Houston Methodist Hospital suspends 178 employees for failing to get vaccinated

[Skeptic]

@jlw

285 employees were given medical or religious exemption

Should there be a religious exception? I realized that under the current supreme Court, the hospital may not have a choice. But I don’t consider someone’s personal choice any greater or lesser value than someone who claims that their choice comes from their religion.

[pfranz]

Medical, religious, and personal belief are the three types of exemptions. Each state allows a subset.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/school-immunization-exemption-state-laws.aspx

A few states got rid of some exemptions a few years ago when opting out of vaccinating kids got popular and transmission was linked to Disneyland in 2015. As far as I’ve heard there haven’t been serious Supreme Court challenges recently.

[Pipkin]

Thanks for the link. That’s super cool.

[jerwin]

The experimental vaccine disclosure is pretty dramatic. But it’s better than getting COVID. And it’s even better than worrying about getting COVID.

[AJinNH]

That should include the “religious” exemptions. There should be no such thing.

[smulder]

@anothernewbbaccount

in the UK there is a large difference

This article and topic are about Texas

[allenk]

@willmore

These are vaccines, any complications with regards to safety will be found in the first week or two.

Is that true? I thought one of the potential ways for vaccines to go awry (and, that this was an issue with attempted SARS and MERS vaccines) was that you might have too strong an immune response when you actually encountered the disease. Obviously, we have enough data on the COVID vaccines to know this isn’t an issue, I’m just asking more abstractly.

[jerwin]

Much more realistic than the way it’s portrayed in scarface.

[renato]

@willmore

These are vaccines, any complications with regards to safety will be found in the first week or two.

There is a problem with a dengue vaccine because it would increase the risk of severe infection in those who have not been infected before and that is not something that was found so fast.

[d_r]

@MadLibrarian

My brother and SiL are in the “waiting to get FDA approval” camp.

There have been 170 million people in the US alone that have been vaccinated, with negligible ill effects. Are they waiting for a larger sample size?

[jerwin]

yikes.

Texas is scheduled for March 16, 2022,.

How Is The COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign Going In Your State?

[RickMycroft]

Certainly not around anyone who’s immunocompromised, which might happen in hospitals from time to time.

[Otherbrother]

@willmore

These are vaccines, any complications with regards to safety will be found in the first week or two. So, two vs four months of data makes no difference.

There’s definitely precedent out there for odd vaccine complications that took longer than two months to present themselves.

Incidence of narcolepsy in Norwegian children and adolescents after...

Narcolepsy Following 2009 Pandemrix Influenza Vaccination in Europe | Vaccine...

[anothernewbbaccount]

@smulder

This article and topic are about Texas

My sincere apologies for expanding the conversation in a direction I thought relevant.

Nevertheless, my original point about statistical fact was about the UK:

@anothernewbbaccount

We have a similar issue in UK. I do not know what it is that means certain demographics (yeah, it’s a catch-all euphemism for various groups that also overlap - POC, less educated, lower incomes, and so on and on) are less willing to get the vaccine, but it is a statistical fact that those in authority need to pay attention to, investigate, and take actions to try to address.

To which your response was that it only ‘may’ be a fact but was really just ‘something somebody claimed on the internet’.

I simply sought to disabuse you of that notion by providing citations. (a.k.a. ‘facts’), to which your response seems to be (I paraphrase) ‘stick to the subject - the subject is Texas’.

I did not realise the subject was strictly limited to ‘Texas’, but I now see I was mistaken to think that the general topic of vaccine hesitancy or vaccine avoidance in some subset of hospital staffs (and the possible role that demographics may play within that) might somehow be relevant to the topic in hand and of interest to others, even if my examples were from another, somewhat similar, western country with similar issues with getting hospital staff (and certain demographics in general) vaccinated.

I should have known better than to diverge from the ‘what about those ignorant anti-vaxxer medics in Texas’ theme. My apologies.

[anon29537550]

This was certainly an issue with the try at a dengue vaccine, and it is possible, but as you note, we have sufficient experience now to say this is not an issue with Covid.

(Ninja’d by @renato. Have a coke on me!)

[anothernewbbaccount]

I’m sure you are completely correct, although there was this, today…which goes beyond the rare blood clotting problem already observed, I believe. But again, very rare.

AstraZeneca vaccine linked to slightly higher risk of blood disorder

[anon29537550]

The argument that I am hearing now is not related to sample size, but time course. Like “we need 10-15 years experience before we can call it safe.” By this argument, of course, there can never be an innovative treatment introduced, since we need decades of experience before starting to gain experience.

[anon29537550]

Interestingly, the objections I hear (anecdotal, I know) are not about AZ, which actually has a known, if very rare, adverse effect, but about the mRNA vaccines based on new-equals-scary. People are weird.