Month: September 2021

I know it sounds harsh, but if people refuse to get vaccinated to protect their families and co-workers I just don’t see the downside if having them quit. If someone is making the workplace a hostile and dangerous place to work, employers fire such people every day. And the very people who are refusing to get vaccinated are the first to say they have that right. So, if these folks are willing to quit rather be fired, then they are doing everyone a favor. But as it happens, there are fewer people who are willing to follow through on their big threat than we might think.

Here is some new polling on vaccine attitudes. As you might expect the refusniks, who are mostly right wingers are still mad and acting like fools. However, the mandates seem to be having an effect on getting them to do it anyway:

As the U.S. continues to grapple with the “third wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor finds that more than seven in ten U.S. adults (72%) now report being at least partially vaccinated, with the surge in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to the Delta variant being the main motivator for the recently vaccinated and other factors like full FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine and an increase in vaccine mandates playing a more minor role. T

he largest increases in vaccine uptake between July and September were among Hispanic adults and those ages 18-29, and similar shares of adults now report being vaccinated across racial and ethnic groups (71% of White adults, 70% of Black adults, and 73% of Hispanic adults). Large gaps in vaccine uptake remain by partisanship, education level, age, and health insurance status.

[I don’t know why health insurance status is an issue. The shots are free whether you have insurance or not. Maybe that hasn’t been well explained?]

Amid a slew of recent announcements about COVID-19 vaccine requirements, majorities favor requirements for health care workers, school teachers, college students, and federal government employees, but the public is more divided on employer mandates in general and on K-12 schools requiring vaccines for eligible students. More specifically, nearly six in ten (58%) support the new federal government mandate on larger employers to require vaccines or weekly testing for their workers, and nearly eight in ten (78%) support the requirement that these employers offer paid time off for workers to get vaccinated and recover from side effects.

Despite a lukewarm reception for employer COVID-19 vaccine mandates, such requirements do have the potential to further increase vaccine uptake somewhat. Asked what they would do if their employer required them to get vaccinated in order to continue working, about a third of unvaccinated workers say they would be likely to get vaccinated while two-thirds say they would be unlikely to do so (including half who say they would be “very” unlikely). However, when presented with the option to get vaccinated or face weekly testing (an option that larger employers could offer under the Biden plan), most unvaccinated workers (56%) say they would take the weekly testing option while just 12% say they’d get the shot and three in ten say they would leave their job…

Partisanship and vaccination status continue to loom large as factors in how the public views both the U.S. vaccination effort and the government’s response to the pandemic in general. For example, while Democrats are most likely to see individuals refusing the COVID-19 vaccine and not taking enough precautions for the current surge in coronavirus cases, Republicans are most likely to view immigrants and tourists bringing the disease into the U.S. as a major reason for the surge. Similarly, the top reason vaccinated adults see driving high caseloads is vaccine refusal, while the unvaccinated say the main reason is that the vaccines aren’t working as well as promised. Some express anger as well, with two-thirds (65%) of Democrats and half (51%) of vaccinated adults saying the current state of the pandemic makes them angry at people who have not gotten a vaccine, and six in ten Republicans (59%) and a similar share of unvaccinated adults (56%) saying it makes them angry at the federal government.

Here’s more:

In June 2021, we conducted a nationwide survey, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that gave us a sample of 1,036 people who mirrored the diverse makeup of the U.S. We plan to publish the survey in October.

We asked respondents to tell us what they would do if “vaccines were required” by their employer. We prompted them with several possible actions, and they could check as many as they liked.

We found that 16% of employed respondents would quit, start looking for other employment or both if their employer instituted a mandate. Among those who said they were “vaccine hesitant” – almost a quarter of respondents – we found that 48% would quit or look for another job.

Other polls have shown similar results. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey put the share of workers who would quit at 50%.

Separately, we found in our survey that 63% of all workers said a vaccine mandate would make them feel safer.

But while it is easy and cost-free to tell a pollster you’ll quit your job, actually doing so when it means losing a paycheck you and your family may depend upon is another matter.

And based on a sample of companies that already have vaccine mandates in place, the actual number who do resign rather than get the vaccine is much smaller than the survey data suggest.

Houston Methodist Hospital, for example, required its 25,000 workers to get a vaccine by June 7. Before the mandate, about 15% of its employees were unvaccinated. By mid-June, that percentage had dropped to 3% and hit 2% by late July. A total of 153 workers were fired or resigned, while another 285 were granted medical or religious exemptions and 332 were allowed to defer it.

At Jewish Home Family in Rockleigh, New Jersey, only five of its 527 workers quit following its vaccine mandate. Two out of 250 workers left Westminster Village in Bloomington, Illinois, and even in deeply conservative rural Alabama, a state with one of the lowest vaccine uptake rates, Hanceville Nursing & Rehab Center lost only six of its 260 employees.

