Vaccine mandates work

Also nice to see a story that focuses on the big picture rather than unrepresentative outliers:

Gov. Jay Inslee’s order for 63,000 state workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19 has drawn broad outcry from conservatives, large protests from state workers and legal challenges by employees who stand to lose their jobs under the mandate.

But if Washington’s biggest agencies are any indication, state employees are largely complying with the mandate that they be vaccinated by Oct. 18 or lose their jobs.

The Washington Department of Corrections, (DOC) which oversees the state’s 12 prisons, has verified that 89% of workers have been vaccinated as of noon Thursday, according to a spokesperson. That’s a steep rise from a few weeks ago, when individual prisons reported vaccination rates among staffers as low as 39%.

The Department of Social and Health Services — Washington’s largest state agency, with nearly 16,000 employees — had verified 91% of its workers as vaccinated as of Thursday.

The state Department of Transportation meanwhile is at 93% verified vaccinated as of Friday morning, and the Washington State Patrol announced Wednesday that 93% of its workers had been vaccinated.

At the Department of Children, Youth and Families, that number stood at nearly 87% as of Wednesday — up from around 50% three weeks ago.

Mandates are effective, are deeply embedded in American political culture, and do not violate any constitutional or morally protected liberty interest. We need a lot more of them.

Meanwhile, the anti-anti-anti-vaxx set, while completely ignoring the massive Fox News anti-vaxx propaganda campaign, is (pretending to be) outraged by stories that point out that potential treatments for COVID are promising but still not substitute for vaccines that prevent the vast majority of people from getting seriously ill in the first place. I had no idea it was biologically possible to be that far up your own ass.