Just because there is an alternative doesn’t mean the alternative is anymore reasonable.
I’ve had COVID. Testing myself weekly to see if I have it again doesn’t make any more sense than getting the vaccine. Why can’t the mandate include an option for antibody testing, to demonstrate immunity? Wouldn’t that be reasonable?
Another example: many, many people working from home with no physical interaction with others. Is there an exception for them?
But even more importantly, it’s probably impossible to test that many (more) people every week, currently.
I know of a family whose kids were out of school this week because the testing was unavailable/delayed. And that’s before the testing mandate. I’m afraid it is impossible for now. For how long? And how many businesses are willing to risk the $14,000/person/day? None. So in essence it means lots of people sent home and not allowed to work.
An alternative that is not actually available makes it back into just simply a vaccine mandate.
I’ve started doing a little research to try to understand what precedents exist concerning OSHA’s authority in work from home environments. From what little I’ve read so far, their authority seems rather ambiguous there, and I’m anticipating that the administration is planning to lean hard into that ambiguity.
Here’s a document dated 1999. Haven’t made it to more recent documentation yet. Interesting read, anyway.
EDIT: Here’s another interesting one from 2000. It seems to confirm that OSHA’s only real interest when it comes to work from home environments is when people are doing more industrial-type work there. They don’t appear to have much interest in the regular telecommuter. However, the language of the OSH Act doesn’t seem to necessarily preclude them from taking a more heavy-handed interest in the future.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Department of Labor strongly supports telecommuting and telework. Family-friendly, flexible and fair work arrangements, including telecommuting, can benefit individual employees and their families, employers, and society as a whole.
The purpose of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act) is to “assure so far as possible every working man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions…” (Section 2(b)). The OSH Act applies to a private employer who has any employees doing work in a workplace in the United States. It requires these employers to provide employment and a place of employment that are free from recognized, serious hazards, and to comply with OSHA standards and regulations (Sections 4 and 5 of the OSH Act). By regulation, OSHA does not cover individuals who, in their own residences, employ persons for the purpose of performing domestic household tasks.
OSHA respects the privacy of the home and has never conducted inspections of home offices. While respecting the privacy of the home, it should be kept in mind that certain types of work at home can be dangerous/hazardous. Examples of such work from OSHA’s past inspections include: assembly of electronics; casting lead head jigs for fishing lures; use of unguarded crimping machines; and handling adhesives without protective gloves.
The reason I noted the alternative was because it is more reasonable.
If re-infection is “likely” then testing or vaccinating makes sense. If not, then, absolutely, immunity should fill in for vaccination. The details haven’t been drafted yet, perhaps such an option will be allowed.
I may be wrong, but it sounds to me like this is headed in the direction of a court battle to determine the extent of OSHA’s authority as enshrined in the OSH Act of 1970.
So first question, does OSHA historically have anything to do with workplace vaccination? Answer: Yes. They have been involved with things like Hepatitis B vaccination records in the past (link).
Which tells me that there is going to be some legal argument for precedent.
Which means I don’t know how fast this is going to be struck down in the courts. 
Sure, why not? Seems like WFH has gotten all the breaks lately.
I thought testing was pretty commonplace now, but I dunno. I bet someone would churn out a bunch of tests if there’s a business opportunity.
We should also include testing for the flu and common cold too. Can never be too careful.
There is indeed way too much care/fear/worry going on now. But COVID is clearly worse and scarier. Despite overreactions, there should be reactions.
It seems like things have gotten better in the last six months in terms of at-home testing, but the FDA (or was it the CDC?) was actively thwarting the deployment of at-home Covid tests for months and months after they were drug store items in places like Germany.
I don’t know the specifics on what kinds of tests qualify one for the exemption, though. I just wanted to point out that “money to be made” hasn’t been the only factor here and likely won’t be going forward.
Big picture, it looks to me like the Biden administration is going to use the vaccines as a wedge issue to push its political opponents out of government service, the military and large companies. They seem to want to send the unruly Scots Irish back up into the hills. Well, they may get what they want, but I don’t know that they will want what they get.
After doing some reading and contemplating, these are my thoughts exactly. Back in August, he said of governors who have blocked businesses from requiring vaccine passports that he would “get them out of the way” and override their orders, but several state executive branches have remained their ground with no real consequences thus far.
Additionally, Washington, and the Democratic Party in particular, have been thriving on sowing discord and drawing battle lines among Americans (e.g. intersectionality) for quite some time. Biden and his people were likely hoping for the belligerent opposition from conservatives we’ve seen already so they have more fuel to further advance their narrative that a sizable chunk of the American population are domestic enemies.
