Letter to Employer Regarding OSHA Mandate
A mixed tape of links to express a counterpoint to OSHA's attempt to regulate a virus.
Depending upon whether the Supreme Court issues a stay on this measure, OSHA will make my employer gather proof of vaccination against COVID-19 from its employees. If an employee doesn’t provide proof of vaccination, the employee will need to be tested for COVID-19 weekly.
Personally, I am very much against this measure. Being against the measure would be a more difficult decision if I thought the mandate would work. However, I do not think this provision will help. Even if the Federal government had tools that could decrease transmission of SARS-CoV-2, I think the provision is a great overstep into our civil liberties and might not be worth it.
I wrote a letter to my employer about my concerns. I understand that it is a little bit odd to write a letter like the one that follows. It is not a scientific paper because it doesn’t approach the problem from multiple angles. More than anything, I would say that this letter is a little bit like a mixed tape. I’m using scientific papers to present counter-points to the mandates and the papers provide some of the basis for my feelings about the mandate. This letter is using scientific findings for their specific purpose, to provide a lay of the land so we can make decisions that support our human values. In the letter, I also share my personal opinions about the morality of the OSHA mandates. There are published articles out there that might be better than this mixed tape, but this letter is mine. Feel free to use it to send to your employer or make your own mixed tape from this one.
January 6, 2022
Brandon Porter
To Whom It May Concern:
My name is Brandon Porter. I have worked with this company for just over two years. Over these years, I have been impressed with this company’s dedication to its employees. Working here is meaningful to me and it helps me take care of my family. I appreciate this greatly.
I am writing because I am deeply concerned about the OSHA mandate for employees to provide proof of vaccination or test for SARS-CoV-2 infection. My concerns are related to the morality of the mandate, the harms it will expose people to, the decreases in productivity it will cause, and its low chance for efficacy. I hope for this company to speak out against the mandate. I will include embedded links to primary scientific studies and news articles to support my concerns. I apologize for the length of this letter, but these issues are very important and these scientific points are nuanced and do not get expressed in the media these days. There is an active process by people in the Federal government to suppress legitimate scientific information that is contrary to its policies. Even more concerning to me, there is an active process to circumvent normal FDA safety evaluations for immunizations and boosters.
I will start with the way this mandate plays out in society. Connecting one’s employment to vaccination status is immoral in most circumstances, including our current circumstances. Consider this, recently a Canadian physician calculated the number of unvaccinated people needed to exclude in order to avert one SARS-CoV-2 transmission event. That number is about 1000 for Delta. In an interview with a Stanford epidemiologist, he says this number is estimated to be similar for Omicron. Each day, to avert one SARS-CoV-2 transmission event at work, you would need to exclude 1000 unvaccinated people. The value doesn’t even take into account the fact that vaccination protects individuals from hospitalization from Delta by about 80%. Risk for hospitalization after infection with Delta, without immunization, is about 5%, on average (depending upon age, frailty, obesity, and immunodeficiency). Given these rough numbers, you would need to exclude about 25,000 (1000 ÷ 0.80 ÷ 0.05) unvaccinated people per day to prevent 1 hospitalization in vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant. Now consider the damages to families, society, businesses, and individuals for firing 25,000 unvaccinated people to avert one hospitalization a day. Is it worth it to society? Firing 25,000 people won’t prevent the vaccinated people at work from getting COVID outside of the workplace. Firing 25,000 unvaccinated people won’t prevent people from going to the hospital because of acquiring influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza virus, and other respiratory viruses and bacteria in the work setting. Will society receive any benefit from excluding these unvaccinated people?
For the currently dominant variant, Omicron, the calculation is a little different because infection, and therefore transmission, is pretty much the same for people who are vaccinated and people who are not vaccinated (some calculate that vaccination increases your risks of getting Omicron infection). Fortunately, most people are already protected from this virus. The virus is less virulent (it causes much fewer hospitalizations and deaths per person infected) and, if people are vaccinated or experienced prior infection with SARS-CoV-2, they continue to have protective immunity for severe disease and death. For most working people, their age also protects them from SARS-CoV-2 mediated severe disease or dying (age doesn’t exclude the possibility of severe disease, but the possibility for severe disease decreases by about 1000-fold between the elderly and children). The OSHA vaccine mandate does not create a safer workplace, first, because Omicron causes a cold in almost everyone, and second, because both vaccinated and “unvaccinated” people transmit this virus very well. We will all get this virus with or without this mandate.
