Courts block two Biden administration Covid vaccine mandates (opens in new tab)

> to what types of medical orders are allowed to be given to patients

Suppose an anti-abortion president gets elected and he elects someone as head and tells them that health care providers that accept medicare or medicaid cannot provide abortions. Not making it illegal per-se, but just for the providers that accept medicare or medicaid for any of their services.

You okay with this as well?

Sure, that’s the loophole. What’s happening here is yet another end-run around the democratic process. People are tired of emergency powers, executive orders, and delegated authority being used to enact some of the most impactful laws of our time. We want the Schoolhouse Rock version of law-making because we at least get something of a say in it.

Except this isn’t about almost anything else. This is about control over one’s body.

This is from someone who chose freely to get the vaccine. Even at my own peril I support other’s freedom to choose.

If that's true, how come several federal judges have come to the opposite conclusion in their rulings?

That's the key problem with the US now. Elected representatives are allowed to delegate law making. It breaks the line of accountability. It makes contentious issues worse.

> Requiring employees to be vaccinated as a condition to accepting Medicare seems pretty reasonable to me.

That's just a backdoor for giving more power to the federal branch. Its like 'interstate commerce' where anything that has interstate implications (pretty much everything) can be influenced by the federal government. What if an anti-abortion president elected someone to this board and told them that no health care provider that accepts medicare or medicaid can offer abortions?

I don't see mandating people to get a vaccine that they don't want as non-political bureaucratic action, especially considering its coming from the president's office. It's mandating a medical treatment. Take a step back and ask under what authority and supervision should we require a government to be mandating a medical treatment.

Not to mention, this is exactly how representative government works. It's not controversial that we do not have a direct vote on Secretary of Defense, a position that arguably has more human impact as the head of CMS.

That's true. My impression is that this is more or less a rubber stamp and the head is acting on behalf of the president. I can't imagine someone getting elected to this position that wouldn't take marching orders from her appointee. It's a lot of power to give one person.

I'M in the UK and I absolutely do not trust the civil service at all.

> Health decisions, prosecution decisions, and so on are explicitly devolved from the government

Yes, although UK Govt ministers tend to retain accountability when things go wrong, at least in the eyes of the media.

this is why it becomes a severe legitimacy problem when experts can no longer be rationally seen as apolitical actors.

In London they are taking butter knifes from people and bragging about it on social media.

Except in the US, the civil service is politicized and its employees are 95% in favor of one party, as shown by their political donations history.

I disagree. It is a political decision to force 2 million Americans to get a vaccine that they don't want under threat of not being allowed to work in their profession. If you disagree with the decision at least you can vote the bastards out.

You're acting like its a trivial procedural matter. These people obviously feel very strongly about it since they're under immense pressure everywhere to get it and they still refuse. Or they may have other reservations, but to dismiss that and just have some nameless faceless un-elected organization intrude in their lives in such a meaningful way is really gross

Because the chance of a net neutrality bill making it through the Senate is roughly equivalent to guessing Satoshi's wallet. We can barely pass debt ceiling increases to avoid national default.

The net neutrality PR did work though, the FCC was under a lot of pressure . ATT didn't pay all of those marketing firms to fraudulently post thousands of anti-net-neutrality comments for nothing.

"Representative".

Anyone who took a biology class and paid attention could have told you that an efficacy-killing variant was an inevitability. Hell, even tinfoil hat Alex Jones said the same thing, and was for that specific instance, vindicated entirely. The top virologists didn't just "not take this into account", they willfully withheld this truth of how viruses operate in order to push a flakey, quickly-deteriorating product into people's arms.

So that "95%" figure was a lie to begin with, because those who touted it knew exactly what was going to happen. Viruses evade, and any non-sterilizing vaccine will be evaded by a virus. This is how you get delta, this is how you get omicron (which, by the way, was first found in fully vaccinated individuals and likely created through this evolutionary pressure).

Thanks

Or did they just not run the trials long enough to detect the efficacy dropping?

Technically, perhaps. But really it's a small government agency whose major task is to disburse oodles of cash to people not employed by it.

Vaccinated people have far, far fewer cases of severe covid and far fewer deaths. What else do you want them to look at?

And when some department of unelected officials test radioactive oatmeal on children or infects people with syphilis, we somehow ignore these issues and pretend like that it would never happen to us.

Oh I didn't mean pass a law authorizing the executive to force vaccines.

I mean this would be a good time for Congress to show leadership in general. As in, make a decision. Really, any decision that shows some reasoning behind it. Entirely too many people in the service of legislature are more worried about their electability than doing a good job. There's a reason that branch has, on average, a mid-teens approval rating most of the time.

1. I'm a former Federal litigator. LMAO. And both Parties here. Welcome to America. That's why they filed this in LA + roll up to 11th Cir. Dems file in WA or HI which rolls to the 9th. State Courts are infinitely worse based on the different experience of close friends working in Chicago area v. Northern Indiana.

