They’ll Think Themselves Victims: Scenes From An Oregon Attorney’s Office
Detail from photograph captioned PLUMB, GLENN EDWARD. LAWYER. AT DESK (1955), by Harris & Ewing, photographer, digital file from original negative available from the Library of Congress at https://www.loc.gov/resource/hec.12681/, call number LC-H261- 30770 [P&P]. Looks annoyed, doesn’t he?
I didn’t know how things would turn out — no one did. I tried to keep current on the relevant issues and application of the law, and finally, starting in August of this year, nearly a year and a half after I committed to help, my phone started to ring and my e-mail started to ding. It hasn’t stopped since, and it’s given me a lot more gray hair than I had before then.
What appears below is not a conversation I have had with any particular person. It is sort of an amalgam of a bunch of these calls, freely reconstructed and lightly genericized because a lot of them have been more or less the same. There have been a bunch of them — to date I count 83 e-mail referrals and I’ve had at least half that many calls generated directly by my website.1 But I think the below represents both the general substance and (I hope) tone of most of these callers:
JANE DOE
Hello, I got your number from the Oregon State Bar. I’d like to talk to a lawyer. I think I’m about to be wrongfully terminated.
ME
Tell me your name and the name of your employer and I’ll run a conflict of interest check.
JANE DOE
Sure. I’m Jane Doe and I work for XYZ Hospital.
ME
[Taps on computer] No, I do not see any conflict of interest. Okay, so what’s going on? What do you do for XYZ Hospital?
JANE DOE
Well, I’m a nurse at XYZ. I worked long and hard to get my R.N. and there aren’t enough nurses here. And they know that! We’ve been working double shifts since this COVID thing happened.
ME
I hope they’ve been compensating you accordingly.
JANE DOE
[Laughs bitterly] No, my reward is they’re making me get vaccinated!
ME
You’re… Wait. You’re a nurse and you didn’t get vaccinated the first chance you got?
JANE DOE
No way. No one’s putting that poison in my arm! Besides, I know how to not get infected, I’m a nurse. I’m trained in using PPE.
ME
I believe you, but I got vaccinated back in February, first chance I could, in case a client or someone was infected.
JANE DOE
Good for you, I guess you’re one of the lucky ones if nothing bad has happened to you. Most people won’t be as lucky as you and I hope for your sake there aren’t any long-term effects no one knows about yet. Anyway, I’ve already had COVID, so I have natural immunity. That’s better than what the vaccine gives.2
ME
Uh… huh. So. The hospital is making a rule that all nurses have to be vaccinated by a certain date, I take it?
JANE DOE
Not just nurses, everyone! Even the guy who works in IT! Everyone has to be vaccinated, if you can believe they’d do such a ridiculous thing.
ME
Actually, I can.
JANE DOE
So what I’m thinking about is I want to maybe claim a religious exemption.
ME
You know that won’t be the end of the story, right?
JANE DOE
What do you mean? My pastor will give me a note.
ME
Oh, they’ll take your religious claim at face value. They won’t challenge that at all. No one can tell you what your religious beliefs are. But that’s not all there is to it. Once they see that you have a religious objection to the vaccination, HR and, I’d hope, the ADA coordinator are supposed to look at the physical requirements of your job and see what can be done to accommodate your objection. And there’s this case, from way back in the seventies.3 It says that the employer’s obligation to accommodate is only de minimis. Basically, if it takes them more work than they’d do trying to fit in everyone’s requested days off on a schedule, they don’t have to do it at all.
JANE DOE
That’s not right. No. That can’t be right. I’ve read a bunch of things that say they have to honor my religious exemption!
ME
I don’t know what you’ve read. I’ve read the law.
JANE DOE
You’re kidding. I can’t believe that! It’s not true!
ME
Sorry. That’s the law, Ms. Doe.
JANE DOE
No, this guy at my church has this flyer that said–
ME
With all due respect, was the guy at your church a lawyer?
JANE DOE
No.
ME
Well, I am a lawyer.
JANE DOE
I’m starting to wonder if you’re a very good one!
ME
My opposing counsel in another case just told me the same thing. [Waits a beat, scowls.] She was a little nicer about it.
JANE DOE
So does this mean the hospital can do… they can just do whatever they want? And everyone’s just going to let them get away with it!
ME
I’m sorry but I wouldn’t take a case with these facts. That’s not political, it’s mercenary. I–
JANE DOE
Okay, well, what about my privacy rights? Isn’t my vaccination status protected under HIPAA?
ME
No.
JANE DOE
I thought HIPAA protected all of my medical information.
ME
No. It doesn’t. HIPAA mainly applies to insurance companies. Even if it did apply here, the employer has a need to know whether people are vaccinated.
JANE DOE
Don’t I have any rights? Did we just abolish the Constitution when I wasn’t looking?
ME
XYZ Hospital is a private corporation, right? It’s not owned and operated by the State of Oregon?
JANE DOE
No, it’s… it’s a private corporation.
ME
Then the Constitution doesn’t apply.
Are you in a union?
JANE DOE
Well, I’m not happy about it, but yes. But that won’t do any good. The union is totally in bed with the hospital on this.
ME
How do you know that?
JANE DOE
My union steward is a real bitch; she’s been trying to get me fired for years. There’s a whole story there, let me tell you…
ME
Sorry, but that’s not to do with COVID. Here’s the thing. Like every state but Montana,4 Oregon has “employment at will” and that means they can fire you for any reason that isn’t outright illegal. I don’t think this is.
JANE DOE
But it has to be. It’s not fair that I have to make a choice like this!
ME
Again, I’m sorry. Really, I know what it is to have to pick between two really bad options. So look, the objective here is saving your job. Do you have a medical condition or disability that makes you a bad candidate for the mRNA vaccine?
JANE DOE
Hey, yeah, maybe I can get my doctor to write me a note!
ME
Well, I’m talking about a legit doctor’s note that attests either to a history of anaphylaxis in response to vaccines using similar binders as the mRNA COVID vaccines, or if you have one of a handful of rather exotic autoimmune disorders or some other similar condition.
JANE DOE
You mean, like how my sister-in-law has lupus?
ME
You’d know if you had one of those conditions. So, that’s a “no.” Look, you’re an R.N. That’s a super high-demand profession right now. You ought to be able to get a job at a different hospital or medical practice pretty easily.
JANE DOE
No, the Governor issued a mandate to every health care provider in the state that every health care worker get vaccinated. I was kind of hoping you’d want to take on the state on that but it doesn’t sound like you will.
ME
That’s not the sort of thing I do.5
JANE DOE
Isn’t there an Oregon law that health care workers could decide for themselves if they wanted to get vaccinated?
ME
You must mean ORS 433.416(3). That law is on the books, yes, but the Governor and the Oregon Health Authority has effectively suspended that law until at least December 31 under the Emergency Powers Act. I could be wrong, but I suspect the Legislature will repeal this law altogether next year.6
JANE DOE
Damn that Kate Brown! We used to be a free country before all these liberals took over!
ME
Well, it was a 7-2 conservative majority that decided TWA v. Hardison, and a Republican Legislature and a Republican Governor who passed the Emergency Powers Act way back in the day, but really, I try to not be political in my law practice. I need to get the law right, whether I like the answer the law gives or I don’t.
JANE DOE
Is there anyone else there I can talk to? Your supervisor?
ME
Ma’am, I am the supervisor. It’s my name on the door.
