rates.

The best option for anti-vaxxer MAGA zombies: Revive Trump University as a brick and mortar campus at some previously uninhabited island. You can all have “COVID parties” where they pass out Ivermectin brownies to go with bleach cocktails.

[tomorrowusa]

Late Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett upheld a vaccine mandate for Indiana University students.

The Supreme Court will not interfere with Indiana University’s vaccine mandate. On Thursday evening, Justice Amy Coney Barrett turned down a request from a group of Indiana University students to block the school’s requirement that students be vaccinated against the virus. 

[ ... ]

The case, Klaassen v. Trustees of Indiana University, was the first test of COVID-19 vaccine requirements to arrive at the Supreme Court. The rule at the center of the case, announced in May by the university, requires all faculty, students and staff to be vaccinated unless they qualify for a medical or religious exemption. Eight students went to federal court to challenge the constitutionality of the mandate, but on July 18 a federal district judge in Indiana rejected their request to block the mandate, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit declined to put the mandate on hold while the litigation continues.

The students came to the Supreme Court last week, asking the justices to act on the case by Friday, Aug. 13. On Thursday evening, the court announced that the students’ request had been denied. The court did not issue a separate order or provide any explanation; instead, the docket for the case only indicates that Barrett denied the application.

So technically this ruling applies to Indiana students. However the fact that this came from Amy Coney Barrett does not bode well for anti-vaxxers. The implication is that there is a probable SCOTUS majority in favor of vaccination mandates – as long as those mandates have wording similar to that at Indiana University.

An increasing number of universities, healthcare providers, and businesses have imposed vaccine mandates. This ruling acts as a legal green light for even more to follow suit.

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