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With COVID out of control, Biden unveils hefty vaccine mandates:
President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled a sweeping six-pronged plan to try to regain control over the COVID-19 pandemic, which is wildly raging once again in the US.
[...] The main focus of the president's "Path out of the Pandemic" plan is on reducing the number of unvaccinated people in the country. As such, the plan's most prominent elements are hefty vaccination requirements for millions of federal employees, health care workers, school employees, and even employees of private businesses.
Biden signed an executive order Thursday requiring COVID-19 vaccines for millions of federal workers plus millions more federal contractors. The new vaccine mandate eliminates a previous option that allowed federal workers to undergo regular testing in lieu of vaccination.
In addition to mandating vaccines for federal workers, Biden will also require vaccination for over 17 million health care workers who work at facilities that receive federal funding. The administration had previously required vaccination for all staff of federally funded nursing homes. The new requirements will extend vaccine mandates to hospitals, dialysis facilities, ambulatory surgical settings, and home health agencies—most facilities that receive Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements.
[...] The administration is also working on a rule—to be implemented through the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration—that will require employers with 100 or more workers to ensure that their workforce is fully vaccinated or submits to regular COVID-19 testing. The rule is expected to apply to over 80 million employees nationwide. OSHA is also working on a separate rule that will require those employers to provide paid time off to get vaccinated.
For schools, Biden will require vaccination for the nearly 300,000 staff in federal Head Start and Early Head start programs. He will also put pressure on governors to get all teachers and school staff vaccinated. Last, the administration will push more schools to implement regular testing, which will be funded by $10 billion the administration already allocated to schools earlier this year.
Also at CNN, www.aljazeera.com
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Friday September 10 2021, @12:09PM (1 child)
The problem is when vaguely related things all get lumped together. It's even worse than a slippery slope fallacy, as the jumps to the next "and also" can be in any direction.
Don't get me wrong, I not saying even a fraction of anything positive about how those in positions of federal responsibility for public health in the US addressed the issue, so some of your complaints are valid, they're just unrelated to a present vaccination policy. Fucki and Ballszack should be turned into fucking labrats, in my honest opinion. Hanging's to good for them, unless it can somehow be incorporated into some kind of biological experiment. Something to to with tensile strength of neck tendons? Yup, OK, approval granted - just make it slooooow. Maybe start on the arms and legs first, before the neck, so more data can be gathered. For science, and the advancement of mankind. Of course, if some president, I forget which one, some time during the late 2010s hadn't nuked the NSC's Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense then perhaps there would have been a more coherent response the global biothreat? Bummeur, as they say in France.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Redundant) by shortscreen on Friday September 10 2021, @01:57PM
You're correct that multiple issues are getting lumped together. If we had found ourselves in a different political landscape, with higher levels of trust, candor, and calm rationality, then we could construct policies that serve the public good without provoking a shitstorm everytime. But that isn't where we are, and nobody is even trying to get there. Nobody is trying to build trust, build consensus, or reach a compromise. Instead they are trying to grab more pork for their friends and protect them from accountability, while trying to censor, bully, undermine, and discredit their foes. The authorities taking an adversarial position against large sections of the public is counter-productive and irresponsible. It's like we're being governed by tweets now.