JANE DOE
I just can’t believe I have to choose between being a nurse, something I’ve worked my whole life for, and getting vaccinated. I’m not going to quit!
ME
Ma’am, if it helps, I’ve been vaccinated myself. Got the Moderna shot. It was easy. My shoulder was sore for a day or two. I kind of had chills that night and I just went to bed, and I was fine when I woke up. This would be by far the easiest way for you to keep your job, and it would cost you no money.
JANE DOE
Well. Thank you for your opinion. [hangs up]
I did promise to render service to pro bono callers at little to no cost to them. To fulfill that promise, as illustrated here, I’ve dispensed knowledge and applied the law to the caller’s particular situation. She just didn’t like the answer: an employer can make you get vaccinated as a condition of continued employment if it wishes. Sorry, folks, that’s the law. No one says you have to like it. But if you want to change it, you need to change the law.
I’d have hoped to do a further public service to encourage otherwise-reluctant people to get vaccinated. But I’ve found, as depicted, that my callers are unpersuadable. Fine. But I’m quite sure that I’d be doing the opposite of a public service if I used my Super Attorney Powers7 to help people avoid vaccination.
Note also that this is an abbreviated version of these conversations. They typically lasted twenty to thirty minutes. After about the tenth call like that, I made some changes, to protect my own professional time. Now, here’s how a call like that goes:
JOHN ROE
Hello, my name is John Roe. I got your number from the Oregon State Bar.
ME
Are you calling to seek a religious exemption to an employer vaccination mandate?
JOHN ROE
That’s exactly what I’m calling about. How did you know?
ME
So sorry, Mr. Roe. I’ve made a business decision to not take on these kinds of cases. Has nothing to do with your case or you. I’ve told the State Bar I’m not accepting those kinds of cases but for some reason, they haven’t taken my name off the referral list.8 Anyway, I can’t take your case.
JOHN ROE
But… I’m a referral from the State Bar. Don’t you have a legal obligation to accept my case?
ME
Nope. But hey, good luck to you! Goodbye! [Ends call.]
That sort of call goes much better. And, really, by “better,” I mean “faster,” which is about as good as I expect it’s going to get. I know now that a vaccine holdout will be unpersuadable. So I’ve stopped trying to persuade them, about the science, the law, anything. It’s just a “business decision.” And they don’t like it, but the call ends quickly and quietly.
I’ll conclude with offering some observations about demographics. Who are these people that have held out and got themselves into a position where they are looking for a lawyer to help them not get fired?
They have been about equally split between male-sounding voices and female-sounding voices; it’s sometimes hard to tell peoples’ ages and I’ve no idea at all about any of their racial identities, but recall that Oregon is almost 87% white.
They all want to invoke religious beliefs, so what are their religions?
A few callers have identified as Roman Catholic, and had heard that COVID vaccines were made from tissues derived from abortions, but all of them also conceded that the Pope said that taking the vaccines is a “lesser evil,” and my response was “You have your answer right there,”9 but for some reason that never seemed to end it. Only Catholics, and not a single caller who volunteered that they subscribed to any of the myriad non-Catholic flavors of Christianity, have raised this issue as a basis for an objection.
This is the only substantive religious objection I can remember; mostly the callers say, as I’ve depicted, that they have a religious objection and leave it generic. I don’t inquire.
A few have insisted on reading screeds out loud to me. Frankly, I didn’t listen to any of them closely. I feel a little bit remorseful about this. After all, it’s possible that not all of these homilies10 were spurious and insincere. I beg you to spare a modicum of grace for me on this; by the time I was first imposed upon to endure the reading of such a manifesto, I knew that later on in the call, my caller would say something rude to me about my unwelcome but solicited advice. So maybe “respect” is a two-way street that, in these calls, wound up carrying but light traffic. But truly, the substance of the religious belief is irrelevant to the question I’m being asked.
What matters is whether the employer is willing to accommodate someone who isn’t vaccinated for any reason whatsoever. Particularly if the reason is purportedly religion, they pretty much don’t have a legal obligation to be.11
So these callers have a choice to make. I do have compassion for people facing hard choices and I accept that for these people, this is a hard choice. But at the same time, to me this choice presents one option that is clearly superior to the other.
By way of analogy: I once heard the story of a man who worked as a vocational trainer for adults with mental disabilities. Under time pressure one day, he made a mistake. He needed some toilets cleaned, and his client balked because that was gross. The trainer intended to offer a reward of ice cream, but because he was stressed out, he messed up and said instead, “Would you rather eat ice cream or scrub the toilets?” (He got the answer you’d expect.)
To me, “Would you rather become vaccinated against a debilitating and potentially deadly disease or lose your job?” is a toilets-or-ice-cream kind of question. I’m gobsmacked that anyone would torch their own career rather than eat the ice cream.12 I fear they will blow the call, and wind up unemployed. They’ll think themselves victims.
I remind myself, there are two things all these people have in common. Demographically, they’re all adults. And they’ve each been presented with a choice. They and not I will have to live (or maybe die) with the consequences if they choose poorly. So it’s not for me to make that choice for them.
- At least I know the website attracts potential clients.
- This claim is questionable, if not doubtful.
- Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, 432 U.S. 63 (1977)
- Sounds good for the Montana employee, but Montana’s worker protection laws have recently been weakened and it may well be harder to bring a wrongful termination suit there than most other states.
- This isn’t exactly true; while I’ve never done it, I’d challenge a law that I thought was unconstitutional. But not a vaccine mandate. A no-exceptions, all-adults vaccination mandate was upheld in Jacobsen v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) and that case’s reasoning will map to modern Constitutional law. Current members of the current U.S. Supreme Court appear to think so, anyway: cf., Klaassen v. Trustees of Indiana University, USSC docket 21-2326 (relief denied), Aug. 12, 2021 (Barrett, J.).
- To you, Ordinary Times readers, I’ll confess that I’m unclear on how this rule was promulgated validly given the existence of the seemingly contradictory statute, but it’s being enforced statewide and I’m not aware of any pending challenge other than this one, which ducked the issue on 11th Amendment grounds (pages 38-40).
- Spoiler: these powers don’t turn out to be all that “super.”
- This is 100% true, and a durable source of frustration for me.
- In fact, no COVID vaccine is made from any “fetal tissue” recovered from abortions. They were developed or tested using one of two decades-old lines of stem cells, thousands of generations descended from some collected from either an abortion that took place in Denmark in the mid-1970s or in Texas in the 1980s. Nearly all vaccines have. Also, Pope Francis has called getting vaccinated “an act of love” and pointed to humanity’s “history of friendship with vaccines.” But, my callers apparently know the law better than the lawyer, and they know the science better than the scientists, so why shouldn’t they also know Catholicism better than the Pope?
- Cringe-inducing sermons which I did not ask to hear and told the caller that I did not want to hear because they would not affect my legal opinion.
- An actual, bona fide medical exemption would likely be different.
- Yes, I know that they think they’re being offered a shit sandwich, not ice cream. They’re wrong.
It’s very hard for me to have sympathy for people who insist on having their own facts.Report
I have a friend who recently fell down the anti-vax rabbit hole and is now facing termination from a 20+ year career at a major aerospace company in CO. Nominally highly intelligent person. Boggles my mind.Report
Yes, there’s a guy at work who is an extremely competent engineer, older than me, has a wife who is sick enough that he’s needed to take time off on occasion, and he’s not vaccinated yet.
