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So, I Have an Interview That Might End at Vaccination…
JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL., APPLICANTS
v.
MISSOURI, ET AL.
XAVIER BECERRA, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, ET AL., APPLICANTS
v.
LOUISIANA, ET AL.
ON APPLICATIONS FOR STAYS
Yes, that decision. That decision retained a measure of freedom from vaccine mandates in the domain of business operations. That decision, however, also recognized mandates for healthcare workers employed in organizations that accept federal dollars from Medicare and Medicaid.
I am a mental health professional. That SCOTUS decision Thursday was perfect timing for me. Today, Friday, I have an interview for work that could triple my income, but I had to go check to see if they take Medicare or Medicaid monies. They do. It is now 30 minutes before my interview, and I am banging out a post on Ricochet. I suppose I am using you all as a stress ball.
One of my questions in the interview now, obviously, will be about their implementation procedures and policies. Will they accept certain types of exemptions?
In my last several interviews for work over the last few years, I got an offer letter every time. I don’t always take it. But I interview well. I am confident, and I only apply for positions I am sure I can match qualifications. Even if I feel like I’m reaching up a bit, I interview well and can answer difficult questions and I do my homework for the position. So, another element causing me clinically significant distress (sorry, counselor jargon) is if I do not get this work for no other reason than vaccination reasons.
I’m a philosopher at heart. I strive, strive, strive for balance. One hand clapping for a position is a bad sign; you need two hands clapping for applause. Where is the debate? I have begun studying the vaccinations and considering it seriously for employment.
Wherever you stand, please don’t judge. I could stand to make more money in 2022 since being laid off in 2020 and struggling to land a solid gold prospect ever since. I have a family of five and financial pressures only grow over time.
All I really want to do is teach philosophy and languages in a big old stone building with small classes and vines growing up the side of the stone, visible from my office window with a big oak desk and whiskey.
But why the mandates?! The majority of people, as far as I can tell, are getting vaccinated, anyway. Besides, the remaining others (yours truly) would probably get the shot if it seemed more trusty rather than sketchy. If folks want to convince me immediately of the safety and efficacy of this medical intervention (how do you yell logic over text?) then stop censoring legit doctors and scientists from discussing legit issues. Censorship does not breed trust.
I am chock full of every other vaccination ever produced. My parents were conventional, so I got all the school shots. I was in two branches of the military and served overseas, so I got all kinds of other shots. When I had kids, we looked into appropriate protocols for vaccinations and operated thereby. I’m OK with this stuff.
I just get an allergic reaction to reductionist, simplistic, and censored deba … well, it isn’t a debate. One-sided theater, let’s say.
Anyway, I have twenty minutes left until my interview. Thank you for listening. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Published in General
Wow, @tikhon olmstead, You’re between any number of rocks and hard places. The only advice I can offer is so generic that it won’t be very helpful – to yourself be true. But there’s something else that continues to amaze me: What they’re asking, requiring, or even asking about health issues, like vaccines, is illegal. Via a law, passed by Congress, and signed by the President – which is supposed to carry the day over something like executive orders, mandates, edicts from on high, etc. etc. And that would be HIPAA.
For a host of reasons apart from this, I think the law stinks. It made many parts of my job (I’m now retired) much more difficult. But it does prohibit employers from asking about health issues, let alone keeping record of them.
Which is why I find curious parts of SCOTUS’ decision. I assume the two justices that swung the other way, found sufficient rational basis for the requirement for healthcare workers. I await discussions among attorneys on this. It also lays bare the fact that once you accept federal money, they have their tenterhooks in you. Hence the danger of Medicare, etc. long before Obamacare, because Medicare is the king on the hill in the entire healthcare field.
I don’t intend to highjack @tikhonolmstead‘s good OP. I simply want to offer my hypothesis regarding the SCOTUS’ decision: It was a 4-4 tie, and Roberts didn’t want the three liberal justices to have to take loss on both decisions. By voting to break the tie, and splitting the decisions basically half-a-loaf for both ends of the political spectrum, Roberts protects himself from partisan attack by the MSM, Senate Democrats, and the Biden Administration. I don’t think rational basis had anything to do with it.
