I know a woman who works in the Health Care industry. Specifically, she works for Essentia Health. Just a few days ago, Essentia released a memo stating that they were going to “require all colleagues to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment”. Here’s a chunk of the first page (highlighting added by me):
I know it’s a lot of words so I’ll give you the gist, my friend must allow herself to be injected with an experimental drug in order to keep her job. But everyone is expected to just “look the other way folks, there’s no coercion to see here”. Nope. None at all.
Yeah. Right.
Now, I could maybe see the justification for forcing nurses, doctors and other patient-facing people to be vacksinated. I’d still argue against it, but at least I’d be able to see the logic in the argument.
But my friend is in customer support. And she works entirely from home.
Even though she has zero face-to-face interactions with anyone at the company, the “Essentia Health Leadership Team” has decided that she still needs to be vacksinated if she wants to keep working there.
In what universe does that make sense? Not this one.
I’ve heard stories of other remote employees (the term “remote workers” sounds too Socialist for my liking) being faced with a similar ultimatum, but now I’ve witnessed it firsthand.
Essentia Health isn’t the only company forcing remote employees to get vacksinated. Much, if not all, of what I’m saying today applies to other companies and even governments. But I’m going to pick on Essentia, because the members of their “Leadership Team” are obviously idiots.
Hey Essentia, let me give you a little clue, the only virus you need to be concerned about catching from a remote employee is a computer virus. You don’t need to force people to be vacksinated, you just need to buy a copy of Norton.
Can companies like Essentia Health really force their telecommuters to be vacksinated? I don’t think so.
According to the EEOC: “Federal EEO laws do not prevent an employer from requiring all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for COVID-19, so long as employers comply with the reasonable accommodation provisions of the ADA and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other EEO considerations.“
As I said, my friend works 100% from home. She’s not going to ever physically enter an Essentia Health facility. So, one could reasonably argue that she shouldn’t be required to be vacksinated.
The only way it makes sense for companies to require telecommuters to get vacksinated is if the employer considers work areas inside the employees’ homes to be a company facility. But they’re not. So they can’t.
My friend is a young woman and and hopes to start a family soon. She’s concerned, and rightfully so, that there may be potential long-term effects of an experimental drug she’s being forced to take.
Will the vackseens have any impact on her ability to have healthy children? I don’t know. And, unless Essentia Health has a magical crystal ball that gives them the ability to see the future, they don’t know either. Because no one knows. There is no data available about the long-term effects of the vackseens because there have been no long-term studies.
My friend doesn’t want to gamble her future family on any potential unknown side effects of an experimental drug. But apparently the “Leadership Team” at Essentia Health is willing to make that bet for her. Or not. I mean, it’s up to her to decide if she still wants a paycheck so it’s not like they’re putting a gun to her head. Except it’s kind of exactly like that.
We’re now seeing that the vackseens aren’t particularly effective against the new “variants”. In fact, most people who are contracting COVID-19 have been fully vacksinated. What’s more, the CDC recently announced the discovery that vacksinated people are at least as contagious as unvacksinated.
So, being vacksinated isn’t likely to keep you safe and it isn’t likely to help keep others safe either. But employers like Essentia are still going to force all employees to be injected with a drug that will be less effective tomorrow than it is today.
Again, how does that make sense?
That’s easy. It doesn’t.
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