IMHO we’re filtering on a personality trait that normally doesn’t come up so we have no clue who has it. It’s the difference between “goes to church” and “really, truly BELIEVES”.Report
It wasn’t a thing back in college when we met, so once upon a time it wasn’t an issue. It popped up after they started shifting rightward politically and fell into the culture war.
Politics makes people stupid.Report
Intelligence is a funny thing. Lots of flat-earthers are also electrical engineers. People can seemingly finish nursing school and sometimes even medical school and still fall for quackery especially if they sense a grift to make more money. Dr. Oz comes to mind.Report
Quackery is MUCH more widespread than we like to think (probably all religious claims could be lumped in there), it’s just people pick and choose their flavors.Report
When I was the go-to guy at <large telecommunications company> for weird questions about technology, I was always surprised by the number of people who reached high-level positions and had basically zero knowledge about either the technology critical to the business or the laws that applied to it. Also, how much more willing they were to believe a generic business consultant drawing a huge fee than the in-house technical and legal staff.Report
The consultant probably told them what they wanted to here. The in-house technical and legal staff probably told them “no that is a bad idea” and the exec thought “how dare the peons question their betters?”Report
Well, sometimes workers lie to upper management. Sometimes they have vested interests that they can’t see beyond. If the higher-ups don’t have the skills to evaluate that for themselves, they will bring in someone from outside to verify.
I’ve been through that process. We completely turned the outsider. He bought our story completely, because we were being faithful and accurate. But there’s no way the CEO, who was an English major and a retail exec, could have known that.Report
This is a person with a high quality STEM degree, who started out doing extremely precise embedded assembly code.
I really blame the underlying politics. When they started getting involved in the right wing crap, it’s like all reason went with them.Report
i dunno i’ve known a lot of people with advanced degrees (and not just in the humanities*) who were really good at what they did but flat out nutbars about one (or several!) different topics. being good at code doesn’t remove someone’s ability to become emotionally invested in cultural conflicts.
so it’s not particularly surprising to me that someone can be tremendously skilled at some things and disconnected from our shared reality in others. it is disappointing when it happens to someone you like, but i just try to avoid certain topics because i’m going to hurt their feelings and/or be a jerk, inadvertently or not.
(none of these good friends are anti-vax, though i certainly have some colleagues in my orbit who stay under the radar about it with me)
* i am taking the high road and not making cheap jokes about the humanities phd folk i’ve met who have no skills *and* no adherence to our shared reality. i am thinking of them, tho. thinking real hard.Report
I have worked with people who dreamt in code and were masters at electrical wiring who were Young Earth Creationists.
Now the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum…Report
Oh, I hear you. I was mostly just responding to Michael’s point about people rising high without the supporting domain knowledge. My friend is upper management, and has that supporting domain knowledge. This is just an odd hill for them to defend that (IMHO) grew directly out of their rightward political shift.Report
HIPAA applies to a lot more than just health insurance companies. It also covers nearly all providers, claims clearinghouses, employers, and most critically their sprawling numbers of business associates (including law firms!). What it doesn’t do is prohibit the type of verbal disclosures by a person of their vaccination status mostly at issue nor does it apply to documents held by an individual patient at all.
Anyway my experience with planet healthcare has me a lot less shocked about vaccine hesitancy in the industry, particularly with nursing and allied caregivers. People think of them as much more science-y than they necessarily are. They are best understood as skilled technicians (which is not meant to be a knock at all, they’re very important). But much like a great mechanic is capable of both rebuilding a transmission and not grasping statistics, providers especially at this level can be great at tapping veins and operating complex radiology equipment while still knowing nothing about epidemiology, vaccination, and having pretty out there political beliefs.
Anyway I am off to get my J&J booster today, as I feel compelled to stick with the third best option. Hopefully the side effects will be less annoying this time around.Report
I’d say this is true even up to MDs. The MD doesn’t mean that they are trained scientists, as medical schools are not (TTBOMK) trying to turn out research scientists.
One would hope that along with the biology and chemistry classes, they would have picked up on how the scientific process works and adopted the mindset, but it doesn’t seem to take all the time.Report
Indeed. There can even be a ‘know just enough to be dangerous’ component, not to mention the various god complexes running around some places. Which again is not to tar huge groups of people, some of whom are literal miracle workers. It’s just important to remember they are human with idiosyncrasies and the same capacity for blind spots as everyone else.Report
I’m getting a Moderna booster on top of my J&J, because my non-expert reading of the limited data available suggests that. (Throw in that I also have natural immunity, and “limited” goes down to “non-existent”.)
Science!Report
I’m operating more on the ‘devil you know’ theory. You see I preach science but practice superstition.Report
“People think of them as much more science-y than they necessarily are.”
The healthcare industry is much more like the IT and automobile-repair industries than anyone wants to admit. A smart person can do the job better, but “smart” isn’t actually a job requirement; you just have to be able to learn the skills and learn the flowchart for identifying which skill is relevant in a particular situation.Report
If we may assume the existence of IQ for a few moments, the eternal problem is that people who are within one standard deviation of the average make up around 68% of the population. People one standard deviation away (on the right side) make up about 13.5% of the population. People two standard deviations away make up about 2% of the population.
How many people two standard deviations away do we need to do stuff like IT, car repair, and healthcare? Oh, and educating people who are going to be doing all of the above?
Just doing some quick bar napkin math, my answer is “a hell of a lot more than 2%”.
And that’s without getting into how two standard deviations away from the average is, like, a *STARTING* point for where bare competence begins. You’d prefer someone three standard deviations away. (Maybe not four. I’ve met some fours. Three is fine.)
I mean, assuming IQ exists.
Thank goodness it doesn’t.Report
secret knowledge:
Nursing is a technical job, not an empathy job.
Teaching is an empathy job, not a creative job.
Engineering is a creative job, not a technical job.Report
Please…
Not-so-secret knowledge:
A good nurse knows the technical side, but delivers much needed empathy.
An expert teacher is very creative while being empathic.
Engineers need a good technical grounding in order to be creative.
I’ve done all three. Simple little slogans don’t do a good job of describing complex and important tasks.Report
You can be skilled in multiple domains and that can make you better at your work but you don’t need these things to perform the basic job function.Report
I will happily leave performing just “basic job functions” to others. Seems…limited.Report
Love how you’re advocating for the reduction of women in IT, healthcare and teaching. Truly, Jaybird, I doff my hat.
Finding a woman that’s 1 in 100? Pretty easy. Finding a woman that’s 1 in 10,000? Extremely difficult. Finding a woman that’s one in a million? Pretty much not happening, statistically.
[Autists and other weirdos are a bit of an exception, having weird brains to begin with.]Report
Oh, IQ doesn’t exist.
There are multiple intelligences, anyway. Emotional intelligence is very important too.
What do we even mean when we say “intelligence”? Nobody has ever defined it.Report
Women have pretty much the same IQ as men.
“Pretty much” as in “within the margin of error we’re not sure if there’s a difference”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenceReport
Well I certainly don’t want to under-cut the value of providers. Again, there are some people out there doing just incredible things. But to your point there is also a lot of rote work more like changing oil or routine IT troubleshooting.Report
Vaccine mandates do seem to work. The number of people losing their jobs over them is small but that minority is an interesting study in how adamant humans can be. The choral director of the San Francisco symphony lost his job over refusal to get vaccinated. He clung to the idea that provisional approval is dangerous and he is going to wait until the 2023 trials are finished at earliest. This is also probably a lie.
