Cuomo (yep, still governor for another week) just mandated vaccination for all health care workers in New York. It’s going to be significant, considering this:
As of Monday, the vaccination rate was 75 percent for roughly 450,000 hospital workers, 74 percent for around 30,000 adult care facility workers, and 68 percent for approximately 145,000 nursing home staff.
That’s almost 168,000 people who need to be vaccinated by September 27. Those numbers show just how deep the anti-vax rot goes, even in supposedly blue New York.
There’s a religious exemption (which is bullshit), but I’m assuming a good percentage of this number will get vaccinated by then. Then, when the Department of Health sees that they didn’t hit fully vaccination, Kathy Hochul will come back around and remove the religious exemption, just as New York did for school vaccinations a few years ago.
Since Americans Have Suddenly Discovered Afghanistan, A Couple Of Items To Keep In Mind As the News Media Frenzy Escalates
MisterForkbeard
For all that Cuomo should have resigned months ago, i’m totally in favor of him doing potentially unpopular but correct things before he goes.
Ken
I’m trying to be charitable but can’t find an interpretation other than “I work with vulnerable old people, but don’t really give a damn about them….”
Leto
@Ken: There’s quite a bit of that. They didn’t give a shit beforehand, simply don’t give a shit now. Of the many things that scare me about growing old, the retirement home system ranks very high.
Earl
@Ken: Given how poorly they’re paid, it’s not like the olds give a damn about the workers either, so I’m kinda :shrug: on this…
Pay peanuts, get monkeys, meet Darwin
Or more charitably… complaining people getting the shit end of the social contract ain’t enthused about obligations of the social contract…
Roger Moore
@Ken:
The one charitable interpretation is that a lot of those people got COVID before and assume that will protect them well enough they don’t need to be vaccinated.
Leto
@Earl: part of the reason they’re paid poorly is that venture capitalists found nursing homes to be an exploitable money making operation. John Oliver had a good piece on it, which given this thread is about Cuomo, his opening statements are hilarious.
Ryan G
Health care workers don’t need to care about their patients, that’s just asking for them to burn out and quit when their patients inevitably die the next year. They need to care about doing a decent job, and remembering their immunology training, and acting like a goddamn professional.
Barbara
@Ken: This is a powerless, poorly paid population frequently doing a job they don’t like, and a non-trivial percentage will seize power where they can as a means of expressing discontent, not because it makes sense. This is almost always at the heart of anti-vaccine sentiment, when you look more closely.
Kay
Martin
Eh.
I mean, don’t get me wrong – it’s good, but it’s insufficient. I welcome the progress, just as I did when CA did this, but all of these leaders need to really do the work here. Here’s how I laid the problem out a year and a half ago for university leadership.
Put aside for the moment what you believe you have the capacity to do.
Now, let’s walk through what is going to happen. The things you think you might have the capacity to do might slow this down, but they are insufficient to stop it. We all recognize that. As we proceed through this the following things will happen:
1) Students will get sick and start missing classes. What is your duty to notify other students? Are you prepared to exercise that duty. It may come in the next few days – have you consulted with legal council on what you have the authority to do, and have you laid the infrastructure for doing it? They hadn’t because that was part of my job.
2) Instructors will get sick and either need fill-in instructors or their classes get cancelled. Have you laid the infrastructure for doing this? They hadn’t because that was part of my job.
3) A student or instructor will die. Have you consulted with legal council on what our liability is in this case. Are you prepared for questions of what you could have done differently. If we are the first university for this to happen at (decent chance we would be) are you prepared for every decision you have made to this point being questioned and scrutinized by the national media? Are you prepared to see the mom of this student on CNN crying and denouncing your decisions?
4) At some point the state or feds will force us to close. We WILL close. That is unavoidable. In light of this, is moving that decision forward to today to avoiding 1-3 the moral, legal, and correct thing to do? If so, then do it, and then defend that. Be the first to make that decision, be a leader, carry that reasoning to your colleagues elsewhere. That’s what got universities 2-5 closed. UofW was first. 4 UCs followed. I think UofW closing caused leadership to accept that closing was inevitable, and they were then primed to jump to 4.
So, does this move address the problem? It helps, sure. And it may help to keep the respective health care systems from collapse. But it allows the problem to continue. Newsom made a decision, Cuomo is following. Cuomo needs to lead and force Newsom to follow. I mean, lets face it, Cuomo is already out of office, Newsom has yet to learn his fate. Cuomo can afford to be bold here.
Raoul Paste
It’s unimaginable to me that you would allow plague rats in a hospital.
And yet I’m seeing a news story about protests at a local hospital requiring vaccination. Personal choice my ass
Chief Oshkosh
@Earl: The “olds” have no say in how much the caregivers are paid, even at the most expensive places.
MagdaInBlack
@Leto: Thank you. Last I checked, the “Olds” don’t determine the pay scale.
Martin
@Ken: Have you seen what nursing home staff get paid? Not giving a shit about them seems to baked into the business model for nursing homes. You can only expect so much charity out of your employees.