Delta Airlines didn’t mandate a shot, but in August it did subject unvaccinated workers to a US$200 per month health insurance surcharge. Yet the airline said fewer than 2% of employees have quit over the policy.

And at Indiana University Health, the 125 workers who quit are out of 35,800 total employees, or 0.3%.

Past vaccine mandates, such as for the flu, have led to similar outcomes: Few people actually quit their jobs over them.

This refusal to get vaccinated is based upon arrogance, conspiracy mongering bullshit and tribal posturing. When it comes down to it many of these people will not give up their jobs for those reasons. They may think they are invulnerable to a disease but they know they are not invulnerable to financial ruin.

Election Law Blog‘s Rick Hasen is losing sleep. Not just over Donald Trump’s and his party’s “stolen election” narrative, but over nationwide Republican efforts to help the 2024 Republican presidential candidate steal the next (if voters who still can vote won’t hand it to him).

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen.

CNN:

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at University of California Irvine School of Law, said he once thought that it would require “some kernel of truth” for people to believe the falsehood that the 2020 election had been rigged.

“It turns out that no matter how much proof there is that the election was done fairly, people are going to continue to believe the ‘Big Lie’ because it’s being constantly repeated by Trump and his allies,” said Hasen, who co-directs the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at UC Irvine.

“One would think in a real world, that even this fake audit, that was stacked in favor of helping Trump, that a finding in favor of Biden would have deflated the enthusiasm. And maybe it has among some,” he added. “But facts don’t matter when you’re incessantly lying about election integrity.”

The extremist right has moved on from working the refs to working its base, more vigorously than before. If nothing else, they are disciplined about it.

Hasen, who recently wrote a paper warning of the risks of election subversion in 2024, said it’s “incredibly dangerous” that people who continue to promote the “Big Lie” are running to oversee future elections.”

No. 1, it will further undermine people’s confidence in the process,” Hasen said. “And No. 2, someone who believes or purports to believe that the last election was stolen is more likely to act in a way to not conduct a fair election as a kind of payback for the supposed rigging the last time.”

People will not believe a thing can happen until it happens. Northerners scoffed at the idea that Southern states would secede, historians explain. Then Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. Many of us never thought the country so unbalanced that it would elect Donald Trump in 2016. Then it did. We failed to take Trump’s “Stop the Steal” as anything more than “a ridiculous stunt.” writes Jamelle Bouie. Then came the Jan. 6th assault on the Capitol.

Ten months later, Bouie writes, “Stop the Steal” has become “something like party orthodoxy, ideological fuel for a national effort to seize control of election administration and to purge those officials who secured the vote over Donald Trump’s demand to subvert it.”

Bouie continues:

Despite the danger at hand, there doesn’t appear to be much urgency among congressional Democrats — or the remaining pro-democracy Republicans — to do anything. The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has passed a new voting rights act aimed at the wave of restrictive new election laws from Republican state legislatures, and Democrats in the Senate have introduced a bill that would establish “protections to insulate nonpartisan state and local officials who administer federal elections from undue partisan interference or control.” But as long as the Senate filibuster is in place — and as long as key Democrats want to keep it in place — there is almost no chance that the Senate will end debate on the bill and bring it to the floor for a simple majority vote.

It’s almost as if, to the people with the power to act, the prospect of a Trumpified Republican Party with the will to subvert the next presidential election and the power to do it is one of those events that just seems a little too out there. And far from provoking action, the sheer magnitude of what it would mean has induced a kind of passivity, a hope that we can solve the crisis without bringing real power to bear.

“The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it,” Hasan told Politico:

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

After everything that has happened since Trump decended the golden escalator, Democrats continue to behave as if it can’t happen here. New voting rights legislation has stalled as they focus on the infrastructure and Build Back Better reconciliation bills.

Hasan again sounded the alarm Monday evening on “All In with Chris Hayes,” saying,

Law — making legal changes — it’s so important. It’s my number one priority to push this over the next few years. But legal change alone is not going to protect American democracy. We’re going to have to be ready for mass, peaceful protest. We’re going to be ready to organize civil society, the kinds of things I never expected we’d have to talk about in the United States.

Hasan is right. After Trump’s 2016 election, women were so outraged that millions took to the streets nationwide and around the world, as many as half a million or more in Washington, D.C. It might take that and more after the Electoral College meets in 2024.

We assumed the legal battlements would hold in 2020, only to find months after the Jan. 6th attack how close Trump’s allies came to a successful coup. Faithful Americans might want to be better prepared in 2024.