At this point, the unvaccinated are probably going to remain that way and a good number will die from an easily preventable death. The stories that boggle me the most are all the ones about both parents dying and leaving behind orphans. They couldn’t even get over their resistance for their very young children. The other aspect of the stupid, it burns is all the people who seem to be literally dying to own the libs and causing shortages of horse dewormer.Report
A good number will die? I think it’s still around 2% max, and that’s among those with comorbidities.Report
in Mississippi, 94-96% of those hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated. Nearly the same percentage of deaths are unvaccinated. So while it may be that 2% of the overall population dies (which is bad, but ecologically sustainable), that doesn’t change the fact that if you are unvaccinated and get COVID your chances of dying are significantly higher.
What worries me more, however, is all the people who are unvaccinated, get COVID, get hospitalized and live. Long COVID is a thing, its turning out to be very debilitating, and combined with the loss of over 700,000 Americans it’s going to have long term economic effects we are only beginning to start understanding.
All for something that’s now preventable through a vaccine.Report
According to the MSDH, 86% of hospitalized patients are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.Report
Now that boosters are available, what’s the definition of “partially vaccinated”?
Does it include “only two shots”?Report
There’s a fuzzy footnote on one of the charts defining it as one dose of a one-dose vaccine or two doses of a two-dose vaccine.Report
The overwhelming majority of COVID hospitalizations and deaths now are among the unvaccinated. A few weeks ago, there was a story of a couple that left five young kids behind, one child was a forced premature birth as the babies mom was on a ventilator for COVID. These are entirely preventable deaths.
There have been at least 739,000 COVID deaths in the United States. This does not include people who died because they were denied care or had delayed care because of ICUs filled up with COVID patients. If people were not filled with kookbabble about vaccines, many of the deaths since April 2021 or so would have been preventable. Maybe even earlier in the year.
I will be blunt. I am rather tired of the conservative prosecution complex. I’m tired of people who insist bad-faith kookbablers like Ben Garrison with his barely veiled anti-Semitism and racism need to be taken seriously. I’m tired of bad-faith trolls who offer the non-apologies of middle school class clowns when called out on it. I’m tired of the endless resentments of dwindling rural populations whose attitude towards life might as well be Eric Cartman in his state trooper mode.
Maybe you right in a very technical sense about the death rate but it would have been much worse if we followed the COVIDidiots or Trump’s ideas.Report
“Maybe you right in a very technical sense about the death rate”
technically correct is the best kind of correct, tho.
i think the better hinge point here is not “so what if you’re factually correct, because feelings” (this is the refuge of the maniacs you decry in your subsequent paragraphs) but rather “sure, their risk of death may be small…” – because it very likely is extremely small in many of these cases, perhaps even most – “….but the risk of those around them? those they come in contact with? their kids or grandkids? their neighbors? coworkers? dear friends? those are the risks they should be focused on, because they are unknowable *and* incredibly preventable.”Report
Me getting covid means I seriously suffer (and have other problems) for two weeks. The vaccine reduces that by a lot. That’s worth the pain of a shot right there.
Yes, it does other things for other people (as well as for myself), but we’re already deep into “no brainer”.Report
I don’t think my point is quite that but that these are very preventable deaths.
As to your second paragraph, these pleas have been tried numerous times and failed. Couples are leaving behind very young children as orphans because they refuse to get vaccinated. During the early days of anti-mask rhetoric, there was a tweet that more or less said (and spread around the internet); “I don’t know how I am supposed to tell you that you should care about other people.”Report
And yet we better not dare question conservatives commitment to or reasoning from Fairness and Caring when we have this discussion, because they really, really care you see . . .Report
The young couples leaving behind orphans is a rare outcome, however. It’s a good emotional point – because it’s horrifying and dramatic – but a super small portion of covid deaths. Pretending otherwise is the lair of madness.
Vaccine uptake has slowed across all populations, which as we’ve all noted super duper sucks. And the ambient rage involved is a thing I would hazard most of us feel now and then. It is definitely a consistent expression in the Twitters, and elsewhere, as no real outlet is available to us.
And thus we flounder.Report
The Ambient Rage and Butthurt has been simmering since Trump got elected. “How DARE he!!!”
It’s gotten worse since the vaccine, but it’s hard to tell if that’s “We were promised NORMAL!!” or if it’s actually the vaccine.
Type B personality disorders on the rise, on the “easily advertized” front. Twitter isn’t helping.Report
My state has a Health Care Right of Conscious law which is being successfully invoked by nurses that refuse the vaccine. It’s been claimed that this law was passed to recognize health care workers right not to participate in an abortion. Plausible, but don’t know if it is relevant. Broad laws are often passed in response to a particular situation. Now I’m reading that police and teachers are using the law as a shield, and the Governor has broken down and agreed to arbitration with the public employee unions on the mandates.
Anyway, a bill was introduced to “clarify” that the Health Care law does not preclude vaccine mandates; it garnered 30,000 online witness slips in opposition within 24 hours. It may not have the votes to pass with a super-majority.Report
This is where you need the ‘life science’ industry to come in with their sketchy lobbyists to threaten everyone. We can find out once and for all which evil really is more favored by satan, big pharma or public sector unions.Report
I’m not sure the science is the core of the issue. The courts are at least temporarily blocking people from losing their jobs; the amendment approves these workers losing their jobs. I’m more familiar with the health care mandates since my wife is employed by a hospital. They mandate an annual flu shot for several years now. But it looks like they are getting 78% vaccinated for COVID-19 and the rest are getting tested weekly. State workers do not have the testing option. So I don’t think they are going to follow those facilities that have enacted pure mandates regardless of the fact they would like everyone vaccinated.Report
Sorry ‘life science’ is a euphemism for big pharma. My comment was about who would win a lobbying fight over changing the statute to expressly allow for vaccine mandates.Report
And the amendment was modified this morning, making it pretty clear that the persuadable legislators needed to pass the bill want vaccine mandates without consequences.
The original language basically stated that the Health Care Right of Conscious Act does not apply to COVID-19 requirements, “including by terminating employment or excluding individuals from a school, a place of employment, or public or private premises in response to noncompliance.” The quoted language has been removed. There will be litigation: One side will argue that the Act does not apply to COVID-19 requirements, the other arguing based upon the legislative history that it applies to terminations and exclusions. I think the former is the better argument, but the exemplary language removed was intended to make it clear what the amendment did, and removing it makes it less clear.Report
Sorry to be a party pooper, but I find this piece wildly inappropriate. Regardless of anyone’s personal beliefs re vaccination, surely you guys an see this is not a terribly professional article – either in terms of legal advice, or in terms of journalism – to have published here?
Look, in my day to day work I get tons of people who ask me entirely ridiculous and incredibly stupid questions about fertility, how babies are made, etc. I get gobs of people who are behaving incredibly irrationally and irresponsibly, and it’s frustrating to no end. I get it. I understand completely the inclination and temptation to hold people up to the light and say “OMG can you even believe this shit”. But this is not the way.
You know I love you, man, but these people came to you for legal advice. People come to lawyers for help with all sorts of issues, many if not most of which are entirely or partly of their own making, many if not most of which are rooted in incredible stupidity, and in many cases are acts of willful aggression many times more overtly violent and self-created than not wanting the vaccine. Do you write articles making fun of them, too? And if not, why?