The OSHA mandate is disproportionately heavy-handed. The OSHA mandate’s goal is to protect people’s health. However, employment is necessary for most people if they want to live outside of poverty. Poverty provides a much greater risk to lifespan than this respiratory virus does. There is a 14.6 year (males) and 10.1 years (females) difference in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals. This difference is much greater than the 1.5 years decrease in U.S. life expectancy during 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 1.5 years decrease in life expectancy was before the vaccines were available (which decrease chance of death by about 90%) and was likely exacerbated by lockdowns and widespread opioid abuse (there were nearly 70,000 opioid-related deaths in 2020). Importantly, deaths in young people change the life expectancy much more than deaths in the elderly.
Based upon my experience with this company, this company does a lot to help its employees improve their lives, thrive, and stay out of poverty. In my opinion, this is an honorable position for a company to take. The decision to threaten people with a severely decreased opportunity to provide for oneself and one’s family if they don’t register their vaccination status is deeply disturbing. The punishment is severe and doesn’t match the risks created by not registering one’s vaccination status with one’s employer. In my opinion, it is immoral for the government to place companies in this position. The testing for COVID-19 caveat in the OSHA mandate decreases the potential costs for not sharing one’s vaccination records with one’s employer. However, the testing caveat makes companies and employees spend money and time testing for the virus. If employees test positive, they will stay home for too great of a time after being infected with a virus that most people are protected from having severe consequences from because they have immunity. Some people should stay at home for a day, some should stay at home for a few weeks, depending upon how sick they are. It would be nice to have very accurate testing to make good decisions, but we don’t have that right now and are dependent upon how we are feeling to judge whether we might be infectious to others. PCR’s have too many false positives and can be positive well after infection. Antigen testing has too many false negatives, making it so that their use might encourage people who feel sick, but have a negative test, go to work. Immunity does not mean you will not get an infection. Long-term immunity means that you are at far less risk to get a severe infection.
In addition to the harsh coercion for people to share their private medical records with their employers and to take a medication they may or may not need, there are many problems with the logic of the OSHA COVID-19 vaccine mandate. A major problem is that it will expose many people, primarily young males, to risks they do not experience without the mandate. Some young males get myocarditis after receiving the mRNA vaccines. The Moderna vaccine has an associated rate of myocarditis that is higher than Pfizer and is not allowed to be given to young males in many countries, like Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Despite what some politician physicians and scientists say, the risk for this age-group to get vaccine-induced myocarditis is about 3 to 16 times greater than the risk of getting myocarditis from SARS-CoV-2 infection. This risk for vaccine-induced myocarditis is observed in studies in Canada, Israel, England, USA, and more. The measured risks of vaccine-induced myocarditis range from about 1:1500 to 1:10,000, and differ based upon the way the studies were designed. The most recent study from US data, using the CDC definition of myocarditis, showed an incidence of myocarditis of 1:1862 after the second dose in males aged 18 – 24. Some claim the myocarditis is “mild” however, 50% of people with vaccine induced myocarditis (page 20) continue to have symptoms (fatigue, palpitations, shortness of breath, and/or chest pain) 3 months after diagnosed with myocarditis. Please consider that these are young people who will need to live with a scarred heart (or a transplanted heart in some situations) for the rest of their lives due to a medication that was forced on them. Some will die due to dysrhythmias or require pacemakers in the future. There is even a report of heart transplant needed in a 19 year-old woman after possible vaccine-induced myocarditis. She died.
Viral myocarditis is associated with shortened lifespan. Time will tell, but some cases of mRNA vaccine-induced myocarditis may be similar. It will cause harm and possibly shorten the lifespans of a small percentage of young men if employees comply with the OSHA mandate by receiving mRNA vaccinations. Importantly, young men have an even smaller risk for hospitalization or death (pg 18-19) due to SARS-CoV-2 infection. There is a moral difference between a person deciding to take on the risks associated with taking a medicine so that they receive a possible benefit versus the government and his employer (at the behest of the government) using his livelihood to extort him into taking a medication that may provide more risks than benefits.
There are other moral problems with the OSHA vaccine mandate. The mandate doesn’t acknowledge immunity due to previous infection with SARS-CoV-2. Many studies demonstrate that infection induced immunity is equal to or more effective and lasts longer than vaccine induced immunity. There is no reason to take a medication when it provides little to no benefit in preventing moderate to severe illness. There is no reason to force a medication upon another person when the medication will provide no benefit to them, let alone, no benefit to others. In this situation, the person only receives the risks that the medication provides. Please consider this, should you decide to comply with the OSHA vaccine mandate. My hope is that you will not need to make this decision because the mandate will be found to be unconstitutional. Time will tell.
As discussed above, OSHA claims that their vaccine mandate will make workplaces safer. There is no evidence for this. Vaccines improve safety for the recipient, it is quite evident that they do not quash viral transmission because regions with high immunity continue to have SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks, especially with the Omicron variant. “Unvaccinated” people are not driving SARS-CoV-2 transmissions, infected people drive transmissions.
