Skip to main content

Showdown! Will Vaccine Mandates Prevail?

As American readers know, our Uniter-in-Chief announced a vaccine mandate for companies employing over 100 people. The rule has been drafted by OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and is now in review. It is expected to take effect in December--or to put it more plainly, millions of employees are supposed to be fired right before Christmas for the offense of being unvaccinated. Is this really going to happen? 

The day after the announcement, I talked to my boss, who's one of the owners where I work. He's a certified public accountant who advises businesses on compliance. He predicted lots of lawsuits and workarounds; I didn't get the sense there were any plans to fire unvaccinated employees. 

We've seen employers who've already issued mandates and claimed only 1% or so of their workforce left. But given the shortages, shutdowns, delays, rising prices, and rapidly rising wages for certain types of jobs, a 1% difference in the workforce beggars belief. Further, it doesn't take many employees leaving at once to create bottlenecks, especially when they work in similar positions and there aren't many applicants to replace them. Southwest Airlines finally realized this and is now defying a separate federal mandate, encouraging pilots to apply for exemptions. The mayor of Chicago, on the other hand, hasn't been as quick to catch on. 

As Mayor Lightfoot demands Chicago police get vaccinated, those officers have flooded police departments in northwest Indiana (just outside Chicago) with calls and emails seeking employment. Indiana Senator Mike Braun even invited them to contact his office so they can be put in touch with a police department that's hiring--the state police and the Indianapolis Metro Police Department among them. I imagine Senator Braun, who's a former employer himself, talked to the state attorney general about whether the upcoming OSHA mandate will be enforceable and got a response of "probably not." 





So there are indications, from people in a position to know, that federal mandates aren't going to fly and that employer mandates aren't necessarily workable. 

Not only do vaccine mandates make no sense in terms of public health--COVID vaccination rates aren't correlated with COVID rates and provide only small reduction in transmission that recedes or disappears after three months--but they're causing turmoil and simply shuffling people around. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What $115 Buys--Junk Food vs. Real Food

A lady recently went off about how little food $115 buys, complaining that the pile of (mostly) junk food she bought wouldn't make a week's worth of lunches and snacks for her children. Sad to say, but this looks like what I see in a lot of grocery carts.  Fat pic.twitter.com/qbM23ydaOq — shellshock (@shellshockkk) March 7, 2025 Coincidentally, I paid almost exactly the same amount today on groceries that would make lots of healthy lunches. It's filling food that won't leave you hungry every few hours for snacks. If we want to make America healthy again, this is the way.  

Celebrities Shilling for Big Soda

There's a push in Washington and ten states to ban soda (and other junk food) from SNAP, a program for low-income people to buy groceries. This seems like a no-brainer: the N in SNAP stands for nutrition, and soda doesn't have nutrients. It's liquid sugar, the last thing we need in a country full of diabetics. People can drink water for virtually nothing and save their SNAP money for actual food. Yet a number of posts from otherwise sensible accounts have opposed this.  Reporter Nick Sorter says that a company called Influenceable has been paying influencers to post these opinions. (Click on the link for the full thread.) 🚨🧵 EXPOSED: “INFLUENCEABLE” — The company cutting Big Checks to “influencers” on behalf of Big Soda Over the past 48 hours, several large supposedly MAGA-aligned “influencers” posted almost identical talking points fed to them, convincing you MAHA was out of line for not… pic.twitter.com/PpPwH9lHGe — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 22, 2025 Sorter adds...

$17/pound chips! Real food is cheaper

 My latest video on YouTube: Real food is generally cheaper than junk food--the pictures prove it. I took these at Kroger and from their website in March 2025. Prices are either straight from the tags or calculated based on product weight.  Music: On We Go (ClipChamp)  First photo by AS Photography: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vegetables-stall-868110/

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...