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The most likely explanation is here [1]. Pilots (and apparently some air traffic controllers) are doing a sickout to protest vaccine mandates, presumably to ma

• twofornone 5y ago
  The downvotes on this site have gotten insane. This is a perfectly rational comment. Whether you agree with them or not, just burying your hand and refusing to acknowledge that a nontrivial percentage of workers oppose mandates is just asinine. Boneheaded authoritarianism. If you ever wondered how horrors like the soviet union and nazi germany are possible, take a look at the religious groupthink that has seemingly consumed multiple first world democracies, over a virus with a 99% survival rate. Suddenly americans are cheering on censorship and authoritarianism and refuse to question their mass hysteria; it's high time you paused and asked yourselves if you're the baddies.
  • downandout 5y ago
    Exactly this. I wasn't rendering any opinion on the vaccine, I was simply stating that many people consider it to be dangerous and/or unnecessary, which is why some are pushing back. Others are simply against the mandates and not the vaccines. Regardless, some people are apparently very upset, given that a big chunk of our nation's transportation infrastructure is currently not operating.
  • nemothekid 5y ago
    [flagged]
    • Covzire 5y ago
      It's long term impacts are completely unknown. It's a pandemic that is already endemic. It's the theft of people's livelihoods by forcing irreversible medical procedures that they've determined they don't need and wont' give their informed consent for. To anyone still pushing vax mandates, you're a fucking monster.
      • lazide 5y ago
        Sounds like someone is losing their mind, and it probably has little to do with any facts or what is going on with the vaccine. Vaccine mandates have existed since shortly after vaccines existed, and for good reason. Because otherwise thousands or millions of people end up dead that didn’t need to, often completely innocent folks who never even had a choice in the matter, and often horribly to boot. Huge numbers of folks have had these vaccines and the fatality rates and serious hospitalizations have plummeted because of it. I had the vaccine, everyone I know has had the vaccine - zero serious problems whatsoever. And for me personally, when I had to take care of my 2 year old because he caught covid, so I had a highly infectious toddler screaming in my face for hours sometimes? It probably saved my life. It definitely saved my father in laws life. It still sucked though.
        • Covzire 5y ago
          Read what happened at Nuremberg, the world has been through this before, forcing experimental medical procedures against people's informed consent is not just, fair or anything other than monstrous. You don't know what saved your life, you're guessing based on propaganda you've been fed. It could be true, but nobody really knows. Also, adverse reactions to the COVID shots are far more common and more serious than you're willing to admit.
          • lazide 5y ago
  • KozmoNau7 5y ago
    > "99% survival rate" 1% dead means around 3.5 million dead, in the US alone. Do you consider that acceptable?
    • baumy 5y ago
      If the choice is between 3.5 million dead, and the rise of authoritarianism and censorship, then yes the former is much less tragic than the latter and therefore the more acceptable option. And that's before taking into account that the survival rate is quite a bit higher than 99%, so it won't be 3.5 million dead. And also before taking into account that the vast majority of the dead will be the very old, and people who took extraordinarily poor care of their health. Of course the choice isn't that simple or binary in the real world, but there's elements of that choice at play and I stand by the point I'm making.
      • unethical_ban 5y ago
        Vaccine mandates aren't new. You weren't protesting them 3 years ago, but now you are willing to take the side of 3.5 million members of the community slowly dying so you don't have to get a shot. Your persecution complex is out of control. The absurdity of peoples' accusations of world-ending authoritarianism and censorship is baffling.
        • grillvogel 5y ago
          which brand new rushed vaccine was being mandated 3 years ago?
          • unethical_ban 5y ago
            How many years, and how many people have to die while going from 99% to 99.9% sure of a vaccine's safety, before you would say it's safe? In your professional opinion as an epidemiologist?
            • rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • thowaway976351 5y ago
    this. hn is dead. all these websites are.
• hannasanarion 5y ago
  The tweet you linked is an account that's linked to at least one disinformation farm. Think about it for two seconds, if that really happened, there would be hundreds of witnesses, everybody would be talking about the flight number, there would be cell phone videos and corporate social media responses. None of those things exist, so either everybody on the plane, the airport, and all their friends and relatives are in on the conspiracy except this one bot account, or they're making shit up to stir up conservatives, which is what they've done all day every day since joining the site in January 2017.
  • downandout 5y ago
    I just looked at the account...you are correct, it does seem to be a very right-leaning account, so I deleted the link. The tweet seemed credible, but given the mass-downvoting in this thread, I'll err on the side of caution. Regardless, the tweet was an afterthought, not the main point of the comment.
• franga2000 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • KozmoNau7 5y ago
    > Who does this benefit?? Great upheaval brings great opportunity, if you are ruthless enough to exploit it. There are unfortunately many actors around the world who - for various reasons - desire to create instability, because they see it as a way to profit or to gain political power. It's the history of international politics.
  • downandout 5y ago
    I think it's less about people being against the vaccine and more about people being against the mandates. One giant issue with them is that they completely ignore natural immunity, which over 30% of the country now has and studies show is drastically better than the vaccine, but without the dangerous side effects. If the mandates were rational, they would be centered around antibody tests.
    • beagle3 5y ago
      Just a small correction: natural immunity is not without side effects - it is just that the side effect price of the natural infection is already sunk cost for those who had the disease.
