The Mandate is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer [pdf]

https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-60845-CV0.pdf

by SQL2219 • 5 years ago

28 45 5 years ago

ca5.uscourts.gov

SQL22193• 5 years ago

The title of this thread is an actual quote from this review, on page 8.

ajross• 5 years ago

This is a complaint, not a decision. (Or a review)

gandalfgeek3• 5 years ago

This is the decision from the judge staying implementation of the mandate. Read the whole thing.

dang4• 5 years ago

Please don't cherry-pick a quote like that and make it the title—that's not only editorializing, it's the leading form of editorializing. HN titles need to be accurate and neutral, and represent the article as a whole.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213830 also.

PLenz• 5 years ago

The great thing about mandates is that they work. Worse is better as applied to human behavior.

h2odragon• 5 years ago

It is thus critical to note that the Mandate makes no serious attempt to explain why OSHA and the President himself were against vaccine mandates before they were for one here. (elided further citations)

Many measures have been contemplated (and some taken) that would've been over-reaching and extreme had the disease been smallpox. And COIVD was never smallpox.

SQL22193• 5 years ago

"We next consider the necessity of the Mandate. The Mandate is staggeringly overbroad. Applying to 2 out of 3 private-sector employees in America, in workplaces as diverse as the country itself, the Mandate fails to consider what is perhaps the most salient fact of all: the ongoing threat of COVID-19 is more dangerous to some employees than to other employees. All else equal, a 28 year-old trucker spending the bulk of his workday in the solitude of his cab is simply less vulnerable to COVID-19 than a 62 year-old prison janitor. Likewise, a naturally immune unvaccinated worker is presumably at less risk than an unvaccinated worker who has never had the

virus. The list goes on, but one constant remains—the Mandate fails almost completely to address, or even respond to, much of this reality and common sense. "

sriram_malhar• 5 years ago

I really don't quite understand this fuss about the mandate.

Americans have tens of thousands of laws that are locally inconvenient but globally useful for public well being, such as stopping at red lights, not carrying guns on flights, or god forbid, breast-feeding one's kid (who has received a zillion other vaccines).All laws are one-size-fits-all mandates, so why the fuss about this one, other than the obvious political theater?

The petition claims that it is being treated as an "emergency" even after two years. But isn't it the case that it is because of the people like the petitioners that has led to vaccine misinformation and hesitancy, which has stretched the timeline?

I am less surprised about the petition than seeing this as the top voted post on HN.

gandalfgeek3• 5 years ago

Judge lays out rationale very well. One of the main issues is whether a federal body like OSHA can mandate such a broad thing, and how that infringes on “state’s police power” which is a fundamental principle in the constitution limiting federal power into what is up to every state to legislate locally.

One cannot say “because COVID” and indefinitely suspend the constitution.

rsj_hn2• 5 years ago

I really don't quite understand this fuss about the mandate.
Americans have tens of thousands of laws

OK, let me try to break this down to make the court ruling more understandable. The mandate is not a law. It's a regulation issued by OSHA, which is not a lawmaking body, but a regulatory body, charged with limiting workplace injury.

If it was a law, then you wouldn't have this ruling. Laws are passed by Congress.

In the U.S., regulations issued by various bureaucracies can't just be arbitrary. They have to be within the mandate of said bureaucracy, and they have to follow certain procedures. Otherwise they can be ruled as unconstitutional.

That is what the court ruled on. Not whether covid is important, or whether vaccines are good, or even whether vaccine mandates for covid are good. It ruled on whether OSHA is able to create a nationwide vaccine mandate using its ETS (emergency temporary standard) powers.

So the short summary of what "all the fuss" is about is whether this regulation was lawful.

Note that OSHA has a long history of abusing the ETS, and of the 10 times in its history that OSHA issued an ETS, it has been struck down or withdrawn prior to being struck down 9 times.

This is because the ETS powers are extraordinary and so are placed under very strict scrutiny by courts. Again, the courts are not ruling whether vaccine mandates are good, they are ruling whether the ETS power is being abused. This is why many (if not the vast majority) of legal experts have said that you can't use OSHA to make a nationwide vaccine mandate, and that this standard would inevitably be struck down.

