Biden Conceding Defeat on Vaccinations – New Strategy?; Backed by Several Rulings, Companies Can Now Require Vaccinations
Q1 2021 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
Biden's Defeat On Vaccinations
WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 22, 2021) - The White House is expected to concede today that its program and goal to have 70% of the adult population at least partially vaccinated by July 4th failed.
So, since it now seems certain that, as a result of this failure, many will die needlessly, and many more will suffer serious and sometimes long-lasting illnesses, perhaps it's time for a new tactic which worked so successfully regarding smoking, at least if we really want to save thousands of lives and billions in unnecessary health care costs, suggests pubic interest law professor John Banzhaf.
The professor - known as the "Man Behind the Ban on Cigarette Commercials," and also as the father of the nonsmokers' rights movement, is widely credited with getting millions of Americans to quit smoking, thereby saving over a million lives and billions of dollars in unnecessary medical expenses.
When we first began to convince businesses that workers who refused to quit smoking endangered the health and very lives of other employees around them with their carcinogenic tobacco smoke, workers who had previously and stubbornly refused to quit smoking - despite all the health warnings and governmental pleas - soon acquiesced once their companies prohibited smoking on the job, remembers Banzhaf.
When many companies went a step further, and announced that only workers who had quit smoking could continue to work for them, even more very hurriedly quit, he says.
Vaccination Requirement
So now that there is a ruling by a federal court, a determination by the EEOC, and the acknowledgment by the CDC that employers can require their workers to be vaccinated or face termination, perhaps it's time for major corporations to publicly consider - if not actually announce - that their employees should finally get vaccinated if they want to guarantee their jobs and/or their return to the workplace, and for Biden to publicly suggest that they do so.
President Joe Biden and his people can support such a movement through speeches, announcements, guidance, and most importantly assurances that such a policy is not only legal, but also very effective in making workplaces safer, and saving lives of many, in addition to the workers themselves.
In both situations (smoking and vaccine hesitation), health warnings and other pleas simply did not work well enough, and the direct result was an enormous loss of life, and huge unnecessary medical expenses paid by everyone in the form of higher taxes and inflated health insurance premiums, and the health and very lives of many others was endangered.
So, as with smoking, we can and should do more than simply warn and plead; major corporations which were quick to support many other causes even if lives were not directly at stake should consider imposing a vaccine mandate as thousands of companies (including hundreds of universities) have already done; and government leaders should support such policies, or at the very least make it clear that companies may legally adopt such measures.
Getting Free Covid-19 Vaccinations
Banzhaf notes that it is far easier to get one or two free COVID-19 vaccinations than it was for millions of smokers addicted to nicotine to quit if they wanted to keep their jobs.
So if companies were willing to impose a no-smoking or even a no-smoker requirement when health warnings and persuasion wasn't sufficient, they should be willing to do the same here and now, and issue a vaccine mandate, for all of the same reasons, argues Banzhaf.
So many public spirited companies have spent millions supporting other important public causes - pledging to hire more women and minorities, running ads for Black, Asian, LGBTQ+ people, etc. - that it is time for them to consider putting real muscle into a movement where lives and health are directly at stake, where continuing to rely solely upon messaging is working poorly, and continuing to cause many unnecessary deaths and even more very expensive hospitalizations.
While governments may not be able or willing to mandate that companies only permit people who have been vaccinated to work for them, governments can support and facilitate such measures (by providing guidance about how to best carry them out, and that such policies are legal), and individual companies can of course adopt these policies on the own to protect the great majority of their employees who have been vaccinated, and perhaps even prevent law suits by a person forced to return to an office, factory, etc. who then contracts COVID-19 from an unvaccinated coworker, says the law professor..