      • downandout 5y ago
        Yes, I should have said “without the additional” side effects of the vaccine, but I assumed everyone would understand that part of it. But you are right that I should have been more specific, because someone else responded saying that I was overlooking the effects of COVID itself. So apparently not everyone did understand that. People in these debates tend to assume that anyone questioning mandates is automatically a COVID denier because the issue has become political. Two things can be true at once: COVID can be dangerous, and the mandates can be flawed. Of course COVID itself is dangerous. But once you have had it and survived it, the science shows that you have far better immunity than the vaccine delivers. The mandates do not take this into account. That is all I was trying to say.
• tomohawk 5y ago
  Agree. Have family members in the pilot's union and in the air traffic control union. The White House thinks they can force unilateral changes to the union contracts. If the unions admitted to what was going on, the White House would have more legal authority to intervene more directly with the unions.
  • q1w2 5y ago
    The parent comment above is being downvoted in favor of the top comment - which is a baseless pro-union comment. It's so strange. Do people really prefer to push an agenda here rather than understand the nuance and truth of what is going on?
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    > The White House thinks they can force unilateral changes to the union contracts. Well, yes. Contracts can't override Federal regulation. "Sign this contract exempting you from OHSA protections" won't (generally) fly, right?
    • EricE 5y ago
      What federal regulation gives the federal government the magical ability to mandate a medical procedure without consent?
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        OHSA, for employers subject to it. Medicare puts a lot of hospitals under their jurisdiction standards-wise, as well. Same for airlines. You'll note they've limited the mandate quite a bit to areas where there's wide court agreement the Feds have jurisdiction. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/us/politics/biden-vaccine-mandate-osha.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/us/politics/biden-vaccine... > Experts said that legal challenges to the rule were all but assured, but precedent is most likely on Mr. Biden’s side. In the past 20 years, “every standard that has been challenged in court has been upheld by federal judges,” David Michaels, a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health who was a head of OSHA during the Obama administration, said in an interview. > OSHA also has the authority to quickly issue a rule, known as an emergency temporary standard, if it can show that workers are exposed to grave danger and that the rule is necessary to address it. The rule must also be feasible for employers to enforce. At the state level, there's plenty of legal precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
• himinlomax 5y ago
  I don't find pilots refusing vaccines in significant numbers plausible in the slightest. Airline pilots have to comply with plenty of regulations and they're continuously trained to comply with safety regulations. Thus you don't become a pilot or don't remain one for long if you're allergic to safety regulations. If there's one occupation where expert recommendations are respected, it's aviation, and for good reasons -- the safety record of the industry speaks for itself.
  • ryandrake 5y ago
    Not only that, but pilots must go through extensive medical examination in order to get their medical certificates, and for Airline Transport Pilots (ATP) they need to get them renewed every 6 or 12 months, depending on their age. They are entirely used to their medical status gating their employment! Just make COVID-19 vaccination a requirement to pass your medical, and be done with all this hand-wringing.
  • unionemployee 5y ago
    Pilots in the US are an extremely conservative bunch. On my pilot group's FB page, the number of times I've read "Let's go Brandon!" in response to this supposed sickout are numerous. Every trip I hear the far-right Breitbart, Newsmax media narrative, and links from similar pseudo news blog sites are posted all the time. It's impossible to fly to SFO or LAX without a comment on homelessness, taxes, liberals, etc. Once, when I happened to be alone on my way to the hotel, a van driver in Trinidad asked my why the pilots are always talking about guns. Many US airline pilots are full-on anti-vax and claim that they'll be fired before being forced to get the vaccine.
    • brandmeyer 5y ago
      > On my pilot group's FB page Social media has optimized the process of finding groups of people that think just exactly like you do. The fact that you are listening to one specific echo chamber that feels this way does not tell you that the entire industry feels this way. Consider the following counter-example: United Airlines also has a vaccine mandate, and got well over 99% compliance.
• dabernathy89 5y ago
  > unless they take something that many consider to be quite dangerous. Of course, zero pushback on this nonsense idea
  • newsclues 5y ago
    Is it nonsense that the vaccines may be dangerous or that many consider the vaccines to be dangerous?
    • dabernathy89 5y ago
      The former. But saying it this way is just like the GOP saying that "many people are concerned about election integrity" after they spent months lying to the public that it was a giant fraud.
  • logicchains 5y ago
    It's such a nonsense idea that Finland and Sweden recently halted Moderna vaccination for under-30s males due to, in the views of their health authorities, the risks outweighing the benefits? https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-pauses-use-moderna-covid-19-vaccine-young-men-2021-10-07/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-pauses-use-mode...
    • ceejayoz 5y ago
      > recently halted Moderna vaccination In favor of Pfizer for that age group. Not in favor of "don't get the vaccine".
  • downandout 5y ago
    For a healthy person under 35, the odds of dying or having to be hospitalized shortly after receiving the vaccine are slightly higher than the odds of dying from COVID [1]. While the odds of any of these events, including dying from COVID, are low, there are certainly risks. We are faced with only bad choices in this pandemic - take a vaccine that has a high death/hospitalization rate relative to other vaccines, or roll the dice with COVID. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28829574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28829574