This is a very similar situation to when the Biden administration tried to use the CDC emergency powers to freeze evictions. Again, the debate is not whether evictions are bad, or whether it was a good idea to freeze them, but whether the CDC emergency powers allowed freezing evictions. That, too, was struck down.

Hope that helps.

MrDunham• 5 years ago

This is very well written out. Thank you.

It seems much of the conflicting arguments about this article are debating more about whether or not vaccine mandates are good/legal/constitutional, rather than seeing that this is a ruling against the method used to deploy the mandate (namely, using an OSHA ETS) and whether or not that is constitutional.

SQL22193• 5 years ago

PAGE 20

Of course, the principles at stake when it comes to the Mandate are not reducible to dollars and cents. The public interest is also served by maintaining our

constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make

intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions—even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.

westcort4• 5 years ago

I had to get the MMR, varicella, Mantoux test, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and several other vaccines to work in healthcare. Children need to get a host of vaccines to go to school and that has been true for a hundred years. The only thing new here is a politically driven disregard for human life.

wingspar2• 5 years ago

And those childhood vaccines are required by STATE law, using the states legal authority. The injunction spells out that the states have ‘police authority’ in this area, not the federal government.

theodorejb• 5 years ago

Never before have I seen restaurants and hospitals requiring me to show proof of a particular medical treatment before they will serve me.

vadfa• 5 years ago

Those vaccines have been tested widely and proven safe for decades.

logicalmonster• 5 years ago

For what it's worth: religious, medical, and philosophical exemptions to various immunization requirements have also been some kind of thing forever in various locations. And in the past, nobody hyperventilated about their own immunity not working if another person wasn't immunized for some reason.

The only thing new here is a politically driven disregard for human life.

The only new thing here? And you can read minds and are certain that the only possible motive here is a disregard for human life? Really? That is not a serious comment.

I'd argue there's a lot of new things and qualitative differences here.

Here are 2 big ones you should consider.

#1) Once the technology to measure clicks was invented, the business model of the mass media has changed from promoting how trustworthy they were to a competition about driving traffic through emotional manipulation (fear, anger, sadness, etc). What media somebody uses has a big impact on how they trust either the Covid-Fear-Porn or Vaccine-Fear-Porn presented.

#2) These vaccine were developed in a much different and quicker fashion than previous vaccines: many of which took around 10+ years of development and testing before being introduced into a mass audience. I think it's entirely rational to be more than a little cautious about the short-term side effects and long-term problems with these new vaccines. It's very easy to see why somebody who took plenty of previous vaccines is cautious about these vaccines.

disambiguation• 5 years ago

People bring up precedence a lot. I hope the same people consider that:

1. Not all vaccines are required go participate in society.

2. I believe this is the first vaccine to be mandated within 12 months of its distribution, though I'd love to be proven wrong about that.

westcort4• 5 years ago

I didn’t think we would end up in a timeline where courts are trying to protect the replication of a deadly virus that has killed millions. Look at the results. Mandate->lives saved; no mandate->more death. I thought you all claimed to be pro life?

xil3• 5 years ago

Pro-life not pro-tyranny! Forcing people to take a vaccine that was rolled out almost immediately, without due process is not protecting anything.

I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it's not a silver bullet, and only time will tell if it's safe.

jimkleiber3• 5 years ago

I'm just not sure how the mandate forces people to take a vaccine. Doesn't it say that people don't have to take it but then have to get tested weekly...if they want to stay at a company of over 100 employees? Doesn't that give people lots of options if they want to refuse taking a vaccine? 1) get tested weekly and 2) move to a smaller company are at least two alternatives to a vaccine, no?

mpyne2• 5 years ago

Pro-life not pro-tyranny! Forcing people to take a vaccine that was rolled out almost immediately, without due process is not protecting anything.

