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Doubt it. The court also said the following (court towards the end indicates that the mandate didn’t make sense even when the order was issued): > “”Being vacc

Doubt it. The court also said the following (court towards the end indicates that the mandate didn’t make sense even when the order was issued): > “”Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19. As of the day of this Decision, CDC guidelines regarding quarantine and isolation are the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves. We have learned through the course of the pandemic that the vaccine against Covid-19 is not absolute. Breakthrough cases occur, even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted. President Joseph Biden has said that the pandemic is over.& The State of New York ended the Covid-19 state of emergency over a month ago.? As this Court stated in its decision in the Rivicci matter, this is not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders, the ones who worked day-to-day through the height of the pandemic. See Rivicci v. NYC Fire Dept., Index No. 85131/2022. They worked without protective gear. They were infected with Covid-19, creating natural immunity. They continued working full duty while their exemption requests were pending. They were terminated and are willing to come back to work for the City that cast them aside. The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health: it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for vaccination for all residents. In a City with a nearly 80% vaccination rate, we shouldn't be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down. If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt. It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just.” Source: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet?documentId=JK5E3gx5XV1/ku37jnWR_PLUS_w==&system=prod&TSPD_101_R0=08533cd43fab2000a714a7fbca6ed5d92c9e780c98ea524c4b9b8701764b487905955c017542ac48080139dd47144800dda62d59b1ba02692121c6b4f86f53b4130e01eca4d9e4b1c8054784ce120d336736ccac0abbaf37b8d4ad9aa7103ddbd641ea04a53032d77d7903f1ad7a1b06abd1dac1cfde96f2 https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

jquery 4y ago
Yikes. This reads like a gish-gallop of anti-vax talking points. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the decision to reinstate the employees, but this legal reasoning is embarrassing. Edit: I’m happy to learn that the New York Supreme Court is not the highest court in New York, this entire thread is misleading (I think people are assuming New York’s highest court slapped down vaccine mandates). I don’t know why New York has to name their courts in such weird ways…
- tlogan 4y ago
  I think it is important to understand that not all people who against vax mandates are anti-vaxers.
  - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
    I thought about this for several moments, and I disagree. Vaccines offer some personal protection but predominantly become effective by achieving herd immunity. Vaccine hesitancy undermines this goal and weakens the system. Being pro-vaccine is senseless without being in favor of enough people being vaccinated to provide strong immunity, including for those who cannot be vaccinated due to medical complications. Even if you were to argue on behalf of one who is indifferent to vaccines but is against mandates, so long as those mandates encourage vaccination, they effectively are discouraging vaccination and are thus anti-vax. It can be hard to recognize all of this without the right perspective. In isolation, it is easy to claim that one is not anti-vax; however actions speak infinitely louder than words.
    - ghoward 4y ago
      This argument is useless in the face of the COVID shots because they do not prevent transmission, an important factor in herd immunity being effective. Being anti-vax-mandate for an ineffective vaccine is not anti-vax in any way.
      - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
        Your lack of understanding how vaccines work belies your argument. No vaccine prevents transmission. That makes no sense. In order to prevent transmission, your immune system must prevent any infection, regardless of how minor. No vaccine guarantees absolute prevention from infection. Depending on mode of transmission, any infection can be transmissible. Thus any vaccine may not prevent transmission, for anything. Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.
DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
> Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19. This was not true before Omicron. Vaccination was never a 100% protection against contracting or transmitting SARS-CoV-2, but it did significantly reduce the rate of both. People who refused to vaccinate themselves were, in fact, putting people around them at greater risk. That protection has decreased with Omicron, though it is still not zero (and with boosters, it increases again for a few months).
- origin_path 4y ago
  That's not the case. Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative. The UK is one of the few countries that kept regularly publishing case stats even after this happened and it showed that once the initial vaccine 'high' wore off, vaccinated people were getting infected more frequently than the unvaccinated. Omicron didn't change this. This sort of thing is unintuitive but has happened before. In fact Fauci cited the possibility of this effect as one of the reasons not to rush the trials. Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics (the way they classify people as unvaccinated for weeks after having actually been given the shot can warp the stats).
  - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
    > Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative. Effectiveness against Delta did not go negative. Protection against infection decreased, but was still quite significant. A single booster also greatly increased protection against Delta, which is why many countries initiated booster campaigns in the Fall of 2021. > Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics The trials were always designed to test protection against symptomatic disease, severe cases and death. They were not designed to test protection against infection. Everyone who read the trial registrations and the studies knew this from the beginning. The fact that this has recently been presented as a big revelation in the media just shows how uninformed the public (and much of the media) is. It's also a reflection of the revisionist narrative (i.e., we shouldn't have done anything about CoVID) taking hold.
version_five 4y ago
- brigandish 4y ago
  I'm getting a bit tired of people on HN questioning the motives of other commenters. You don't have a mind reading machine, you are not a telepath or a wizard. If you think they are wrong then argue it, they could be mistaken, entirely right, entirely wrong, partly right/wrong… you could be wrong. There are so many possibilities but none of them include you being able to divine their intentions.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- nomel 4y ago
  From the HN guidelines: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. The better interpretation is that they have a misunderstanding, which could very well have been corrected already by the above replies.