The COVID-19 vaccines are not sterilizing vaccines. “Breakthrough” COVID-19 infections are common and expected because of the natural biology of this virus and the way our immune systems work. Measles and Polio vaccines are sterilizing and they greatly decrease transmission of these viruses. The vaccines can do this because it takes longer for Measles (~8 days) and Polio (~10-14 days) virons to infect one person and then be able to be transmitted to other people. It only takes ~3-4 days after infection with the Delta SARS-CoV-2 variant to be able to transmit the infection to others. In people who are immune for Measles and Polio, their memory T cells and B cells have the needed time to quash the infection before they can transmit the infection to someone else. This is not true for people with immunity to SARS-CoV-2. With SARS-CoV-2, the virus is able to infect an immune person, exponentially expand in number, and be aerosolized to infect others before the vaccinated or previously infected person’s immune system controls the infection. The length and severity of the infection is decreased, but the ability to infect others is not eliminated by immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
The Omicron variant infects and spreads through immune and non-immune populations, alike. I would not be surprised if the incubation time needed for viral transmission is even less for this variant. Fortunately, there is good evidence that the Omicron variant is less virulent and is causing far fewer ED visits, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and fewer people on ventilators. Omicron blew through South Africa quickly and there was no increase in death rates during this time. Most people with Omicron variant infections do not experience symptoms. In those people who have symptoms, Omicron variant infections cause cold like symptoms. There is evidence that Omicron virons don’t infect lung cells as easily as the Delta variant, which might help explain its decreased virulence. The natural process is for virulent viruses (e.g. Delta) to be outcompeted by variants that have less virulence and greater transmissibility (e.g. Omicron). Fortunately, due to widespread acquired immunity (infection and immunization induced) and decreased virulence, Omicron is likely a harbinger to the end of this deadly pandemic. This OSHA mandate will not improve our situation, it will simply create unnecessary interventions into our privacy, threaten people’s livelihoods, and place some populations at greater risks for myocarditis.
Decisions about whether to get vaccinated are complex and should be left for individuals to decide with input from their personal physicians so they can navigate the complexities based upon the individual’s personal values and risks (risks for COVID immunization include age, sex, previous infection, amount of time between previous infection and immunization, a previous negative response to the first immunization dose, and more). We have had almost a year to get vaccinated if we want. It is evident that vaccines are very good at protecting people who are at high risk. It is also evident that there is no way to rid the world of SARS-CoV-2. We can delay it, but it is here to stay (Australia and New Zealand gave up their quixotic attempts at Zero-COVID). Fortunately, much of the U.S. population already has acquired immunity (vaccine and/or infection mediated) and will be protected from moderate to severe infections with SARS-CoV-2 variants.
I hope that this company will speak out against the OSHA mandate. The mandate is immoral, abusive, destructive, invasive, will not curtail viral transmission, and will provide little improvements over our population’s current level of immunity (vaccine acquired and infection acquired). Overly testing the population will severely decrease productivity because of false positives causing healthy people to not work. Also, it is futile to try to control transmission of a virus that the population is already largely immune to and protected from. In addition to this, if OSHA ends up requiring boosters, we will all be placed into the grips of the very shady processes the administration took to get boosters FDA accepted and CDC suggested in people less than 50 years old. Here are two articles (1 & 2) discussing how the FDA bypassed their vaccine scientific advisory panel to accept the boosters for younger people, despite no evidence for additional benefits and substantial evidence that the vaccine causes harm in young males.
I’m sorry that this is a long message. I shared this wide breadth of information because, obedience to this OSHA mandate will create vast harms (32:50) and there will be no benefits from the harms. Experts agree. I want you to know that vaccination and boosting WILL CAUSE MYOCARDITIS in some people. This mandate will not protect us. It forces businesses to invade the privacy of their employees and will further dampen productivity with no social benefit. Forcing medical treatments on cognizant adults is immoral, especially in these circumstances where there is no significant benefit to society for individuals to take this medication.
Given my concerns about the OSHA COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate, I will not give my proof of vaccination because I think complying with this OSHA mandate will hurt people and I think it is wrong to exclude people’s personal physicians from these very important, nuanced decisions about when to get vaccinated. I think the physician/patient relationship is sacrosanct and I refuse to extend the physician/patient relationship to others.
I am open to discussions. I hope you will share my letter with those at this company who are deciding what to do about the OSHA mandate. People’s lives and U.S. businesses will be very negatively affected by this immoral, unscientific, brutal abuse of power. I hope this company decides to fight this mandate in court. Please contact me with any questions. I would like to help this company avert imposing the harms the OSHA mandate will create.
Sincerely,
Brandon Porter