It had 'due process', the same process any other vaccine would receive (including previous vaccines), culminating in an FDA authorization for use. All based on decades of research and 18 months of "shots in arms" data to back it up, when we know after a great deal of experience that vaccine side effects would show up in weeks, not years.

That doesn't make the Pfizer vaccine a "silver bullet" but it has not sideswiped due process and there's no additional data to be gained from waiting longer. So we're at the situation where if the courts decide this vaccine mandate is contrary to the public health, no vaccine mandate could be enforced either.

tag2103• 5 years ago

Stop with the pearl clutching- the mandate is illegal in our Federal system. Full stop.

dang4• 5 years ago

Please stop posting ideological flamewar comments and please do not use HN for ideological battle, because we ban accounts that do that (regardless of ideology).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

gruez• 5 years ago

Mandate->lives saved; no mandate->more death. I thought you all claimed to be pro life?

mandate -> no choice. I thought you all claimed to be pro-choice?

See? It's almost as if someone's political beliefs has more nuance than a two word slogan.

swayvil• 5 years ago

Personal autonomy is sacred in our country. Personal beliefs, less so. It's an important feature of our system.

native_samples• 5 years ago

The issue is, a whole lot of people disagree that mandate = lives saved. The reason mandates are bad is that when lots of people are disagreeing with a law, there are usually rational reasons why.

In this case the increasingly fanatical "vaccinate everything over and over" brigade refuse to accept that disagreement can have any kind of rational basis, and thus don't even listen to the people who don't want to take it. But that is exactly why this type of mandate is really bad news.

As for "what about the other vaccine mandates" - yep, time to revisit them too. Apparently public health agencies aren't at their most trustworthy when talking about this topic. Their treatment of COVID vaccine data has been shockingly poor. It's not a big leap to wondering whether they've been acting like this in the past too and people just didn't notice.

dang4• 5 years ago

Ideological flamewar hell is exactly what we don't need on this site, and you dived straight into it with this comment. That's not cool and is against both the rules and the spirit of this site. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do this anymore?

noetic_techy• 5 years ago

If they mandate we all take the latest and greatest anti-viral cocktail daily or even weekly, fresh out the Merck/Pfizer lab, would we all be onboard with that also? You see the legal precedent that have been set here because "just save one more life".

Because if the goal is elimination and not crushing the curve, then mandating experimental anti-virals is the only logical next step, and it will only work if its truly global.

This virus is endemic now, deal with it. It will never go away, and anyone who thought that 60-70-80-90% vaccination in the USA only would magically stop it was nuts. The vaccine wont prevent transmission or replication, not even in the slightest. Its only at best a therapeutic that 'might' keep you out of the hospital, not even guaranteed.

The government didn't want to create "vaccine hesitancy" so they ignored any and all counter data, doubled down on a bad idea and mandated it, pitted neighbor against neighbor, and suckers fell for the groupthink. Now that its endemic, we have to step back and ask, is +0.07% more deadly then the flu worth all this heartache (lockdowns, mandates, masks, etc)? If its never going away, then at what point do we all plan to take the masks off?

westcort4• 5 years ago

You are exposed to millions of antigens daily, and almost none are FDA approved. This isn’t at all like a new chemical entity, it is a short-lived antigen that trains your immune system, then goes away. This isn’t 1960, it’s 2021. It’s safe, certainly safer than COVID, and necessary to protect you, your family, your neighbors, and our society.

Ekaros• 5 years ago

What is the point of weekly testing anyway? If it doesn't equally apply to both vaccinated and unvaccinated. If the test is positive it's too late with unvaccinated anyway. And if vaccinated aren't tested they are still wilfully spreading to those who aren't vaccinated...

m0llusk• 5 years ago

It is an out. If you absolutely refuse vaccination then there is another path to relative safety. If the testing is weekly then the time for infection is spread is still present but limited, at least in theory.

dang4• 5 years ago

This submission broke the site guidelines badly by editorializing the title. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Commenters: if you're going to post to a thread on a divisive topic, make sure you're up on the site guidelines: .https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We got a lot of hellish flamewar in this thread. That's not cool.

The Mandate is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer [pdf]

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