My wife will be reentering the job market soon (after spending the last 12 years homeschooling our kids while I try desperately to keep our family from poverty — and fail), . . . and the chief concern on her mind is whether she’ll be forced to get jabbed or constantly test and wear a stupid mask. She won’t take a job that requires either. (And neither would I.)
Do they include all the people behind the scenes as “health care workers?” I’m thinking of janitors in hospitals, medical coders who work at home, hospital vendors, and receptionists – people like that. In addition, what medical facility isn’t somehow involved in Medicare?
And one more thing – how do I claim a religious exemption? See my priest/minister/rabbi/imam/guru? What about a medical exemption? My family doctor?
Just so you know, the government is keeping a database on those who claim religious exemption. But why?
I can’t click like on your post (but I do like it) because I don’t like databases on citizens. Not for guns. Not for vaccination exemptions. Heck, not even for taxes. Speaking of which, this year there is a IRS checkbox asking if you bought cryptocurrency, so now there is a database on that, too, apparently.
Top-down, total-control systems try to harness everything under its scope. But that is just not possible. There are always outliers, exceptions, the residue. Trying to get all things under one roof is going to crack up the house. USSR, anybody? Waiting on N. Korea and China, but it is inevitable.
I haven’t commented on the decisions yet, though I did browse them.
It wasn’t quite a rational basis argument. The issue presented was the scope of the federal government’s authority to set a vaccine mandate, based on rather generic grants of regulatory power, with two principal agencies involved: OSHA for the broad employer mandate, and Medicare/Medicaid for the health worker mandate.
Moreover, it wasn’t a final decision on the merits, but rather a decision about whether to grant preliminary injunctive relief (well, technically, whether to leave in place the preliminary injunctions issued by lower courts). That’s another layer of complexity, generally having to do with balancing the equities between the likelihood of irreparable harm and the parties’ respective likelihood of success on the merits. It doesn’t actually decide the merits, but decides whether the case looks pretty strong or pretty weak.
The two mandates are quite different. The OSHA decision focused on the agency’s authority over “occupational safety,” and made the point that the risk of Covid wasn’t generally job-related, while keeping open the possibility that there might be some occupations for which the Covid risk was job-related — for example, health care workers or workers in crowded situations. SCOTUS found the OSHA-based employer mandate too broad at this preliminary level.
In contrast, the Medicare/Medicaid mandate applied to health care workers, which presented a different circumstance in two ways: (1) such workers are more likely to come into contact with Covid in their jobs, and (2) such workers might pass Covid along to patients. SCOTUS found this mandate acceptable, at least at this preliminary level.
I thought that this was a reasonable result, and that Roberts and Kavanaugh, who voted in the majority in both, had a sensible viewpoint.
I did think that there was a strong argument on the conservative side against the Medicare/Medicaid mandate, led by Thomas and Gorsuch, who were arguing a broader point about the scope of executive discretion.
Tikhon, for what it’s worth, I think that the facts on the vaccines are pretty clear. In this case, I think that there’s a lot of incorrect information propounded by vaccine critics. I’ve seen many, many analyses here at Ricochet that are quite flawed. There are some risks, and there’s a chance of a long-term risk that we don’t yet know about, but I think that these are very unlikely.
I’ve looked into the issue before, and the risk of death from Covid appears to be many, many times higher than the risk of a negative reaction to the vaccine. These risks do vary depending on age, as the young (under 30, mostly) are almost invulnerable to Covid, while the risks increase dramatically among older folks.
My own decision, about 9 months ago, was to go ahead and get the vaccination. You and I are probably in pretty similar demographics, based on your photo — I’m a 54-year-old white guy. My own impression is that the vaccination is advisable for people over 40, possibly for people over 30, and probably unnecessary for people under 30.
This analysis is based on individual risk, not accounting for the positive externality associated with vaccination, i.e. the fact that a vaccinated person is less likely to get a Covid infection, and probably less likely to pass it along to others.