Elizabelle
@Kay:
Good to hear that.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Martin: FWIW SUNY/CUNY has mandated vaccination for all students. It should be mandatory for staff as well, and for private colleges/universities.
Martin
@MagdaInBlack: Sure. I’m not saying nursing home residents deserve getting sick. I’m saying that management doesn’t care if nursing home residents get sick, and why are the workers being put on the hook here instead of management/owners?
This is why unions aren’t volunteering for vaccine mandates. The whole point of organized labor is to make management do the work. They can do the work of hiring in a team to vaccinate workers on site. They can do the work of mandating it for workers and then dealing with the backlash if any is generated. Management is walking away here with no repercussions.
Sorry to go all Marx here. I’m working through some contradictions in my own thinking.
Barbara
@Martin: What’s happening is this: There are many nursing homes that WANT a mandate but they fear the loss of employees who go to work for competing providers. A few — but not many — individual nursing homes will become the outlier in mandating that their employees get vaccinated. This is something that HAS to be done by government mandate.
I saw your follow up comment. I am not sure what additional work management could do. They could pay workers better, they could provide better incentives or payment rates to encourage vaccination, but I think that most have concluded that won’t work and it would be unfair to workers who have willingly gotten vaccinated, and actually create a perverse incentive for those who haven’t. There are situations where I would agree with you 100%, but to me, this is basically a public health issue, and given shortage of nursing home beds and qualified employees, it’s just not fair to nursing home residents to leave this one up to management competence.
Martin
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: Yeah, at most universities the vaccine mandate applies to staff as well. We’re even requiring it of contractors.
Progress is good, but political progress is at best linear. Epidemics are never so generous as to be linear. You have to move WAY faster than you think, because the disease is. By the time you mandate it, you are *at best* a month from the effects of that mandate actually showing up. 2 weeks for people to get the shot, and 2 weeks for the shot to work. Add another 2-3 weeks for the 2-shot options.
If you aren’t looking at the landscape at least a month out, your decision making is behind.
MagdaInBlack
@Martin:
Well, speaking as a working class stiff who had a Marxist sociology professor, I can see that the workers are always on the hook and management always walks away, in our present system. So I agree with you.
But, my point was that the choice to pay the workers so little doesn’t come from the patients, any more than my stagnated wages are caused by my customers.
Martin
@Barbara: I realize that. But that’s part of the courage that owners/management need to show. I’ve not seen a single one lobbying/advocating for a mandate from government. All I’ve seen are union reps and workers.
And I’m not convinced that’s the outcome. Wouldn’t the workers who don’t want to get sick then leave their employers that lack a mandate for the ones that have one? There’s all kinds of dynamics here, but I’m guessing they almost never play out because low-wage workers lack mobility because they lack agency.
The market solution here would be to put the mandate in place because it’s the right thing to do, and if your workers start quitting raise wages to attract new workers. Hell, I’d be willing to bet if management said ‘we’ll raise wages $1/hr if all staff get vaccinated’ that problem would solve itself.
MagdaInBlack
@Martin: That last bit, $1/hour raise, I’ve been saying since the vaccines came out. Falls on deaf ears, so far.
catclub
Too bad they cannot afford to say they are giving raises to those who are vaccinated.
Barbara
@Martin: We probably read different trade publications. Hospitals and nursing homes have been — if not advocating for a mandate — explaining why they individually are unwilling to impose a mandate. Notwithstanding, I do agree with you in that there are some facilities that have either mandated vaccination or somehow managed to get upwards of 90% of their workforce vaccinated without a mandate. I suspect that their success has more to do with an overall good track record of creating trust in their employees that predates the pandemic. But it would take too long and leave too many vulnerable people as collateral damage to allow that alone to be the factor that motivates people to get vaccinated.
gvg
I have been looking for a thread to mention this, but I noticed in the last 2 zoom townhalls for my employer (in Florida) that the doctors are no longer mentioning those who have underlying medical conditions and can’t get vaccinated. Now the expert wisdom is the immune compromised need to get vaccinated more than anyone else and they are almost saying that if they don’t it’s irresponsible. Its interesting to notice the change, and I guess I should have expected it. That makes more sense than them trying to isolate.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Well, YEAH!!!
PHUCKING RUN ON THE MANDATES.
NorthLeft12
Up here in Canada, the Cons are running on a no mandate platform and the NDP and Liberals are supporting mandates for a lot of people based on their potential to transmit the virus to the public. Especially those who are vulnerable and unable to be vaccinated.
Josie (also)
@Martin: I recall seeing reports that health care workers at senior homes were working at two or three different places at one time due to work hour shortages. Not sure if this is still true.
Cermet
Religious exemption is total bull shit; no major religion disallows vaccinations – period. Any and all are special groups that claim such a thing all do belong to religions that allow vaccination so it is a lie – this is worse than the re-thug voter fraud claims.
Another Scott
Jamie Lynn Crofts at Wonkette:
Indeed, take the win. Forward!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Ascap_scab
Okay. Now abolish the death penalty before you leave.