floridacatlover wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 6:01 pm
I’m a bit uncomfortable about the mandates, too, and it is terrible that it has come to this. I’m afraid this will harden the antivax crowd. What the Hell is wrong with people!
I do notice today that there is no pushback from businesses or business groups. I think they are glad to get workers vaccinated and pass the “blame” to government.
I do believe strongly in the mandate for healthcare workers. In our newspaper today it said our leading healthcare group, which runs 14 hospitals with 28,000 employees in our area, has 45% UNVACCINATED. To me this is wrong!! The problem, of course, is there is already a shortage of healthcare workers most places and it will be worse if people quit. (They have already said they will comply with the mandate and wanted to put on a mandate of their own but for labor concerns.)
What a mess we are in in this country - and elsewhere, too. (Looking at NYT numbers on vaccinations, most countries are higher than the US but lower than I thought, in the 60s% even Israel.)
I think some people in authority are just trying to potentially save lives / reduce suffering of the people
whether they want to be saved or not because it's really hard to incentivize the truly short-sighted and/or ignorant, or to force them to care about anyone but themselves (I coudn't find a navel-gazing emoji). Companies like DH's employer won't mind because it takes the red-state retaliation issue off them and gives them a better chance to return to pre-covid productivity and profitability sometime before 2025.
I don't think they can mandate one set of employees (teachers or medical professionals) and not mandate say, food service or hospitality workers, or even the military. Too much finger pointing and cries of "it's not FAIR, THEY don't have to..." where the response "life isn't fair, get over it," would bring on yet a new level of entitled outrage.
Then there are the ever-nitwits, like the gov of OK, who won't uphold a mandate on diddly because he thinks his chances of re-election are better if he lets many more red voters choose to die of a hoax (/s). Really, it'd be funny if it weren't so painfully self-serving.
A local single mom of 4, who was a NURSE, died this week of covid. No vaccine. A single mother of 4 who worked in the medical field in the time of a veritable modern plague somehow chose NOT to improve her odds of seeing her children grow up. THIS is why I like the idea of a mandate - if it had come a while back and she'd seen the intelligence in keeping her job to feed her family, maybe those 4 kids would still have their mom. (However, if she hadn't seen the intelligence in getting vaccinated so as to reduce the odds of her dying or making one of her kids sick, she may not have seen the sense in keeping her job, either - who knows. Fortunately her youngest kids are 16, not too long 'til adulthood. Although I think social security will give out on them at 18, so they're probably going to have it rough. There was no mention in the news story about the father, if he is living/deceased or in their lives/out of their lives. I hope he's alive, nearby, and totally steps up - or is already a shared-custody parent who was left out of the story for whatever reason.