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The Mandate is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer [pdf]
- SQL2219 5y agoThe title of this thread is an actual quote from this review, on page 8.
- ajross 5y agoThis is a complaint, not a decision. (Or a review)
- gandalfgeek 5y agoThis is the decision from the judge staying implementation of the mandate. Read the whole thing.
- gandalfgeek 5y ago“… remains STAYED pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction. In addition, IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that OSHA take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.“
- dang 5y agoPlease don't cherry-pick a quote like that and make it the title—that's not only editorializing, it's the leading form of editorializing. HN titles need to be accurate and neutral, and represent the article as a whole. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213830 also.
- PLenz 5y agoThe great thing about mandates is that they work. Worse is better as applied to human behavior.
- LatteLazy 5y ago[flagged]
- 7DPrinter 5y agoCasual anti-white racism is what you're going to find will no longer be tolerated. How many lives do you estimate your mask wearing has saved? Seriously, what's the number. You can use a double.
- svnpenn 5y ago> Casual anti-white racism Every single time I see this, its someone projecting their own racism. Maybe dont do that.
- w4zm0ng3r 5y agoYou are racist. Shut up.
- dang 5y ago"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you unfortunately have a history of breaking the site guidelines and we've had to ask you many times to stop. Would you please fix this? I've banned those other accounts and am not going to ban yours right now because you've also posted good things—but we need you to follow the rules if you want to keep posting here.
- 7DPrinter 5y ago[dead]
- sriram_malhar 5y agoWhat number would satisfy you? For me, one is sufficient.
- 5y ago
- h2odragon 5y ago> It is thus critical to note that the Mandate makes no serious attempt to explain why OSHA and the President himself were against vaccine mandates before they were for one here. (elided further citations) Many measures have been contemplated (and some taken) that would've been over-reaching and extreme had the disease been smallpox. And COIVD was never smallpox.
- SQL2219 5y ago"We next consider the necessity of the Mandate. The Mandate is staggeringly overbroad. Applying to 2 out of 3 private-sector employees in America, in workplaces as diverse as the country itself, the Mandate fails to consider what is perhaps the most salient fact of all: the ongoing threat of COVID-19 is more dangerous to some employees than to other employees. All else equal, a 28 year-old trucker spending the bulk of his workday in the solitude of his cab is simply less vulnerable to COVID-19 than a 62 year-old prison janitor. Likewise, a naturally immune unvaccinated worker is presumably at less risk than an unvaccinated worker who has never had the virus. The list goes on, but one constant remains—the Mandate fails almost completely to address, or even respond to, much of this reality and common sense. "
- sriram_malhar 5y agoI really don't quite understand this fuss about the mandate. Americans have tens of thousands of laws that are locally inconvenient but globally useful for public well being, such as stopping at red lights, not carrying guns on flights, or god forbid, breast-feeding one's kid (who has received a zillion other vaccines).All laws are one-size-fits-all mandates, so why the fuss about this one, other than the obvious political theater? The petition claims that it is being treated as an "emergency" even after two years. But isn't it the case that it is because of the people like the petitioners that has led to vaccine misinformation and hesitancy, which has stretched the timeline? I am less surprised about the petition than seeing this as the top voted post on HN.
- westcort 5y agoThe neos have been trying to take over HN and discussed it on forums outside of here.
- bmarquez 5y ago> The neos have been trying to take over HN and discussed it on forums outside of here. If you have evidence of external manipulation, please email dang about it.
- gandalfgeek 5y agoJudge lays out rationale very well. One of the main issues is whether a federal body like OSHA can mandate such a broad thing, and how that infringes on “state’s police power” which is a fundamental principle in the constitution limiting federal power into what is up to every state to legislate locally. One cannot say “because COVID” and indefinitely suspend the constitution.
- rsj_hn 5y ago> I really don't quite understand this fuss about the mandate. > Americans have tens of thousands of laws OK, let me try to break this down to make the court ruling more understandable. The mandate is not a law. It's a regulation issued by OSHA, which is not a lawmaking body, but a regulatory body, charged with limiting workplace injury. If it was a law, then you wouldn't have this ruling. Laws are passed by Congress. In the U.S., regulations issued by various bureaucracies can't just be arbitrary. They have to be within the mandate of said bureaucracy, and they have to follow certain procedures. Otherwise they can be ruled as unconstitutional. That is what the court ruled on. Not whether covid is important, or whether vaccines are good, or even whether vaccine mandates for covid are good. It ruled on whether OSHA is able to create a nationwide vaccine mandate using its ETS (emergency temporary standard) powers. So the short summary of what "all the fuss" is about is whether this regulation was lawful. Note that OSHA has a long history of abusing the ETS, and of the 10 times in its history that OSHA issued an ETS, it has been struck down or withdrawn prior to being struck down 9 times. This is because the ETS powers are extraordinary and so are placed under very strict scrutiny by courts. Again, the courts are not ruling whether vaccine mandates are good, they are ruling whether the ETS power is being abused. This is why many (if not the vast majority) of legal experts have said that you can't use OSHA to make a nationwide vaccine mandate, and that this standard would inevitably be struck down. This is a very similar situation to when the Biden administration tried to use the CDC emergency powers to freeze evictions. Again, the debate is not whether evictions are bad, or whether it was a good idea to freeze them, but whether the CDC emergency powers allowed freezing evictions. That, too, was struck down. Hope that helps.