To put it another way, would you have been motivated to write up case by case of an amalgamated wife beater, “the mindset of the average shoplifter,” etc? (and as a brief aside, would you have called them out by the percentage of likelihood of their racial makeup?) Or would you have understood that it’s in your job description as a lawyer to vent your frustrations privately? The entire point of this article is to hold up for ridicule people who came to you for help, help that YOU OFFERED to them voluntarily, and surely they assumed was covered under some sort of auspices of privacy.
Nary a one of these people came to you thinking “ok well maybe this guy won’t mention my name, but he’ll create an amalgamated person and put my words in their mouth for the purpose of mockery in an Internet article”. Because you know and I know they would not have entrusted you with their stories if they had known that going in. You know and I know there is that expectation that a lawyer, even a pro bono lawyer, does not take their clients’ concerns public. I mean, reading this as a layman, if I didn’t know otherwise, I’d never, EVER seek any pro bono legal advice for anything because the whole time I’d be thinking “He seems nice now, but is this lawyer going to write an article making fun of me later? Is this information really confidential, can I trust this person with my situation?” Can you see how holding your clients’ stories up for mockery directly undermines what little faith people already have in the law?
Dude, there is no shortage of articles calling people out on being stupid for not vaccinating. There’s not even any new ground you’re covering here. This article is neither informative nor illuminating, and it is NOT NECESSARY. This is a pointless piece written and published for the sole purpose of the commentariat congratulating each other on how much smarter and better and more ethical they are than “those people”.Report
This is a really interesting point. My only ethical problem with the article was with a lawyer giving out medical advice to health care workers. I don’t think this article was a direct ethical violation, because specific people weren’t identified, but there is a tone of dehumanization in a lot of these conversations, as if Those People don’t deserve human rights or common consideration.Report
I appreciate and respect your thoughts, but feel the need to touch on a few things here. Burt can speak to his own piece and motivations, which I don’t question beyond what he submits any more than I do anyone else who writes for us.
As the person who approves everything that goes on the website and thus is responsible for it, I can speak emphatically that we have never, nor ever will, post something “for the sole purpose of the commentariat congratulating each other on how much smarter and better and more ethical they are than “those people”. The piece comes across as frustrated more than mocking to me but everyone can take it as they read it. Even if so, there is no ethical standard for anonymously mocking someone, though we can debate the taste or morality of that. Nor do I agree with everything Burt asserts here, but me or any other editor agreeing with the particulars of a piece is not a criteria for posting on Ordinary Times. The post does serve a purpose, in my opinion, of taking the angle the bad legal advice these folks are getting running into an actual attorney who by oath and law has to tell them things they aren’t going to like. Agree or disagree with it that take or opinion or Burt’s method, that is a relevant topic and POV. Anything beyond that can, as always, be hashed out in comments, or better yet anyone who wants to write a rebuttal or criticism of Burt’s take, or anything else published on OT, can do so and submit it.Report
Hey Andrew – have any of you checked the inbox on the masthead page lately? I shoved something (entirely not covid related) into there two plus weeks ago and have yet to hear a peep from any of OT Editorial board.
Now back to our regular programming. Thanks!Report
Presenting it as a dialogue between Salviati and Simplicio may not have been the best move if this was intended as an Explainer For The Various Vaccine Exemption Claims.
And, y’know. That’s what keeps happening. People cannot seem to just talk about this, they must get their digs in, take their shots, make their dunks, blow their anger-load all over a choleric right-wing face, work out their frustrations on a target we all agree is a moral failure that deserves it (and mistreatment of whom does not create a burden of psychic guilt.)
Like…”get the vaccine, you assholes, you idiots, you moronic imbeciles, you Trump-voting misogynist bigots, you people who are so god damn stupid you won’t even do the simple thing that saves everybody and lets us all go back to brunch. Jerk.”Report
Are there reasonable arguments for the Earth being the center of the solar system?Report
Do you feel it move? OK then.Report
“Are there reasonable arguments for the Earth being the center of the solar system?”
Ptolemaic Epicycles worked! They had a lot of complicated correction factors, and they’d have found it increasingly hard to explain things like Mercury never quite being where the math said it should be, and when the outer planets were discovered they’d have had a heck of a time figuring them out, but they did work in that all the observed data fit into epicycle theory and it could predict future movements.
And Galileo’s objection was not “I have better math” but rather “this math you have is too complicated, it’s much simpler if you do it this other way that I just thought up”. He was the equivalent of those guys who are angry at Dark Matter theories and come up with weird thought experiments for alternatives. It took about as much work to get past Galileo’s insistence that orbits were circular as it did to get past geocentrism in the first place!Report
This is a picture of Ptolemaic Epicycles “working”.
https://study.com/cimages/multimages/16/cassini_apparent.jpg
This is a picture of the suggested replacement.
https://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/innersolarsystem.jpg
All of the rhetoric in the world doesn’t change that underlying reality, and science is not well served by efforts to disguise that.Report
Hey, Spirograph was one of the coolest toys out there.Report
“oh no its complicated” says the guy who’s too stupid to understand how to do basic mathematics
oh, you have a suggested replacement? quick question, are those circles or are they ellipses? (fun fact: if you pick the wrong one then you cannot create equations that successfully predict the motion!)Report
The point of this digression being “there are chains of reasoning that people have constructed from actual logic that lead them to think what they’re doing is the right answer, and while all us smart ‘uns know they’re stupid and wrong, what they’ve got is not obviously stupid and wrong, and we need to come at it with more than declaring it stupid and wrong.”Report
I look at the two pictures and for all the claims that they both “work”, the 2nd one is clearly more simple, and more obvious in terms of describing what the relationships are.
Worse, the big reason to believe the first picture is religious. That’s why Galileo’s crime was “heresy”.
This wasn’t an issue of “logic” or “math”, that wasn’t the dispute.Report
Comment in mod because I tried to post pictures. Feel free to edit the post so they display, that’s not something I try very often.Report
They could probably explain Mercury with another layer or two of epicycles; that’s how they explained all the other anomalies.
That’s actually a pretty good heuristic: Which is better, an explanation (geocentrism and circles with N layers of epicycle) that works if we keep making corrections, or one that has two premises (heliocentrism and ellipses) and works period.Report
“Which is better, an explanation (geocentrism and circles with N layers of epicycle) that works if we keep making corrections…”
Galileo’s proposed system wouldn’t have worked without corrections of its own. (Kepler had it right but it took thirty years for anyone to agree with him and seventy years for people to figure out the mathematical basis for why his curve fits worked when you used ellipses instead of circles.)
It is really, really presentist to suggest that people were incredibly stupid and that’s why they thought geocentrism and epicycles were accurate. By every measure they could find at the time, those things were proveably true! And saying “well that’s really complicated” didn’t make you sound wise, it made you sound whiny. It took genuine argument from logic to prove otherwise. (And as late as 1702 Newtown was still using epicycles to explain the motion of objects in the solar system.)Report
Also, if you’re going in thinking “epicycles are impossibly complicated and nobody would have ever done anything useful with them”, here’s an example of how you can derive the Fourier Transform using geometric methods, which is basically what epicycles *are*.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY
And again, the point here is not “geocentrism was right”, the point is “very smart people did a lot of heavy thinking to make geocentrism look right, and they came up with a lot of things that weren’t actually wrong, and they even generated some new knowledge by doing it, so you need to bring more than ‘lol ur dum an wrong’ to the argument”.Report
You can come to a lot of useful conclusions with bad assumptions.
