Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:people are confused about Weingarten’s statement, apparently made on a TV show. unclear what AFT’s position actually is about mandatory vax.

https://mobile.twitter.com/crampell/status/1424392084472094722

Only you are confused. As I just said, the AFT supports negotiating mandates. This has been the case all along.

A mandate involves more than just shots in arms. What are the ramifications for those who can't or won't vaccinate? Will vaccination status be made public? Will sick leave be allowed for anyone who suffers from vaccine side effects? Will the mandate apply to potential booster shots? Etc. etc. All of that has to be worked out.

But a mandate is black and white, there should be zero negotiation. If you can’t or won’t get vaccinated, you no longer have employment in education. By throwing in “… we’ll what about people that…” isn’t a mandate, it’s a choice. And considering that teachers in this area were pushed to the front of the line in February, if they don’t have vaccines now, they need to drop everything and get a shot -CVS, Walgreens etc.- are open very late, some open 24 hours. Get it now or get your resume together because you will no longer be employed.

Sadly for you, I guess, life is a bit more complex than your imagination. In reality, some folks have medical reasons not to be vaccinated. Moreover, employment contracts cannot simply be broken on a whim. Thankfully, both the Bowser administration and the WTU took a more serious approach than what you are advocating and were able to reach a mutually-acceptable agreement.

Hi Jeff. Can we get some sources on your assertions? Can you point us to the specific language in WTU's collective bargaining agreement that prevents the city from imposing a vaccine mandate on teachers? Also, doctors will tell you that almost no one has a valid medical reason for not getting vaccinated. Those are rare.

I am quite sure that the DC government could have imposed a mandate. I am similarly sure that if the mandate included penalties affecting employment, it would have been challenged in court and would have been essentially worthless. But, not having a copy of the contract on hand, I can't provide you the specific language. This reality has been clear to anyone paying attention to the ongoing discussions.

I have no idea how common medical exemptions are and I really don't care. Nor do I care about religious exemptions which I personally find even more absurd. But just about every mandate includes such exemptions so there is no reason for DC to be different. If those claiming exemptions want to get tested weekly for the indefinite future, that's their choice I guess. Personally, I'd do a different cost-benefit analysis.

copying this from another thread, because it seems relevant:

I work in HR and see the exemption requests from the vaccine mandates. There’s a lot of people with extreme religious beliefs that relate to vaccines generally or this vaccine more specifically because of the testing on the fetal cell line. (I’m always curious if these people also reject medicine tested on those lines.). There seems to be a large overlap with those people believing conspiracy theories about the vaccine because they also often cite inaccurate info about the supposed risks that they got off questionable internet sites.

There are also people with medical requests that are fairly vague but similar to the lady above who said autoimmune, heart or clotting issues, etc. I sort of wonder about the doctors signing off on these requests but they are out there.

TL;DR: People who still aren't vaccinated are kooks with bizarre theories about vaccines and coronavirus.

Everyone I know with autoimmune disorders have been told to get vaccinated because the severe (aka death) risk is higher for people in a flare. I cannot imagine any doctor recommending no vaccine! I really think they have spoken with their doctors.

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:people are confused about Weingarten’s statement, apparently made on a TV show. unclear what AFT’s position actually is about mandatory vax.

https://mobile.twitter.com/crampell/status/1424392084472094722

Only you are confused. As I just said, the AFT supports negotiating mandates. This has been the case all along.

A mandate involves more than just shots in arms. What are the ramifications for those who can't or won't vaccinate? Will vaccination status be made public? Will sick leave be allowed for anyone who suffers from vaccine side effects? Will the mandate apply to potential booster shots? Etc. etc. All of that has to be worked out.

But a mandate is black and white, there should be zero negotiation. If you can’t or won’t get vaccinated, you no longer have employment in education. By throwing in “… we’ll what about people that…” isn’t a mandate, it’s a choice. And considering that teachers in this area were pushed to the front of the line in February, if they don’t have vaccines now, they need to drop everything and get a shot -CVS, Walgreens etc.- are open very late, some open 24 hours. Get it now or get your resume together because you will no longer be employed.

Sadly for you, I guess, life is a bit more complex than your imagination. In reality, some folks have medical reasons not to be vaccinated. Moreover, employment contracts cannot simply be broken on a whim. Thankfully, both the Bowser administration and the WTU took a more serious approach than what you are advocating and were able to reach a mutually-acceptable agreement.

Hi Jeff. Can we get some sources on your assertions? Can you point us to the specific language in WTU's collective bargaining agreement that prevents the city from imposing a vaccine mandate on teachers? Also, doctors will tell you that almost no one has a valid medical reason for not getting vaccinated. Those are rare.

I am quite sure that the DC government could have imposed a mandate. I am similarly sure that if the mandate included penalties affecting employment, it would have been challenged in court and would have been essentially worthless. But, not having a copy of the contract on hand, I can't provide you the specific language. This reality has been clear to anyone paying attention to the ongoing discussions.

