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."

The welcome sign is up for the folks who do the hardest job in the country.

When you give these crazy ultimatums like “Get the vaccine or lose your job” places like Indiana that don't believe in top-down mandates like Mayor Lightfoot and President Biden will benefit. pic.twitter.com/wgkpiOooEE
— Senator Mike Braun (@SenatorBraun) October 21, 2021

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

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...

Moving on to YouTube

Remember when the blogosphere was a wild ride? Doctors, writers and researchers dove into research, picked apart studies and stood up to official advice and conventional wisdom that didn't work. We found each other in the comments and made a community. Along the way, Dr. T. Colin Campbell's research got exposed as shoddy by an English major, Tom Naughton made us laugh, "safe starch" fads made us scratch our heads, "Diabetes Warrior" Steve Cooksey almost went to jail, CarbSane trolled everyone who was anyone, and CarbSaneR trolled the troll. Now it's very quiet. Blogs don't come up in Google search results anymore and even if they did, most of the bloggers have stopped writing. That's why I've moved on to YouTube. Videos do come up in search results and my shorts--which are mostly what I make--get pushed out to hundreds of people or more. My videos are on food and health (biohacking), but also on growing things and fixing things. If you...

We Hate the ADA; Why does the Perfect Health Diet Get a Pass?

Some people keep touting the Perfect Health Diet as low-carb, but carb levels that are mostly in the triple digits aren't generally regarded as low-carb; in fact, one of the authors says low-carb diets are unhealthy. A lot of us hate the American Diabetes Association's advice for diabetics: start with 45g to 60g of carbohydrate per meal and go higher or lower from there. That's 135g to 180g of carb. Perfect Health Diet advice for diabetics: eat 20% to 30% of your diet as carbohydrate. On 2,000 calories, that's 100g to 150g of carb. On 1,700 calories, that's 85 to 128g; on 2,200 calories, that's 112 to 168g. Depending on your carb and calorie intake, carbs would be 85g to 168g per day. That's not a mile off from the ADA's recommendations. Paul Jaminet, one of the authors of the Perfect Health Diet, says, "the basic biology here is that the body's physiology is optimized for a carbohydrate intake of about 30%." He warns against a ...

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder . ...

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog