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Jay Bhattacharya: SCOTUS Ruling on Health Care Vaccine Mandate a ‘Big Mistake,’ Stanford Professor Says
re: COVID
re: ethics in medicine
re: Jay Bhattacharya
re: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
re: How Well do Doctors Understand Probability?
re: How to understand scientific studies (in health and medicine)
Science will limp along less than wholly ruined so long as honest folk like Jay Bhattacharya are willing to speak out, exerting some drag on intellectually bankrupt researchers.
The Epoch Times: SCOTUS Ruling on Health Care Vaccine Mandate a ‘Big Mistake,’ Stanford Professor Says
2022-01-14, By Mimi Nguyen Ly and Jan Jekielek. Emphasis added.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Thursday allowing the Biden administration to continue mandating COVID-19 vaccines for most health care workers is “really unfortunate” and a “big mistake” from a health policy perspective, said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Bhattacharya, a senior scholar of Brownstone Institute, told The Epoch Times the ruling presents a situation that is “FUBAR,” a military slang term that stands for “[expletive] up beyond all repair.”
“That’s what this is, right? This is FUBAR,” he said, adding, “From a health policy perspective, from a public health perspective, it is a big mistake.”
The Supreme Court on Thursday let stand a vaccination requirement for health care workers at places that receive funding from Medicare or Medicaid—this accounts for about 10.4 million workers at 76,000 health care facilities as well as home health care providers, according to the federal government, down from the over 17 million it originally said...
Bhattacharya said the SCOTUS ruling is “really unfortunate,” and likely to create labor shortages in American hospitals for the foreseeable future. “It’s already the case that there’s a reduction in staff hospital beds—tens of thousands—and that’s because they’ve lost so many workers in hospitals. [Health care workers] left because they didn’t want the vaccine.”
...
The professor said there are two aspects that amount to what he calls a “real strange situation.”
Firstly, many health care workers who left due to the vaccine mandates are “COVID-recovered, because they’ve worked for the frontlines [for] all of 2020,” Bhattacharya said, adding that these people are “better protected against transmitting the disease than the vaccinated.”
Secondly, health authorities across the United States are allowing health care workers who have mild or no symptoms who have COVID-19 to return to work to alleviate staffing shortages amid the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant, Bhattacharya noted. “Of course, they’re vaccinated, and so they’re allowed to come back,” he said.
“So put those two pieces together, this vaccine mandate gets rid of the natural immune-unvaccinated [and] basically induces hospitals to permit COVID-positive vaccinated workers to work,” Bhattacharya said.
On Twitter, he said, “The vax does not halt transmission, so no marginal benefit to patients regarding covid risk either.”
“The vaccine mandate in this case actually may result in more exposure of patients to the virus than otherwise would have happened without the vaccine mandate,” Bhattacharya told The Epoch Times.
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WIND: the law of unintended consequences.
I’d say follow the money here, except that the Supreme Court is really about follow the stupidity, or some such.