Report
Perhaps that’s because after spending hours and days issuing factually based corrections to the lies that are being spread about the vaccines, and having that debunking get you nowhere, people are fed up.
Perhaps after hours and days trying to figure out why this vaccine mandate is so horrible and other long standing vaccine mandates are not, people are fed up.
Perhaps after days and hours of pointing out how monumentally hypocritic it is to scream about body autonomy regarding THIS vaccine while support laws taking body autonomy away from women regarding reproduction people are fed up.Report
Oh, well, if people are fed up…Report
We spent 4 years under Mr. Trump being told we needed to listen to his disciples and understand why they were so angry and so fed up. Funny how the shoe isn’t allowable on the other foot.Report
Facts don’t care about your feelings.
Unless you feel bad after reading American history, or critical race theory. Or if seeing a trans general gives you the squick. Or if masks make feel uncomfortable.Report
CRT has a long way to go before it’s a “fact”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory#CriticismReport
Nothing beats the conservative prosecution complex.Report
Except the conservative persecution complexReport
Oops. Bad typo. Mea culpa.Report
Relevant article.Report
I didn’t take this as mocking of people who don’t want to get vaccinated, but rather a complaint about the shear amount of legal disinformation out there regrading mandates, and how willing people are to believe some guy they read on a blog, or heard on the radio, over the lawyer they have on the phone.Report
There’s lots of legal misinformation and disinformation out there. Much of it comes from people who, quite understandably, don’t know what the actual law is, but, less understandably, think it must be what strikes them as right.
For example, there are actual rules concerning client confidentiality and professionalism. Burt, I am sure, knows them at least as well as I do. We both need to know them to keep our licenses. Burt’s piece violates exactly none of them. But, like the many potential clients who contributed to the composite characters in Burt’s piece, people who don’t know the actual rules make up their own. Thus illustrating Burt’s point.Report
I think we as attorneys should be able to take Kristin’s comment charitably and in stride. It does us no good to go out of the way to do things that make non-lawyers distrustful. No sense in being defensive about it and at the end of the day lawyers serve clients.
That said I kind of wish Burt’s dialogue could be turned into a law school entry exercise. It’s way more representative of the kinds of conversations lawyers have on a daily basis than anything in the case law. Anything to weed out more of the people who believe they are going to go in front of SCOTUS and change the world.Report
I always wanted first year legal writing to cover discovery responses, meet and confers, and motions to compel which are far more likely to be known to an average lawyer than a big, juicy, appeals brief on a hot button topic.Report
So Burt’s piece is OK, even valuable, as long as it is kept in-house and not let out where non-lawyers might see it?Report
I think it’s ok as is and to share with whoever. All I’m saying is a lay perspective on a post like this is worth considering and shouldn’t be dismissed with an ‘I know the rules and you don’t’ kind of response. Yeesh.Report
On a popular soap opera, General Hospital, two characters had different views on whether their child should be examined by a specialist for a potential problem. The wife, who was against it said: “You’re not hearing me.” The husband said; “I hear you. I just disagree with you.” The wife’s response? “I want a divorce.”
I did “consider” KD’s views. I just disagreed with them, precisely because I know the rules and she doesn’t, and you don’t seem to disagree. At least she can’t threaten me with divorce.Report
I agree with the legal analysis but the cogent point being raised is outside of it. All attorneys know there are lots of things within the bounds of the code of professional conduct but which do not paint the profession in the best light.
IMO it’s worth remembering that OT is not a law blog even though there are a lot of lawyers here. If we can’t engage with a point beyond the question of legality then I don’t see the point in participating. The ethos of the site is to go further than that.Report
Much of this discussion assumes that there is a significant number of people who: (a) need legal advice; (b) have expectations of lawyer behavior that they simply have no basis to have; (c) that lawyers ought to respect; (d) because the potential clients would be deterred from seeking legal advice if they knew that their expectations were baseless; and (e) would otherwise be receptive to honest legal advice if they got it. I deny the assumption. And I don’t think lawyers ought to avoid candid discussion of general legal topics — like Burt’s — in deference to expectations people have no right to have for fear that they will cut off their noses to spite their faces.Report
Now that’s a response!Report
hey remember when I said that you were clearly working out some issues with your clients and you said that no no no you were a very good fine nice lawyer who definitely respected his clients a whole bunchReport
Is there a point here? And is it relevant to anything I said here or anywhere else?Report
To me, it was clearly aimed at attempting to understand and offer insights into a behavior and ideology that is foreign and mystifying to many.Report
I think I kinda agree with this.
There are people who will avoid seeking help if they know that they will be mocked, even privately, for seeking help.
The argument that they should be more like me is one that, when I test it on various tulpas, fails without exception.Report
My intent is to convey what’s really going on with how the vaccine-unpersuadable(*) are responding to vaccine mandates and invoking religious beliefs. What I want to offer is a “view from the trenches.” You may certainly take issue with the format or tone that I’ve used to attempt that. I do not believe I have been professionally unethical here and please know that I gave thought to what is professionally appropriate and isn’t before writing and publishing.
Now, you may opine that I blew the call, but at least give me credit for having considered issues of attorney-client privilege before writing and publishing this piece. For having looked up the rule of professional conduct, and talked through with colleagues what can and can’t be shared with people outside of the privilege, and how that can and can’t be done; how it is and isn’t commonly done, both amongst lawyers and in communication with non-lawyers.
That these were pro bono calls is irrelevant to concerns of client privacy.
Respectfully, I wonder if some of the response stems from the format of how I expressed myself. I could have expressed these concerns in block paragraph form and it certainly would have had a different tone. For instance:
If your objection is to the amalgamation of multiple specific calls to a generalized statement, then it seems you would object as strenuously to a prose statement like that as to a portrayal of that same information in a fictionalized dialogue. But if the prose paragraph seems less objectionable to you, maybe at least part of what you’re reacting to is tone and format rather than content. Of course, I don’t claim that tone and format are unimportant, but let’s be clear if that’s the objection. If it is, I have a few other thoughts at the end of this comment on that subject.
I think lawyers ought to consider demographics more rather than less, particularly with issues that, like this one, address trust in the legal system. An understanding of what’s going on demographically informs our understanding of who seeks, and who gets, access to justice; whether or not the profession is treating people equally and fairly. It’s not a secret, for instance, that young African-American men place the least trust in the legal system of any set of people and by a substantial degree. A statement like that inherently involves discussing racial, gender, and age demographics. We would be remiss as a profession to ignore a fact like that.
Here, one big demographic issue put in play is religion – these people are requesting religious exemptions to the mandates. I think it is not only appropriate but important to know: what are the religious beliefs being invoked? Is the law disserving people of a particular faith? I don’t think that’s the case, because as I indicate my experience is the only articulated belief I’ve heard is the based-on-factual-misinformation objection to fetal tissue being in the vaccines, and that seems to only come from Roman Catholics. It’s also important to know that most of the people who seek exemptions do so in insincere ways, or at least in ways that raise suspicions of insincerity. That suggests that there is pressure to use the law in a manner different from what was intended when the law was created.
