Will airlines force employees get vaccine??
 

Any thoughts??

How would that be legal?

Force, no...highly encourage to the point of providing at work for very little or no cost? Yes.

Yes it's legal, already been resolved WRT to other vaccines (notably flu).

ADA and religious exemptions already exist for that, so a pre-existing condition might get you out of it. However... even for those exemptions, the employer only has to make "reasonable" accommodations. In the covid context that might mean providing such a person with a separate workspace away from others, but that's not an option for crew.

I suspect that most employers will be initially reluctant to require vaccinations, but at some point if things are bad enough they will. So depends on known herd immunity and what percentage of folks voluntarily get vaccinated. An employer may perceive liability risk if they allow non-vaccinated employees to have contact with other workers and customers.

All that could be up in the air if specific laws are passed relevant to covid.

Do you have a legal citation with that?

As an example, I get why requiring certain vaccines are BFOQs for medical professionals...but its going to be a very tall stretch IMO to apply that to air crew. I'm certainly not all-knowing but am not aware of any airline REQUIRING its flight crews to get an influenza vaccine, and that past practice would be difficult to justify away in court.

If it puts people on our metal, I’ll take two, injected into the eyeballs if that’s what it takes.

Au contraire. Big Blue has required it for decades, backed up by Article 15s.


https://i.ibb.co/Hzt5nJh/E93-DE05-A-...BC0-CE7-AC.jpg

If course, barring actual government intervention - which is unlikely to happen - your management can’t exceed what’s in your contract without negotiating it...

And HIPPA becomes an issue as well.

The United States Armed Services aren't an airline.

For RECENT and I do mean recent guidance..
 

Refer to this article:


https://i.ibb.co/v3C103s/9-C9-E76-CA...-E764-BBED.jpg

an excerpt:

Establishing a Legally Compliant “Mandatory” Vaccination Program

Absent further guidance from the EEOC, employers considering a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination program once the vaccine is considered safe and widely available as a condition to permitting employees to return to the physical office, for terminating employees from employment for refusing to be vaccinated, or for job applicants to begin employment, should consider some fundamental precepts prior to adopting such a program:

• Vaccine costs, if not fully health insurance-funded, should be borne entirely by the employer to avoid financial barriers to employment;
  
• The program should allow employees to opt out entirely if they have medical or religious objections to vaccination;
  
• In the event of a medical or religious objection, an interactive dialog should be established with the objector to determine whether the individual’s objections can be accommodated in light of the positon for which the individual is applying or currently holds;
  
• Fully trained human resources professionals should be responsible for this process, versus line managers who may lack such training;
  
• Job descriptions should be updated to provide for essential functions, which may include travel, customer-facing positions, close interaction with other employees, or other factors that might compel mandatory vaccination;
  
• Employers should pay particular attention to recordkeeping given the ADA mandate that medical records be kept separate from general personnel files and the importance of data integrity and limited internal access to medical information.
  
• Employers should keep in mind that a vaccine is not a fail-safe for an employer’s general obligation to provide a safe working environment, and COVID-19 has taught some hard workplace lessons regarding the prevention against and mitigation of easily transmittable but hard to discern dangers such as viruses and bacteria in the workplace.
  

yet even they struggle to get compliance with legal orders to get a flu shot, and flu shots have been around since 1933.

Aren’t some vaccinations a requirement at Delta? I thought I remembered a box on airlineapps about yellow fever.

Land in South Africa without a YF vaccination in a record and you’ll have an opportunity to get one, right now, do not check in at the Michelangelo. It wasn’t me, it was the F/A.

The Yellow Fever shot is required at some airlines because some of the countries they fly to require it. If some country requires Covid immunization before entry when a vaccine becomes available an airline could require it if they fly to that country.

DAL requires the YF vaccine before starting day 1 of indoc.

If you trust Jezus will keep you safe go fly a 206 in Africa and don’t bother us.

