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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."
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.
because I am not anti vax, but i am pro choice. in that people should be free to do as they wish with their own bodies
As long as these bodies are kept out of civilization, i.e. basically hermits, then I'm fine with that. If you want to participate in society, though, you have to get vaccinated. It is part of the social contract you make with the rest of humanity. It is analogous to you waving around your hands (your body) being free, as long as you don't hit someone in the face (someone else's body).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Would this be mitigated by Disney *always* providing paid sick leave? The quote in TFS suggests that this might be the exception rather than the rule. If you encourage employees to come in to work while they're sick, or even hide their symptoms, then I guess you're more likely to see illnesses spread...
because I am not anti vax, but i am pro choice. in that people should be free to do as they wish with their own bodies
That is my baseline as well. But while I lean libertarian, the measles virus has no such ideology. As such, I am pragmatic and realize that this probably crosses the line of "your rights end where mine begin". You are infringing on other people's rights by knowingly and voluntarily making yourself vulnerable to deadly disease. I suppose that just like the right to free speech, people should have a right to not be vaccinated - but they do not have a right to be free from the consequences. Long and short - employers should be able to discriminate against people who voluntarily refuse vaccinations.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You have a choice. You can always leave society. I didn't have any choice of where I was born or what civilization I was born into, either. I got over it.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Absolutely it is. Your have freedom to live your life as you choose. If you are forcing others to accommodate your choices, now you're infringing on THEIR rights.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Sounds like you feel entitled to that job...
Innocent until proven guilty is for specific parts of the legal system only - the police and prosecutors have to believe you are guilty to bring a case against you, so its obvious it doesn't apply to everyone, everywhere, for all things. So a company doesn't have to assume you are innocent at all, as neither does your friends, family or random person in the street.
A drug test isn't an assumption of guilt in a court of law. The entire guilty until proven innocent is for criminal and civil trials, not for employment. Mandatory drug tests are pragmatically stupid for many reasons in many industries (they are much less likely to catch the hard drugs like cocaine which go out of the system fast than marijuana which lingers, they cost a lot of money), but in the case of Disney where the employees are working on and maintaining rides with many passengers and where people could easily be killed if something goes wrong, drug tests aren't as unreasonable. In general, the real silliness of drug tests is when they are used by things like fast food restaurants or worse when they are used as a condition of welfare (where the evidence is that they cost far far more than they save the state).
Sure, over an evolutionary timespan. Assuming that the disease in question kill before you can give birth, and that they kill enough of the population to be impactful in an evolutionary sense.
Call me soft though, I'd prefer we solve this problem in something less then an evolutionary timescale. I kinda care about the kids who'd die otherwise.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
so where do we draw the line? should we allow an employer to have access to our bank records? to ensure we arent funding terrorists? Should we give them our passwords to all our accounts online? to ensure we are not bad mouthing the company?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
i consider myself a libertarian, but at the same point i believe that what one does on their own time is of no concern to an employer. as such, one should be judged on the merits of their work, not their recreation
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Draw the line wherever you like, you don't have to work for them. I don't work for companies that want to pay me less than I want to be paid - it doesn't take any laws or rules for that to work.
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.
Rule of thumb: It's not a free choice, if there is a big "or else...." attached.
Free choice does not mean choice without consequences. I am free to speak my mind but that does not mean I shouldn't expect consequences for doing so. I can choose not to vaccinate my children or myself but that doesn't mean I should be allowed to endanger other people by making that choice. I can choose not to be tested for drugs for philosophical reasons but that might mean that certain jobs are closed to me.
Choice almost never comes without consequence.
*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.
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/...
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
Because finding out the dude was high when he forgot to check the safety harness on Space Mountain after someone flies out and dies makes it all better. Suuurrre, he's the one they are going to sue for millions of dollars over negligence and Disney has no right, reason, or interest in ensuring the safety of their customers..
Look, ganjadude, it's FINE that you want to toast your brain. Rock on, dude. Just don't do it at a time or place where your impaired state is likely to affect me in any way whatsoever. In exchange I promise not get wasted on single malt and drive around in your neighborhood.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Look, ganjadude, it's FINE that you want to toast your brain. Rock on, dude. Just don't do it at a time or place where your impaired state is likely to affect me in any way whatsoever
This times 100 is what I am saying. What one does in their off time is not of any concern to others
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
If I HAD to get something from a Disney employee, I'd rather get the clap from one or more of the several Princesses they have running around there.
Lots of fun and then just a shot!
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.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Nearly all companies worth working for have drug testing requirements. So it's not as easy as "you don't have to work for them." You effectively can't work for anybody in entire swaths of industry for doing something that is so harmless, several states have decided to legalize it. Do companies check to make sure you aren't violating other laws? Certainly. Do they make you prove your innocence on a quarterly basis? Of course not. That only happens with drug use.
Some employers even have you sign agreements not to drink in public, drive 5 mph under the speed limit, stay under a certain weight, or my personal favorite-- back in to all parking spots. Let's not forget some companies (e.g. church schools) still fire people for being gay. My employer doesn't allow me to post negative comments about my company on forums. Should this shit be legal?
Seems to me that if a person is doing their job well, that a company shouldn't have the right to fire them. I live in an "at will" state. We can fire somebody because the sky is cloudy, and they can't do anything about it. That seems pretty fucked up to me.
Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it.
But those 10% of caffeine addicts will do anything for just one more shot of espresso.
perfectly spherical unemployed in a vacuum.
We can disagree over the rights of herd immunity, but those who maintain that refusal to vaccinate hurts only the one who refuses, as the OP argued, are just plain ignorant of the facts.
Requiring employees who have extensive contact with the public, especially the young and elderly, to have vaccinations for highly infectious diseases is also common sense.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law