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Should Disney Require Its Employees To Be Vaccinated?

HughPickens.com writes According to Joanna Rothkopf Disneyland is already a huge petri dish of disease with tired children wiping their snot faces on Goofy and then riding log flumes through mechanized rivers filled with the backwash of thousands of other sweaty, unwashed, weeping toddlers. Now John Tozzi reports at Businessweek that five workers at Disneyland have been diagnosed with measles in an outbreak that California officials trace to visitors at the theme park in mid-December. The measles outbreak is a publicity nightmare for Disney and the company is urging its 27,000 workers at the park to verify that they're inoculated against the virus, and the company is offering tests and shots on site for workers who are unvaccinated. One thing Disney won't do, however, is require workers to get routine vaccinations as a condition of employment. Almost no companies outside the health-care industry do. "To make things mandatory just raises a lot of legal concerns and legal issues," says Rob Niccolini. Disney has been working with public health officials, and they've already put some employees on paid leave until medically cleared. "They recognized that they were just a meeting place for measles," says Gilberto Chávez. "And they are quite concerned about doing what they can to help control the outbreak."

8 of 673 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Paid sick leave by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is why the US system sucks - in the UK I get 4 weeks fully paid sick leave from my employer, and after that a further year of statutory sick pay from the Government. I also get 5 weeks paid holiday against which my sick leave does not count. In addition, I get reasonable accommodation to go see the doctor, dentist, optician, hospital etc etc.

    Why is the "land of the free" not similar?

  2. Re:Herd immunity by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Informative

    The protection you get from vaccinations is on the "herd" level and not the individual. If the majority of the herd is not vaccinated, the vaccine itself provide very little protection to an individual....

    Factually incorrect for most vaccines, which provide a high degree of protection for individuals

  3. Re:its a tough subject by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Informative

    but if vaccinations actually worked, Darwin would take over and ONLY THOSE WHO REFUSED VACCINATIONS DIE.

    I reject your assertion that "worked" is binary. Vaccination effectiveness is measured in percentages, not with a simple "true" or "false". You have a small percentage chance of being infected even if you were vaccinated.

    Then throw in that a small portion of the population cannot be vaccinated. We were all part of this cohort at one time as newborns. Combine the percentage of people who cannot be vaccinated and the number with ineffective vaccines and there isn't a whole lot of headroom for ignorance. This is why Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria are the last places on earth with polio.

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  4. Hospitals require testing by sjbe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Employers should not be put in a position where they are giving medical advice or direction. If there is a reason that large, public centered facilities or parks should have required vaccinations, then that needs to be public policy, not corporate policy.

    Hospitals require testing and proof of vaccination as a condition of employment. I've worked in one in the past and they wanted proof of certain vaccinations, a TB test, and provided any needed vaccinations free of charge. (I got a booster for MMR and tetanus) I think if a place like a hospital it would be insane not to require the employees to be reasonably secure against likely communicable diseases. At a place like Disney where they have to deal with the general public I wouldn't have a problem with public health policy mandating vaccination as a condition of employment. I don't think people should be forced to accept a vaccine if they are adults and really don't want to (and of course if they cannot due to allergies etc) but I have no problem with certain jobs being closed to them if they are not vaccinated. I think all children should be vaccinated or have proof that they cannot safely be vaccinated before attending any public school.

  5. Re:its a tough subject by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Informative

    *sigh* Every vaccination debate we get this ignorant argument. Vaccinations, like everything in life, aren't 100% guaranteed. They're very effective, but they don't *always* work. Also ,there are people who can't have a vaccine for legitimate reasons (often a compromised immune system). The people for whom the vaccine doesn't take, and the people who legitimately can't get vaccinated are protected if enough people *are* effectively vaccinated because there aren't enough viable carriers. This is called "herd immunity." That is why everyone who can be vaccinated needs to be vaccinated--not just for their own protection but the protection of others.

  6. Re:Yes. by ganjadude · · Score: 4, Informative

    I kept returning to the UN pledge to build a drug-free world. There was one fact, above all others, that I kept placing next to it in my mind. It is a fact that seems at first glance both obvious and instinctively wrong. Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war. Even William Bennett, the most aggressive drug czar in U.S. history, admits: “Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population.”

    link - http://boingboing.net/2015/01/...

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  7. Post hoc ergo propter hoc by sjbe · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've got a WAIS 3 combined cognitive function test score of over 180 (that's all you need to know), and I am against vaccinations where they are not necessary.

    Ok, I don't get what the needless bragging about your IQ score is about but most health care professionals would agree with you on this point. If you aren't going to Africa there probably isn't a need to get some of the more exotic vaccines out there since vaccines can have unfortunate side effects. Perfectly reasonable.

    Influenza mutates every ten days, rendering vaccinations useless before they're even distributed. My wife got a flu shot in October, she had influenza over xmas. I've not even had so much as a cold since the last time I had a seasonal shot back in 1993 which resulted in me developing pneumonia thanks to influenza. Eight months it took me to recover from that.

    You may be smart but you are quite ignorant on this point. Influenza isn't a single virus. It is a family of viruses and yes they mutate fairly often. Every year the CDC looks at the strains of flu viruses out there and how they are spreading and determines the 5 or so most likely strains to be a problem in the US. They then develop a vaccine to cover these strains. This vaccine does NOT make you immune against all strains of flu and you still might catch a strain not covered by the vaccine. And the CDC is often wrong about which strains actually prove to be most problematic since they are really just making an educated guess. If you get the flu vaccine you are more likely to be protected than if you don't against a few strains of flu but it does not and never did mean that you won't get the flu.

    Furthermore if you choose not to get the vaccine you might actually encounter the virus but not become symptomatic but still carry it and infect others. The more people that get the vaccine the stronger the herd immunity benefit.

    Finally it is highly unlikely that the vaccine caused you to get pneumonia. You seem to be unfamiliar with the latin phrase post hoc ergo propter hoc. Just because the pneumonia followed the vaccine doesn't mean the vaccine caused the pneumonia.

  8. Re:its a tough subject by Translation+Error · · Score: 5, Informative

    Of course, if the CIA hadn't used a vaccination program as a front for an intelligence gathering operation in the region, maybe this violence against and mistrust of vaccination teams would be much lower.

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