For those that think it not being in your contract somehow prevents this from happening, should it actually happen, this has “added to a manual” written all over it.

Yes there is plenty of existing legal basis for employers to require vaccinations, you can google that to your heart's content, it's out there. Also plenty of discussion relevant to potential covid vaccine requirements.

As I said before, employers will prefer not to go there but they will if the landscape (safety or liability) obviously needs it.

Legislation is the wild card, that could go either way or anything in between... congress (or state assemblies) could legislate that organizations cannot be sued for requiring vaccinations, or to the other extreme, could legislate that they cannot require vaccines. Federal legislation would preempt state legislation (unless SCOTUS deemed it unconstitutional over-reach).

Politicians, like employers, will prefer not to go there either if they can avoid it. Depends on how things play out.

But most other countries (western socialist or totalitarian) have no qualms about mandating vaccination, so if you're hell-bent on not getting getting vaccinated and work for a major you're going to need to bid for CONUS and Latin America. If you're on reserve, you're probably SOL.

What is the potential liability if employers require a vaccine that turns out to have unknown side effects because it wasn’t tested thoroughly?

Id prefer to wait to see if people have reactions to it.

Probably no precedent for liability since there's probably never been an employer who required an non-certified vaccine.

If an employer requires a certified vaccine, then the certification is on the mfg and FDA. You can sue anybody for anything but, but you're probably only going to have a shot at the mfg. Even the FDA is probably untouchable.

There's no indication whatsoever that the US, any western nation, or even China is going to skip any of the normal testing so there won't be any basis for "wasn’t tested thoroughly". If a vaccine were to be approved without all normal testing complete (looks highly unlikely at this point), it would under be emergency authority and would be labeled as such.

Actually, the US assumed liability for vaccines years ago. It was the only way manufacturers would keep making them after that Bogus - and - never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Lancet article linking immunizations with autism.

https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compens...out/index.html

I think vaccines have to be specifically authorized by law to be part of the program, presumably covid vaccines would be.

The lancet article was retracted by the publisher years ago, after they learned that the lead researcher was getting paid by... you guessed it, lawyers who specialized in suing vaccine mfgs :rolleyes: Damage was done though.

You afraid you'll get autism?

No way I would get it.

Bill Gates is just trying to finally get rich $0.01 at a time.

Who deleted WutFace insulting cargo pilots?

Looks like he thought better of his behavior. No harm, no foul if you take it back in the narrow window that's allowed for that.

Kind of like email should have a delayed transmission for a cooling down period, especially business email accounts.

Sure every single hospital system in the country requires a flu vaccine for employment.

When I was in the ARMY I resisted the flu vaccine. I took all the required ones for the deployments but since I had never had the flu and didn't want to introduce it into my body I managed do dodge the docs and avoid the flu vaccine. I was threatened with discipline but when push came to shove they did nothing.

I have still never had the flu. I have only thrown up three times in my life (two of those due to alcohol). I am certain I was exposed to the Corona virus in Feb/Mar due to people around me who were displaying every symptom, but never had more than a sore throat for a day. My immune system is up to the task.

I am not anti vaccine but fight to avoid the ones that are not particularly effective due to various strains of the disease being in play. The flu vaccine is always the best guess as to which strain to treat for in a given year. My children have had the important ones but we claim a religious exemption for flu with our school system. My kids have never had the flue either.

I will be curious to see how this goes. I kinda think we will be rehired because lost other countries are going to require it for entry. I doubt foreign immigration authorities are gonna care about why we don’t want it.

Even if they don't actually mandate it for their own people, they won't be nearly as accommodating to incoming foreigners.

Interesting. When claiming religious exemption did you need to provide details or explain yourself?

No, the school system is not particularly worried about details as long as the main "scary" diseases have been covered. Our children have MMR and the other big deal disease immunizations. We just feel that the flu vaccine is not effective and largely speculative with regard to which strain will be active in any given season.

Seriously? If you can “self-identify” as a different gender, you think somebody is going to be able to ask you for a note from your priest or rabbi to prove you are religious?

