Yesterday Just the News posted an article with some interesting news about vaccine mandates. Americans seem to be waking up to the fact that vaccine mandates could be the prelude to some serious losses of freedom.
The article reports:
COVID-19 vaccine mandates are provoking an unlikely set of opponents: Labor unions.
Long known as a generally left-of-center cohort, unions — especially teacher’s unions — are not a social force one would expect to mount a sustained opposition against such mandates, which have been growing in number in recent weeks. Yet a broad, unaffiliated coalition of unions is signalling its intent to oppose the mandates, at the very least for their own members.
New York State United Teachers — a major educators’ union with over 600,000 members — said in a statement this week that it was opposed to proposals to make COVID-19 vaccines a mandatory condition of employment.
“We have advocated since the beginning of the year that any educator who wants a vaccine should have easy access to one,” the group said. “We would support local efforts to encourage more vaccinations, such as through programs that require that those who are not vaccinated get tested on a regular basis.
“But it’s critical that districts come up with plans to make testing available on-site and at no cost. What we have not supported is a vaccine mandate.”
The article continues:
Opposition has not come solely from the educational sector. Henry Garrido, the executive director of AFSCME’s District 37 in New York City, told local media that the union is “absolutely against an absolute mandate to vaccinate everyone.”
Healthcare unions, meanwhile, have also stated their opposition to mandates.
“Mandating vaccination is not, nor will it ever be, the answer,” George Gresham, the president of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, told media this week.
“As democratic organizations, unions will generally do what their members want,” Jack Fiorito, a management professor at Florida State University who specializes in labor issues, told Just the News this week.
“Surely there are some groups of union members with a majority who are ‘anti-vax,’ and thus their union will likely take an anti-vax stance,” he said. “Even in unions that are pro-vaccine, there would be concern for the rights and wellbeing of those who may not be able to get the vaccine for health reasons (for example, due to some other health problem, vaccine sensitivity, etc.)”
We need to remember that this is an experimental vaccine. I suspect there will be a real push to approve the vaccine within the coming months, and that approval will negate the argument that the vaccine has not been approved.
A website called uspharmacist.com notes:
“Since 2010, most novel vaccines approved by the FDA required about 8 years of clinical development and were based on evidence from a median of 7 clinical trials, including at least 2 pivotal efficacy trials that were randomized, masked, and used a comparator group,” the authors conclude. “These pivotal efficacy trials enrolled a median of 5,000 patients, who were followed up for serious adverse events for at least 6 months. Given the urgency of developing a COVID-19 vaccine, trials will need to be larger than those supporting prior vaccine approvals and include sufficient follow-up time for emergence of adverse effects.”
At some point all of us need to ask ourselves why we are even talking about a vaccine mandate for a disease that has proven treatments. We also need to ask why immunity in those who have recovered from the disease is not taken into account. And finally we need to ask ourselves why there is such determination by the government that everyone get vaccinated with a vaccine that has not been fully tested. None of this is logical.