Pirate's Cove

It’s such a grave danger than the rule won’t kick in till January 4th. Here’s Marty Walsh, the U.S. secretary of Labor and Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator and counselor to the president in an op-ed in the USA Today

Employer COVID-19 vaccine and testing mandate will protect workers and boost U.S. economy

Our nation is at an inflection point in our fight against COVID-19. About 70% of American adults are fully vaccinated, and cases and hospitalizations are down over 50% since early September. This is real progress, but the virus remains a threat to unvaccinated individuals, particularly America’s workers.

Although COVID-19 is not exclusively an occupational disease, transmission can and often does occur in workplaces – affecting employees and their health, families and livelihoods. In fact, more than 4.6 million American workers missed work in early September because they or someone they loved had COVID-19.

In other words, COVID-19 continues to hold back our workforce and our economy – and it will continue to do so until more Americans are vaccinated.

Interestingly, the economy was starting to do quite well before Joe Biden took office, even though very few had been vaccinated.

American workers deserve and expect a safe and healthy workplace. That’s why Thursday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a rule that will protect workers from the grave danger posed by COVID-19. The new OSHA rule requires businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure each of their employees is fully vaccinated or undergoes weekly COVID-19 testing.

Employers have until Jan. 4 for each employee to get their shots or begin testing at least once a week. The new rule also requires employers to provide paid time for workers to get vaccinated, eliminating one of the major barriers that keeps workers from starting or completing their vaccinations.

How is that a barrier? People have days off. It literally cost me about an hour to drive to the vaccination site, get the shot, wait around for adverse reactions, then drive home. This is not a thing, but, then, Democrats live in their own little world, thinking that companies will screw their employees on even things like this.

This rule covers more than 80 million workers and will have a huge impact, saving thousands of lives and preventing 250,000 workers from hospitalization over the next six months alone.

Why not companies under 100 then, if we are going to protect workers? Don’t they matter? Why wait till now to release this rule?

And because people want to work where they feel safe, vaccination policies could lead to up to 5 million Americans reentering the workforce, according to Goldman Sachs. That’s good for workers and business alike.

That might not be the best report to cite, as it estimates that “7mn affected workers report that they will definitely not get the vaccine, and vaccine mandates imposed by health care providers earlier this summer caused some workers to leave their jobs”, though they say those people might get jobs at smaller firms.

It is called a “grave danger” many, many times in the rule (here it is an all its 490 pages). And

"The agency is not requiring the use of face coverings by workers who are fully vaccinated because vaccination is sufficient to reduce the grave danger to themselves or
others"

OSHA undercuts all govt which still has a mask mandate https://t.co/otJQlaLlL7

— William Teach2 ??????? #refuseresist (@WTeach2) November 4, 2021

Masks are mentioned hundreds of times, yet, the text, way down in Section VI, part I Face Coverings, does say just that. That completely undercuts masking for all vaccinated people.

It is huge because there is lots and lots of blather, most likely included to make it tougher for lawsuits. And you can bet the lawsuits will be filed soon. Lots of them.