2. Every temporary injunction issued in the litigation surrounding the wall and Muslim ban was conducted with the Democratic version of this same strategy.

This is the game. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. We will learn the law in time.

Correct. Three other factors need to be balanced as well, although LOS definitely the big one. That doesn't make the PI correct, it doesn't even mean that the court will reach the same decision on the merits in Summary Judgement or after a bench trial, and it definitely doesn't make the PI decision the law.

If you can't convince, compelling doesn't tend to work much better, unless you threaten something worse. Given that unvaxed people are worried the vaccine may kill them, threatening career change seems a bit pointless...it would be far better to listen to their concerns and talk to them, threats only confirm the conspiracies and force positions to become entrenched.

We require healthcare workers wash their hands.

We require other vaccines.

There is plenty of room for dissent, but it stops being “dissent” when it is simply denying reality.

Yep. For every doctor or nurse with 4+ years of postsecondary education, there are 5+ people with 2 or fewer years of postsecondary education, I'd bet.

The lower tiers of nurse only require 2 years, IIRC, and I think those are more like technical programs than typical liberal-arts-informed degrees. Then there's the clerks, the front-desk people (to include the ones at the "front desk" of each floor, department, or section of the hospital, plus the ones at the actual main entrance[s]) the cleaning and housekeeping staff (someone has to go around restocking supplies and such), the entire billing department, the people who come around to bug sick people about their insurance details, the security guards (hospitals have lots of them), and so on.

This assumes that only uneducated uninformed people are choosing to not get vaccinated. It couldn't possibly be that they understand natural immunity still provides immunity, or that the risk in their group and based on their health is very low, or that they've learned how bureaucracy can be used to influence the medical community... not like they had to learn about the atrocities committed by the medical community in the past, and how bureaucracy was used to promote things that are now seen as unethical and mistakes.

Or maybe they are aware of drugs that received authorization in the past and that the same companies that are making bank of the vaccines, don't have the best history with being honest and transparent.

>A bit under half of Americans have already caught covid

No- that many have had a positive test or other diagnosis confirming covid.

There were plenty of non-hospitalized, non-diagnosed cases before the tests existed. And plenty of people have had it and never saw a reason to get a test to confirm it.

I'd say we're far above that estimated number.

It absolutely does. An very low dose initial infection can prime the immune system and give you an asymptomatic case.

...but even if you full blown covid, there is no exemption from the vaccine requirement - that's one of the main arguments of many health workers.

The problem that so many have is that the mandates completely ignore other ways to gain immunity and the fact that not everyone can get the vaccine. Right now the one single line from the government is "Everyone should get vaccinated, it's safe an effective".

To anyone paying attention it's obvious that this is not the case. Everyone should not get vaccinated, some folks can't get the vaccine. And not it's not safe and effective for everyone, some have had a bad reaction.

It would be one thing if the government realized this and placed reasonable exceptions for those who either can't get it or don't need to because they have natural immunity or immunity through monoclonal antibodies. But they don't and they continue to push this one way of getting immunity.

And that's where the distrust forms. More and more it seems that the government doesn't actually give a damn about these edge cases, all they want to do is check the box that says you have been vaccinated.

People dying from the virus is useful to an opposition party when they want to argue that the ruling party is doing a bad job and should be replaced.

Things like vaccines also threaten the status of people who use the virus in order to extract money from their audiences, like megachurch preachers and snake oil salesmen. Some people got really wealthy off Ivermectin and HCQ prescriptions during this whole thing.

The doctors here in Montana I've talked to about it are not exactly advertising it but are unvaccinated and have recommended to me to avoid the vaccine and one intimated it's insane to vaccinate children.

So that's not the case with all doctors.

Then again, I'm fit, healthy, great diet, low stress, eat well, lots of sunlight. Covid poses less risk to me than driving, my kids it doesn't rise to the level of conscious thought.

Covid's over here.

Op didn’t disagree with you. You should re-read the comment they made. Do you disagree with the Op?

Thanks.

I think that the death rate stays intake in the best case scenario. It could be higher than the Delta rate though, we don't know yet. But you know, I have no reasons to believe that we are so lucky, and even importantly, we deserve the best case scenario. US is crazy. Courts all over the country halt COVID protections measures. Republicans in the house don't want to prevent the government shutdown because of the vaccine mandates for private sector. Anti-vaxx rhetoric is stronger than ever before. So, people continue to die because dysfunctional government can't get their sh*t together. One party goes all-in with cultural war, conspiracy theories and sabotages everything. The other party is so weak that they can't execute the agenda of their own president.

So far we don't have enough data to say how it compares to previous variants. Even with the other variants, most cases are mild and it can take several weeks to start seeing the more severe cases getting worse.

And is only an increased concern because it might be more adept at evading the spike-based vaccines.

If you're not vaccinated or have natural immunity, there's likely zero increased reason for personal concern.