jquery 4y ago

Yikes. This reads like a gish-gallop of anti-vax talking points. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the decision to reinstate the employees, but this legal reasoning is embarrassing. Edit: I’m happy to learn that the New York Supreme Court is not the highest court in New York, this entire thread is misleading (I think people are assuming New York’s highest court slapped down vaccine mandates). I don’t know why New York has to name their courts in such weird ways…

tlogan 4y ago
I think it is important to understand that not all people who against vax mandates are anti-vaxers.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  I thought about this for several moments, and I disagree. Vaccines offer some personal protection but predominantly become effective by achieving herd immunity. Vaccine hesitancy undermines this goal and weakens the system. Being pro-vaccine is senseless without being in favor of enough people being vaccinated to provide strong immunity, including for those who cannot be vaccinated due to medical complications. Even if you were to argue on behalf of one who is indifferent to vaccines but is against mandates, so long as those mandates encourage vaccination, they effectively are discouraging vaccination and are thus anti-vax. It can be hard to recognize all of this without the right perspective. In isolation, it is easy to claim that one is not anti-vax; however actions speak infinitely louder than words.
  - ghoward 4y ago
    This argument is useless in the face of the COVID shots because they do not prevent transmission, an important factor in herd immunity being effective. Being anti-vax-mandate for an ineffective vaccine is not anti-vax in any way.
    - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
      Your lack of understanding how vaccines work belies your argument. No vaccine prevents transmission. That makes no sense. In order to prevent transmission, your immune system must prevent any infection, regardless of how minor. No vaccine guarantees absolute prevention from infection. Depending on mode of transmission, any infection can be transmissible. Thus any vaccine may not prevent transmission, for anything. Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago

> Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19. This was not true before Omicron. Vaccination was never a 100% protection against contracting or transmitting SARS-CoV-2, but it did significantly reduce the rate of both. People who refused to vaccinate themselves were, in fact, putting people around them at greater risk. That protection has decreased with Omicron, though it is still not zero (and with boosters, it increases again for a few months).

origin_path 4y ago
That's not the case. Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative. The UK is one of the few countries that kept regularly publishing case stats even after this happened and it showed that once the initial vaccine 'high' wore off, vaccinated people were getting infected more frequently than the unvaccinated. Omicron didn't change this. This sort of thing is unintuitive but has happened before. In fact Fauci cited the possibility of this effect as one of the reasons not to rush the trials. Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics (the way they classify people as unvaccinated for weeks after having actually been given the shot can warp the stats).
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  > Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative. Effectiveness against Delta did not go negative. Protection against infection decreased, but was still quite significant. A single booster also greatly increased protection against Delta, which is why many countries initiated booster campaigns in the Fall of 2021. > Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics The trials were always designed to test protection against symptomatic disease, severe cases and death. They were not designed to test protection against infection. Everyone who read the trial registrations and the studies knew this from the beginning. The fact that this has recently been presented as a big revelation in the media just shows how uninformed the public (and much of the media) is. It's also a reflection of the revisionist narrative (i.e., we shouldn't have done anything about CoVID) taking hold.

version_five 4y ago

brigandish 4y ago
I'm getting a bit tired of people on HN questioning the motives of other commenters. You don't have a mind reading machine, you are not a telepath or a wizard. If you think they are wrong then argue it, they could be mistaken, entirely right, entirely wrong, partly right/wrong… you could be wrong. There are so many possibilities but none of them include you being able to divine their intentions.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nomel 4y ago
From the HN guidelines: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. The better interpretation is that they have a misunderstanding, which could very well have been corrected already by the above replies.