I don’t think America’s end is on the heels of this vaccine mandate, but I do believe Biden’s order will prove to be a watershed moment, and we will look back at it as a before/after paradigm similarly to how we’ve grown to view pre and post-pandemic life.
This is civil government expanding to interfere in another sphere. How much jurisdiction does civil government have? When Jesus says give to Caesar what is Caesars, did he intend to say give to Caesar whatever Caesar says is his?
Hopefully the courts will strike it down. These executive actions have been far worse than anything Trump did that the left wined was the end of democracy.
In the time and place that Jesus said this, Caesar’s authority didn’t need to “expand.” It already filled everything. At every turn, from the temple tax to his sham trial in front of Caesar’s appointed Governor, Jesus both affirmed earthly authority and lived a life dedicated to His Father.
It’s hard not to be struck by how different Jesus’, Paul’s, Peter’s and John’s responses were to the civil authorities in their day compared to our responses today, or those of our (American) Founding Fathers.
Oh, and somewhat tangentially to the thread here, I was browsing on the Supreme Court’s endorsement of forced sterilization, Buck v. Bell (“three generations of imbeciles is enough”). Justice Holmes explicitly cited vaccine mandates as a precedent for the decision.
It was an 8-1 decision with only the Roman Catholic dissenting.
I though that was an interesting intersection of things that folks around here find interesting.
We must use all of scripture. Romans 13 for example is not just descriptive but prescriptive of civil government.
Your answer seems to suggest that civil government has all authority on earth except maybe over some little cultic realm involving ceremonies.
Besides is it really our aim to go back to the situation at the time of Christ and the apostles instead of keeping the progress of the kingdom?
We have to be willing to call tyranny tyranny.
Given Sweden’s numbers, I think the overconcern includes covid as well. Get back to life, everyone.
Absurd that it is even a question. The government has no right whatsoever to require vaccines.
You’d have to rewind the clock quite a bit to challenge that. See Vaccination policy of the United States - Wikipedia. In order to get a green card, my wife had to get re-vaccinated because there was no official record of her childhood vaccines. All 50 states require vaccines for children to enroll in public school with the earliest example being Massachusetts in the 1850s for smallpox. The Supreme Court has upheld mandates against all challenges to mandatory vaccination of children. A recent relevant case, Prince v. Massachusetts - Wikipedia, noted in its decision:
The family itself is not beyond regulation in the public interest, as against a claim of religious liberty. And neither the rights of religion nor the rights of parenthood are beyond limitation…. The right to practice religion freely does not include the right to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill-health or death…
That decision as well as the current executive action may be misguided, but we must acknowledge how our actions are perceived by the broader culture and weigh the trade-offs involved. For my wife, I was upset that she had to be barraged with vaccines for diseases she was already immune to. But the alternative was that she might never live in the US and experience the culture I was born into.
Because I’ve experienced mandatory vaccination, I’m sympathetic to those who are on the receiving end. There are risks involved with any vaccine. But when the argument is made that we should not be so risk adverse about COVID then I wonder why we should be so hesitant over a vaccine. Why are some fearless about the disease but fearful of a vaccine?
I want to agree with you but I don’t know how to defend that position from scripture. Help us out.
Render to Caesar the things that are of Caesar. The burden of proof is on them to prove that our bloodstreams belong to Caesar in such a way that a fraudulent ruler can break his promise to mandate the forcible injection of an experimental and unproven gene therapy of spike proteins that was created using murdered babies.
Caesar also does not have the right to define what Caesar’s authority is, which is what an appeal to court rulings does.
We also know that Biden, Fauci, and the CDC are proven liars and demonstrate a communist agenda. Fauci himself helped sponsor the creation of this virus. They profane the name of God, they break the Constitution of the United States and they have already proven treasonous against the American people. They reject natural law and demonstrate contempt for most of the citizens of the nation. Proven medical murderers like Cuomo are treated like heroes until they get removed for unrelated reasons.
We are basically asking if we are required by conscience before God to receive an injection from our enemies or else face extreme sanctions like loss of livelihood or jail time.
It is absurd on its face. We should be able to discern our way through this one.
Is there a reason why Jesus, Paul, Peter and John didn’t call tyranny tyranny? Or did they and I’m not seeing it?
Are you calling our atheistic republic “progress of the kingdom” or am I misreading you here?