There is a superb podcast about these decisions on the Advisory Opinions Podcast over at The Dispatch. Co-host Sarah Isgur’s husband was the prevailing lawyer in the great 6-3 OSHA opinion.
Thanks @ArizonaPatriot. I have followed what I think are sensible critics who actually adopt a position that sounds like yours in these comments. Doctors and researchers associated with the Great Barrington Declaration, for example, which I signed as a mental health professional. I am not an epidemiologist or a chemist (have you seen the other ingredients?) and I have never played either on TV, either, so I am aware of my ignorance.
It’s like Socrates pointed out: The Athenian craftsman were experts in their trade, but at the point they thought their knowledge applied to all other domains is when they lost wisdom. I am not that kind of a scientist, and I know it. But I am good at logic, undergirding suppositions, and teasing out objective fallacies and discerning types of evidence. I am a philosopher at heart and by training. Philosophy is a second-order discipline, so it can interrogate every human contrivance with its tools. That’s mainly how I’ve been trying to discern my path in (what seems to me) a cluttered landscape of opinion, expert and otherwise.
The long-term risks beyond our time horizon are unknowns. I like to take that seriously, too.
With psychiatric medications, for example, researchers (funded by pharmaceutical companies) do 6, 8, and 12 week trials for a medication as standard in the FDA approval process. Changes of symptoms within that short time horizon are considered related to the drug as are adverse side effects correlated with it. Longitudinal studies lasting one year or more are almost never done for efficacy, effectiveness, or adverse side effects (because funding!!!). The few studies that have been done, however, and isolated court cases and mounting anecdotal evidence, suggest severe impairments, paradoxical effects, and adverse side effects in the long term for every major class of psychiatric drug.
Being aware of psychiatric drug stuff is partly in my wheelhouse, but I realize it does not transfer to coronavirus mRNA vaccines. In broad strokes, however, of clinical trials, desired vs. real outcomes linked to time horizons, and so on, there is a reasonable basis to factor in the unknown long term effects. I might also say censorship phenomena looms large in the psychiatric drug issue. With COVID, no surprise, censorship is par for the American medicine course. They are the same pharma companies.
(Here with fellow Ricochetti I don’t feel like I need to disavow conspiracy theories…this is all pretty mainstream as far as I can tell.)
These can be tough choices, but I respect whatever people choose to do re the vaccines. I have less appreciation for the people, vaccinated or not, who hide away in their homes or with masks. Life must go on.
Good luck with your job search!
Fear of the vaccine is overblown. Just because the current administration is a corrupt bunch of small minded, power hungry blowhards is no reason to avoid the vaccine. The current experience of the vaccine with BILLIONS of doses, does not suggest a significant percentage of serious side effects. When I see people suggesting the vaccine causes terrible side effects from impotence to brain hemorrhage and everything in between I know it’s being exaggerated. Having practiced medicine for 35 years (neurology), I think I have a pretty good perspective on the risks/benefits. If I was younger than 40 and had no serious health issues, I’d avoid the vaccine (which one of my three children has done) because I have minimal risk from the virus, but I wouldn’t let the vaccine prevent me from getting a good job opportunity!
I hope the interview went well.
Is it not curious that among the millions of workers in the USA, the people the SCOTUS members chose to burden with a mandated vaccine requirement are health workers?
And they are so often the ones seeing the massive numbers of vaccine injury victims on a daily cases. (Especially the nurses and physical therapists.) The excellent video that went viral last autumn of the nurses in MN discussing the injuries they witness, including the amputation of women’s limbs when the microscopic blood clots invade one particular region of the body was a wake up call for so many people. Plus some nurses testifying at the meeting revealed they had lost family members to the vaccines.
This is curious as well:
I guess someone should say it. This claim about vaccines maiming and murdering tens of thousands of people is utterly baseless, as far as I can tell.
And a lettuce meme is a pretty poor way to make important decisions, in my view.
So they can receive The Mark of the Beast when the time comes . . .
Solomon Roberts is not.
Absolutely not.
Just a blackmailed hack who will face his own judgement one day.
For persecution purposes.