Doesn’t make not taking good vaccines a good idea though. And as for “I’ve never gotten the flu,” everybody who HAS ever gotten the flu was able to claim that at one time, yet in the end all of us DID get it.

On a more immediate note, there is increasing evidence that tweaking the immune response with almost ANY vaccine decreases your risk of getting and/or severity of if you do get infected with COVID-19, probably through one of the nonspecific antiviral immune mechanisms like interferon.


https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/art...ad-of-covid-19

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20...mortality.aspx

https://asm.org/Press-Releases/2020/...e-Worst-Sympto

An excerpt:

Now is NOT the time to ‘get religion’ against established vaccines with a good track record.

Curious how you got out of Anthrax. IIRC there was a big suit that came out of Dover on that one.

I don't get too bent out of shape about people skipping the flu vaccine - especially kids. On a personal level, I'm happy to get the shot every year. Our company provides it for free, and I've never had any adverse reaction from getting it. My biggest concern about the flu vaccine is its effectiveness - some years the "recipe" isn't very good and provides only a limited amount of protection.

BTW, the SICKEST I've ever been as an adult was when I was 27 years old and got the flu. It was a week of abject misery. I've always hated shots, but I would have rolled up both sleeves to avoid that experience. It took a long time to get over it as well, almost four weeks of feeling very lethargic.

If there is an effective vaccine for Covid, I expect airlines may require it as a condition to come back to work. I also think you'll be required to show proof of immunization (or immunity) for international travel. I just hope that the vaccine is good enough that we don't have to get stuck two or three times a year.

I couldn't get out of those and when deploying to hot spots I wanted certain ones. I am not against targeted vaccines that work I just don't like the shotgun approach taken with regard to the flu vaccine.

I was 27 when I got the flu for the first time, never got vaccinated before, now I always get the vaccine. Woke up a little under the weather for my day 4 deadhead to base, thought I was going to die on the train ride home. Sickest I’ve ever been.

2019-2020 influenza vaccine effectiveness
 

Not great, but still prevented a lot of illness:

Yeah that last paragraph is big too. The vaccine also helped keep them largely out of hospitals and morgues.

You might have noted the anthrax vaccinations were “off license” and never tested as effective for the weaponized anthrax.

Flu shot effectiveness is complicated, and at this point is not really a good parallel for a potential covid vaccine.

In addition to the innate efficacy of a specific flu vaccine, the other big factor is the seasonal guessing game as to WHICH vaccines to include in the current seasonal cocktail. Even guessing right only maximizes protection for the population of vaccine recipients, it still does not guarantee that every recipient will be vaccinated against the flu strain(s) they might get exposed to.

There's no reason to suspect that covid will behave like the flu, which exists in a perpetual seasonal mutation loop as it bounces between pigs, chickens, and peasants. Obviously covid can infect some animals, but there's no indication it will run amuck in livestock populations. It's ability to mutate will probably be severely curtailed once it gets mostly knocked down in the human population... mutation opportunity is related to the number of viral replications which occur, and the number of individual hosts.

With the flu shot, the best way to maximize effectiveness IMO is to get it every year. That way you have, in addition to this year's cocktail, you have at least some residual immunity to the most prevalent strains going back some number of years. I haven't had the flu in decades, and I suspect that's because the .mil gave me a shot every single year whether I wanted one or not. I've had the flu when I was younger but never after about five years in the mil.

Thank you for your Service.

Statistically speaking the reason you and your children have never contracted influenza is because enough others do receive the vaccine. If everyone made the same choice you did the flu would be a much larger problem. The same goes for polio, tetanus, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis A, rubella, Hib, Measles, Pertussis, Pneumococcal Disease, Rotavirus, Mumps, Chickenpox, and Diphtheria just to name a few.

The reason some have never heard of some of the above diseases is precisely because of vaccines.

​​​​​​​Vaccines are their own worst enemy.