More importantly, though, this tells me that at least on this issue, when people don’t like what the lawyer says, they’re refusing to believe it’s true which is a qualitatively different kind of distrust in the legal system than what a young African-American man has. The young African-American man believes that every possible decision point in the legal process is going to be decided against him because of what he is rather than anything he might have done. (He may not be wrong to think that, by the way.) But he doesn’t question the reality of the law. These folks simply disbelieve that the law is what it is. It’s much more akin to “sovereign citizen” style alternative reality thinking. And it’s coming from white people, who otherwise have held a very high trust in the legal system.
The “view from the trenches” I proffer here, I submit, adds to the discussion. I attempt to illustrate how people are actually using the law. Employers and employees, one state bar and one member of that bar. At Ordinary Times, we talk about politics sometimes in terms of airy political principles like “liberty” and “common benefit” but what I’m showing here is the end result of the political process. Reasoning from first principles is an empty process without seeing the practical end result of actualizing those principles.
Responding to another point made in a subthread, I do not believe I attempt to dispense medical advice here. I solicit evidence that might support a reasonable and appropriate legal gambit that might actually help such a person keep their job. I do not make a medical diagnosis; I inquire if a particular kind of diagnosis has been made. The claim of “COVID vaccines work and they are safe,” is by now within the realm of things laypeople can know and say with confidence, like “smoking cigarettes causes cancer.”
While mockery was not my particular intent, if you see it here, you see it and I recognize that venting frustration can lead someone in my position there. There is a fine and ongoing discussion here (e.g., Dave Chappelle, and when the Chappelle thing fades from public memory there will certainly be something else that replaces it) and in many other places about the degree to which one ought to hold the ridiculous up to ridicule, about the ways one ought to go about addressing that which one considers ridiculous. There is much to say about this issue generally. For instance, if you don’t think something is ridiculous to begin with, you’ll be more sensitive to what you see as an attempt at ridicule. Here, if you think it is reasonable to refuse the COVID vaccine, it’s a whole lot easier to say it’s inappropriate to portray a vaccine refuser as ridiculous. Mutatis mutandis for whatever the issue of the day might be in the unforseeable future. Ultimately, that is an unresolvable debate and it far exceeds the scope of what is professional for a lawyer to do.
So I’m sorry you disliked this piece, and I hope I haven’t engendered any lasting loss of respect for having written it.
(*) Let’s eschew the phrase “vaccine-hesitant” because the people we’re trying to describe with that label are not “hesitant,” they’re adamant. The word “hesitant” implies that they just haven’t been persuaded to get vaccinated yet, so they’re hesitating until something else happens or they learn something new. We are not talking about people who are persuadable at all. They know good and damn well what they’re going to do; they’re looking for a) justifications for what they’re going to do regardless of whether they find any, and b) ways to avoid negative consequences of the thing they’re going to do anyway. That’s not “hesitant” behavior.Report
I think I would phrase my issue differently.
Let’s say that there’s someone out there who has an issue. They are teetering between getting help for it and not getting help for it.
The information that they will be mocked once the door is closed is infohazardous information. Like, maybe they not only need help but might be able to get it. The information that they could be mocked is information that could harm them insofar as it dissuades them from getting help.
What are the ethics? What are the morals?
I dunno. That might be the wrong approach because I understand that laypeople and lawyers mean *ENTIRELY* different things when they say stuff like “ethics” or “morals”.
I mean, there are infohazards out there that I really, really, really want to opine on but I don’t because they’re infohazards. Like, actual and for real harm could be done by my saying “hey, look at this infohazard!”Report
Without conceding that I’ve ridiculed anyone or, if I have, that this ridicule is somehow inappropriate:
It’s always going to be true that you might be mocked once the door is closed behind you. No matter what you say. You don’t and can’t ever know what other people might find risible. Or morally offensive. Or simple disagreement. We cannot build a society free of all of these so-called “infohazards.”
Sometimes things you do or say will elicit a response from others you dislike. That’s what it is to live in a society.
Additionally, and admittedly unsympathetically, if you stumbled into the knowledge that practicing subject matter experts will respond to a particular claim within their area of expertise with ridicule, maybe you should interpret that knowledge as a clue that the claim is, in fact, ridiculous.
What would you have a software writer say to someone who insisted, with seeming sincerity, that it wasn’t microchips and clever programming that made their cell phone work, but rather there were tiny elves called “sprites” inside their phones making those images on the screen move around and voices appear?
Would you react differently if they added that they knew this was true because God Himself spoke to them through a very large ghost-pepper flavored potato chip? Remember, they’re saying this with utter sincerity; if this is an episode of Impractical Jokers and you’re actually being punk’d, there is no clue of that available at all. How ridiculous do I have to make this hypothetical before it becomes permissible to treat it as actually ridiculous? Or no matter how ridiculous I make it, will it always be inappropriate to offer up that opinion?Report
We cannot build a society free of all of these so-called “infohazards.”
This is true.
Neither will we ever have a society without disease.
But we can vaccinate against it.
How ridiculous do I have to make this hypothetical before it becomes permissible to treat it as actually ridiculous?
Can I just talk about stuff that happened? Or do I need to talk about hypotheticals only?
We, as a society, are transitioning from higher trust to lower trust. That’s bad.
Maybe it’s inevitable. Fair enough. Makes sense. It was a good run.
Now I’m not saying that the people you spoke to are likely to see this post. I’m not saying that. I don’t think that any harm was done by this post. However, I do think that if it somehow found itself in the instagram feed of one of the people it’s based on, they’d be far more likely to conclude that you were one of the crooked lawyers who is on the wrong side than to conclude that you were one of the good ones who treated them as all absurd potential clients deserve to be treated.
Are they going to be more likely to say “I can trust the system” after that?
Seems to me that the answer is “obviously not”.Report
If we’re going to confine our discussion to only “stuff that happened,” then “Let’s say that there’s someone out there who has an issue” is every bit as much out of that declared boundary as the sprites-in-the-phones hypothetical. Responding to one hypothetical with another, to test the issues raised, is a fair rhetorical maneuver. Granted that one hypothetical is more plausible than the other.
In any event, I take the point that you and Kristen made, however it was articulated. I’ve offered my thoughts about the value, morals, and ethics (*) of discussing generalized, anonymized client conversations in response, and the discussion above between CJColluci and InMD is also illuminating on the issue. All the back-and-forth aside, “This post has the potential to further alienate people who are already alienated from the legal system,” is a good point to make and I’m glad you both made it.
(*) In my parlance, “morals” are ideas that you use to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil. “Ethics” are articulated standards that govern practical behavior and are derived in part from morals, in part from legal obligations, and in part from the specifics and practicalities of why the code of ethics exists in the first place (e.g., practicing law). I am required to adhere to a code of professional ethics, not a code of professional morals. The Bar and the Courts do not purport to tell me what is morally acceptable. If I steal from my clients, I’ll be disciplined not for doing something immoral, but rather for doing something unethical. YNMV (Your Nomenclature May Vary.)Report
Well, to wander back to hypotheticals, Kristen mentions the amalgamated wife beater or amalgamated shoplifter and I have less of a problem with talking about that.
Hey, this guy got arrested for X, using lawyer-client privilege, she explained that she may be technically guilty of X, from a certain point of view, and how are we going to work on her defense anyway?
Hell, I’d find that post *FASCINATING*.
“What about the infohazardous nature of it?”
Well, I suppose I’d have to see the post but I can just as easily see someone saying “hey, this lawyer would work for me despite technically having been somewhat accurately accused by the cops!” as saying “oh, I only want lawyers who think I’m innocent to defend me!” (It’s honestly more easy for me to see the former than the latter.)
