Vaccination: Employers’ fraught decision
As companies move toward reopening workplaces, they’re “stepping up the pressure on workers to get vaccinated,” said Chip Cutter and Orla McCaffrey in The Wall Street Journal. Last week, Goldman Sachs ordered its U.S. workers to disclose their vaccination status, and other companies are also “taking a more assertive and urgent tone.” The tech giant Salesforce .com is inviting workers back to its offices—but only vaccinated ones. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that employers can require all on-site workers to be vaccinated, with some exceptions, and many hospitals and other health-care operations are already doing so. Houston Methodist suspended 178 workers who refused to meet a vaccine mandate. A group of them sued, likening the vaccination requirement to Nazis’ medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. But last week a judge threw out the lawsuit, ruling that unvaccinated staff “are jeopardizing the health of doctors, nurses, support staff, patients, and their families.”
Still, few employers plan to require proof of vaccination, said Martha White in NBCNews.com. Most “have little appetite for the potential legal and public relations headaches.” Employers are “getting a lot of pushback from their employees about even asking the question,” said Brian Kropp of the consulting firm Gartner. That’s as it should be, said Aaron Kheriaty and Gerard Bradley in The Wall Street Journal. The FDA has granted three vaccines emergency-use authorization, not full approval. That’s why even U.S. soldiers aren’t compelled to get a shot. Forcing workers or college students to do so violates “basic principles of medical ethics” and tramples on “fundamental liberties.”
Nonsense, said medical ethicists Ruth Faden and Nancy Kass in The Baltimore Sun. Personal liberty ends when people’s choices endanger others. Companies are obligated to provide a safe workplace, and unvaccinated employees could subject their vaccinated co-workers to “breakthrough” infections that can lead to death or hospitalization— especially with the spread of new variants. Conservatives fighting such mandates have forgotten their principles, said Quin Hillyer in Washington Examiner.com. Normally, they would support the right of a private business to set its own rules to “protect its workers and customers,” just as it can ban customers without shoes or shirts; if you don’t like it, you are free to go elsewhere. Sadly, anti-vax hysteria has knocked conservatives off their “philosophical and constitutional moorings.”