Linked List: July 29, 2021

Thursday, 29 July 2021

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to Mandate COVID-19 Vaccination for Employees ★

Aubrey Whelan, reporting for The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia will soon require all its on-site employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, as most of their patients are too young to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The hospital did not specify a deadline for employees to receive the vaccine, but said in a statement Thursday that it is “currently preparing for the implementation of a vaccine requirement.”

“We believe that it is our duty to protect those who cannot protect themselves, especially our young patients,” the statement read.

More like this, please.

Mandate Vaccinations, Not Masks ★

Aaron E. Carroll, chief health officer for Indiana University, in a guest column for The New York Times:

Many may read the C.D.C.’s continued focus on masking and distancing as an acknowledgment that the vaccines don’t work well enough. Leaning heavily on masking and distancing is what we did when we didn’t have vaccinations. Today, such recommendations are less likely to succeed because they are more likely to be followed by those already primed to listen — the vaccinated — and to be fought and ignored by those who aren’t.

Hospitalizations and deaths are rising in some areas not because someone didn’t wear a mask at the ballgame. They’re occurring because too many people are not immunized.

This is why I’ve advocated vaccine mandates. I don’t understand how we can mandate wearing masks but not getting vaccinations.

Here’s German Lopez, making the same case at Vox:

A year ago, requiring masks as cases spiked would have been an obviously smart decision. Mask mandates work, and for most of 2020, they were among the best methods we had to stop the spread of Covid-19. But masks were never meant to be the long-term solution; they were a stopgap until the US and the rest of the world could stamp out epidemics through vaccination.

Now those vaccines are here. And the changed circumstances of summer 2021 call for new approaches. Any entity thinking about a mask requirement — from private businesses to local, state, and federal governments — should consider mandating something else first: vaccination.

Asking the vaccinated to wear masks to protect the voluntarily unvaccinated is not going to work. The backlash is growing.

Google and Facebook to Require Employees Get Vaccinated ★

Heather Kelly and Gerrit De Vynck, reporting for The Washington Post:

Google on Wednesday became the first Big Tech [sic] company to announce that it will require employees who work in its offices to be fully vaccinated. Facebook later announced a similar policy requiring all in-person workers to get vaccinated before coming into a Facebook office in the United States.