It’s the whole “we’re in a place where we want these people to be brought in” thing. I want more of those people brought in. I’m told that if we bring enough of them in, we can stop masking.
My problem with the post can be shuffled off to vulgar utilitarianism, if you want. “I think it will do the opposite of what we want.”Report
SCP much? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazardReport
I appreciate this perspective and take to heart your concerns, Kristin, even as a lawyer who chuckled knowingly and could relate. Not so much because of the topic – I don’t work with clients in my current role and that predates the pandemic – but to dealing with frustrating requests for legal advice and the anger we get when our replies aren’t what they want to hear. A family member once asked if I would sue the government for the introduction of “Japanese beetles” (they were actually Asian lady beetles), would not take my attempt at gentle dissuasion for an answer, and got really exasperated when I then tried to explain sovereign immunity and the need to have incurred damages in order to sue. I too received a snide remark about her perception of my legal acumen.
Am I putting her on blast here? Yes, I suppose so, but since I use a pseudonym and know there’s nearly a 0% chance of her reading this or anything else I write, I’m ok with it. And if it encourages people to be more polite when asking a professional for their time, especially for free, all the better.
Anyway – I don’t think Burt violated any sort of legal ethics here, nor do I fault him for a little creative public venting.Report
On a somewhat lighter note, some of the results from the Pfizer vaccine trials for 5-12 year olds have come in.
There were 4,600 people in the trials and while I would have preferred 10,000, that’s still not bad.
Report
COVID Vaccines will make your kid eat pennies! Copper poisoning among our youth on the rise! Film at 11!Report
COVID vaccination improves savings rates for 5-12 year olds.Report
Short term savings rates, about 12-24 hours.Report
“I knew something was seriously wrong when Johnny insisted I put his chocolate milk in a Moscow Mule mug.”Report
My wife worked in data-entry for a COVID trial and they do indeed include stuff like broken bones in the Adverse Events.
This is not as silly as one might imagine, because the assumption is “perhaps taking the drug caused someone to become disoriented and dizzy, and they fell down, resulting in a broken arm…”Report
far better to take data now that end up being outliers then not take it and need it later.Report
Exactly. What people forget is that there is no explicit causation. Maybe the vaccine did that, or maybe not. Until there is a statistically significant occurrence, it’s just data.Report
“It is clear that use of the Covid vaccine is significantly correlated with voting for Biden. It is not the purpose of this study to determine whether causation is involved, or in which direction it might flow.”Report
Did they take down “breakthrough infections” as potential Antibody Dependent Enhancement cases?
How about miscarriages/odd-menstruation?
You basically have to put down everything odd that happens… and until your immune system finishes flushing these antibodies. (which I do realize means this vaccine is a failure as a vaccine. It does not induce b-cell memory, and therefore is significantly worse at protecting people than being infected normally.)Report
“which I do realize means this vaccine is a failure as a vaccine. It does not induce b-cell memory)”
Why are you STILL lying about that?
(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03738-2)
Do you get paid to lie? Do you just refuse to learn? What is it with you and repeating lies, even after people call you out on it? Do you just enjoy trolling? Do you have a mental disorder that causes pathological lying?
Or does your political ideology demand you lie, and keep lying, because facing the truth would mean you and others made mistakes, mistakes that got people killed?
You shift names, but it’s the same lies. We know it’s still you.
You packed like 8 lies into two paragraphs, I just picked the stupidest to point out.Report
Brandon and Silent Sam seem to be two different people, from what I can tell.
Silent Sam’s comment is now gone.Report
JS,
Moderna and Pfizer were citing declining levels of serum antibodies, as the reason for a booster. Aka, “if we can’t find neutralizing serum antibodies, we need to create more neutralizing serum antibodies” — they are refusing to rely upon memory b-cells to create antibodies when exposed to antigens.
Memory b-cells are good for two years of immunity, at the least, and often good for 10 years to a lifetime. (Importantly, they continue to work after serum antibodies go to nearly zero. This is obvious stuff, assume I’m writing for the benefit of the audience).
I see that someone’s found some indications, months ago, of b-cell mediated response. When Pfizer and Moderna start saying “this works,” then I’ll be more minded to listen.
As it is, Pfizer and Moderna are talking about booster shots every 6 months for the next ten years.Report
There was also the guy who got struck by lightning after his moderna injection.
Full disclosure: I have received the moderna vaccine as well as a booster. I have not yet been struck by lightning, to my knowledge.Report
It’s unlikely that the microchips contain enough metal to attract lightning, but you can’t a priori rule it out.Report
Add Auburn’s football coaches to the ranks.Report
Well they can’t win football games, so they have to signal their worth somehow.
Geaux Tigers!Report
Appropos of the people Burt is talking about:
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/27/1049664531/fox-anchor-neil-cavuto-covid-19-vaccine-death-threatsReport
It turns out that a decent number of people I know in real life were anti-vaxxers. When the governments of the Bay area counties began imposing vaccine mandates to do cool thing indoors, they were complaining about it. At least one of them got vaccinated because they wanted to do cool things with their significant other. Another one is religious and probably still unvaccinated. Sometimes goes on how the vaccinated have a higher viral load than the unvaccinated.Report
Few thoughts:
1) If this were a real pandemic, you wouldn’t be thinking that losing nurses (who are already overworked, as cited above, doing double shifts) was a good idea.
2) If the vaccines worked, we wouldn’t need to force everyone to get one. A working vaccine used on more than 50% of the population should lead to a drastic decrease in cases. (A vaccine that at best is net neutral? Well, boy howdy, isn’t funny they don’t want a placebo population? Could it be that they injected a lot of people before they figured out something was wrong?)Report
(the vaccines do work.)Report
Remember, they got Brandon up in front of everyone, and he said it was “Covid Victory Day”? That was back in July. Earlier than that they promised everything would “go back to normal.” That the vaccinated could stop wearing masks. That if we all got vaccinated, The Government would give us our lives back.
The Scandinavian countries have been flat-out banning the Moderna vaccine (varies by country on how much they’re banning it). This is not “The Vaccines Work.”
Scuttlebutt says they’re trying to duct-tape everything together until after the elections, and then More Lockdowns!Report
False.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-has-sweden-denmark-norway-iceland-banned-moderna-vaccine-1638563Report
Big picture this is almost certainly a misuse of statistics.
I ask the question “do M&M’s cause cancer”? I do a study.
Answer: No.
Then I data slice. Red M&Ms? No. Green? No.
Blue M&Ms for males in a certain age range wearing a certain type of shoes? Oh, wait, there’s something there.
In a random set of data there will be random groupings and so on, with the benefit of hindsight and computer’s ability to data slice, you can match stuff up. However next time you run the data, you won’t find that pattern because it’s not real.Report
Literally none of that is true. Just like your lie above about b-cell memory under one of your million other names.
Can we IP ban this jerk already?Report
Printing out details on what I’m talking about is called “being informative” not calling me on being a liar.Report
If you don’t want to be called a liar, then don’t, you know, lie.Report
How much evidence do you want me to post about the CDC lying?
Striking, isn’t it, how much faith you put in liars.
If the CDC says that 95% efficacy is just as good as 70% efficacy, then you know that both numbers are bunk, and there’s not enough N to say which one is better.Report
Liar is your word. You are repeating a story that Newsweek has evaluated as “false”.Report
Only with boosters, unlike every other vaccine in history!
(If that be mocking, make the most of it.)Report