- _ddzr 5y ago[flagged]
- Kenji 5y ago[dead]
- SQL2219 5y agoyour liberty is being sledgehammered. next will be a BMI mandate, because high BMI individuals are responsible for taking up 10X more hospital beds than covid patients.
- SQL2219 5y agoPAGE 20 Of course, the principles at stake when it comes to the Mandate are not reducible to dollars and cents. The public interest is also served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions—even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.
- _ddzr 5y agoI had to get the MMR, varicella, Mantoux test, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and several other vaccines to work in healthcare. Children need to get a host of vaccines to go to school and that has been true for a hundred years. The only thing new here is a politically driven disregard for human life.
- wingspar 5y agoAnd those childhood vaccines are required by STATE law, using the states legal authority. The injunction spells out that the states have ‘police authority’ in this area, not the federal government.
- bandyaboot 5y agoSo do you think OSHA has any legal authority regarding occupational safety and health? Is their existing regulatory authority unconstitutional across the board?
- wingspar 5y agoIt’s all spelled out in the court ruling. OSHA derives it’s power from the commerce clause which gives Congress authority over interstate commerce activities. It’s a very clearly written decision.
- theodorejb 5y agoNever before have I seen restaurants and hospitals requiring me to show proof of a particular medical treatment before they will serve me.
- westcort 5y agoI didn’t think we would end up in a timeline where courts are trying to protect the replication of a deadly virus that has killed millions. Look at the results. Mandate->lives saved; no mandate->more death. I thought you all claimed to be pro life?
- dang 5y agoIdeological flamewar hell is exactly what we don't need on this site, and you dived straight into it with this comment. That's not cool and is against both the rules and the spirit of this site. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do this anymore?
- xil3 5y agoPro-life not pro-tyranny! Forcing people to take a vaccine that was rolled out almost immediately, without due process is not protecting anything. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it's not a silver bullet, and only time will tell if it's safe.
- _ddzr 5y ago[flagged]
- fyhgdet 5y agoCan’t find it now because google seems to have down ranked it. There have been cases of medication having very long term side effects which were not caught during trials. I’m thinking specifically of something that caused birth defects. I don’t think it is wise to claim so much authority as you have when it is literally impossible to have FULL confidence. Are you going to take responsibility for the 1 in 1 million who reads your comments and goes on to suffer an adverse reaction?
- _ddzr 5y ago[flagged]
- noetic_techy 5y agoIf they mandate we all take the latest and greatest anti-viral cocktail daily or even weekly, fresh out the Merck/Pfizer lab, would we all be onboard with that also? You see the legal precedent that have been set here because "just save one more life". Because if the goal is elimination and not crushing the curve, then mandating experimental anti-virals is the only logical next step, and it will only work if its truly global. This virus is endemic now, deal with it. It will never go away, and anyone who thought that 60-70-80-90% vaccination in the USA only would magically stop it was nuts. The vaccine wont prevent transmission or replication, not even in the slightest. Its only at best a therapeutic that 'might' keep you out of the hospital, not even guaranteed. The government didn't want to create "vaccine hesitancy" so they ignored any and all counter data, doubled down on a bad idea and mandated it, pitted neighbor against neighbor, and suckers fell for the groupthink. Now that its endemic, we have to step back and ask, is +0.07% more deadly then the flu worth all this heartache (lockdowns, mandates, masks, etc)? If its never going away, then at what point do we all plan to take the masks off?
- westcort 5y agoYou are exposed to millions of antigens daily, and almost none are FDA approved. This isn’t at all like a new chemical entity, it is a short-lived antigen that trains your immune system, then goes away. This isn’t 1960, it’s 2021. It’s safe, certainly safer than COVID, and necessary to protect you, your family, your neighbors, and our society.
- _ddzr 5y ago[flagged]
- Ekaros 5y agoWhat is the point of weekly testing anyway? If it doesn't equally apply to both vaccinated and unvaccinated. If the test is positive it's too late with unvaccinated anyway. And if vaccinated aren't tested they are still wilfully spreading to those who aren't vaccinated...
- m0llusk 5y agoIt is an out. If you absolutely refuse vaccination then there is another path to relative safety. If the testing is weekly then the time for infection is spread is still present but limited, at least in theory.
- dang 5y agoThis submission broke the site guidelines badly by editorializing the title. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Commenters: if you're going to post to a thread on a divisive topic, make sure you're up on the site guidelines: .https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We got a lot of hellish flamewar in this thread. That's not cool.
- satisfice 5y agoI want that sledgehammer. I want to it to pound the people who sneeringly prolong this pandemic with their bullshit. Going for my booster shot, now.