I have no idea how common medical exemptions are and I really don't care. Nor do I care about religious exemptions which I personally find even more absurd. But just about every mandate includes such exemptions so there is no reason for DC to be different. If those claiming exemptions want to get tested weekly for the indefinite future, that's their choice I guess. Personally, I'd do a different cost-benefit analysis.

copying this from another thread, because it seems relevant:

I work in HR and see the exemption requests from the vaccine mandates. There’s a lot of people with extreme religious beliefs that relate to vaccines generally or this vaccine more specifically because of the testing on the fetal cell line. (I’m always curious if these people also reject medicine tested on those lines.). There seems to be a large overlap with those people believing conspiracy theories about the vaccine because they also often cite inaccurate info about the supposed risks that they got off questionable internet sites.

There are also people with medical requests that are fairly vague but similar to the lady above who said autoimmune, heart or clotting issues, etc. I sort of wonder about the doctors signing off on these requests but they are out there.

TL;DR: People who still aren't vaccinated are kooks with bizarre theories about vaccines and coronavirus.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The devil is in the details though. It is nice to have a mandate but who is going to follow up with teachers and staff. Will vaccine cards be checked or do folks just have to say whether they are vaccinated or not. Who is going to be checking in weekly regarding unvaccinated folks getting their tests, etc. That is a lot of follow up work. And principals will be reluctant to fire teachers mid-year given the teacher shortage. They will be stuck with a substitute all year. Not saying it isn’t a good first step though

You are right, definitely a good first step. It is more work but the more people who are vaccinated, the fewer quarantines and COVID-related outages there will be. I work in a school and the follow-up work from quarantines and infected staff is a lot too. More vaccinations will cut down on that. My understanding is that fully vaccinated staff have to upload their vaccination card and they will get a "time off" award of 8 hours.

I’m a teacher too. And DC gov is not good at follow through. So, yes, exactly right - this is a good first step but I wouldn’t get too excited.
And I’m fully vaccinated but if I was an extreme anti vaccer, I would just buy a fake vaccine card off the internet and upload that. Not a chance anyone is looking closely at these things

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The devil is in the details though. It is nice to have a mandate but who is going to follow up with teachers and staff. Will vaccine cards be checked or do folks just have to say whether they are vaccinated or not. Who is going to be checking in weekly regarding unvaccinated folks getting their tests, etc. That is a lot of follow up work. And principals will be reluctant to fire teachers mid-year given the teacher shortage. They will be stuck with a substitute all year. Not saying it isn’t a good first step though

You are right, definitely a good first step. It is more work but the more people who are vaccinated, the fewer quarantines and COVID-related outages there will be. I work in a school and the follow-up work from quarantines and infected staff is a lot too. More vaccinations will cut down on that. My understanding is that fully vaccinated staff have to upload their vaccination card and they will get a "time off" award of 8 hours.

That’s correct. I’m staff (not a teacher) and I got an extra day off as soon as I uploaded my card. (I mean, I would have done the vaccine regardless given that I have chronic asthma and high blood pressure and didn’t want to have a potentially debilitating or fatal disease that I could easily prevent by having a rather painless vaccine - I had very mild side effects after both shots but honestly way better than the flu shot side effects I’ve experienced in the past.) I have one colleague with a genuine medical exemption, but religious exemptions are a bunch of malarkey. Parents pull those out all the time when they’re told their kids can’t come to school without their vaccines; all of a sudden, their religion forbids immunization against measles. 🙄 New York State did away with those a while ago; wish we’d do the same.

I don’t know if that’s true for adult employees but it is definitely true for students. And if they won’t vaccinate their kids, it seems likely they haven’t gotten vaccinated themselves and there you go, there’s your community spread. I think parents concerned about teacher and staff vaccinations should press the City Council to eliminate religious exemptions for student immunizations too. I don’t live in DC so I can’t do this as a citizen but it makes no sense to me that kids can go ahead and come to school without shots for highly contagious diseases like measles because their parents filled out a very basic piece of paper.

So all anyone has to do to get a religious exemption is to say my religion opposes vaccination? I’m not sure anything more than that is required

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The devil is in the details though. It is nice to have a mandate but who is going to follow up with teachers and staff. Will vaccine cards be checked or do folks just have to say whether they are vaccinated or not. Who is going to be checking in weekly regarding unvaccinated folks getting their tests, etc. That is a lot of follow up work. And principals will be reluctant to fire teachers mid-year given the teacher shortage. They will be stuck with a substitute all year. Not saying it isn’t a good first step though

You are right, definitely a good first step. It is more work but the more people who are vaccinated, the fewer quarantines and COVID-related outages there will be. I work in a school and the follow-up work from quarantines and infected staff is a lot too. More vaccinations will cut down on that. My understanding is that fully vaccinated staff have to upload their vaccination card and they will get a "time off" award of 8 hours.

That’s correct. I’m staff (not a teacher) and I got an extra day off as soon as I uploaded my card. (I mean, I would have done the vaccine regardless given that I have chronic asthma and high blood pressure and didn’t want to have a potentially debilitating or fatal disease that I could easily prevent by having a rather painless vaccine - I had very mild side effects after both shots but honestly way better than the flu shot side effects I’ve experienced in the past.) I have one colleague with a genuine medical exemption, but religious exemptions are a bunch of malarkey. Parents pull those out all the time when they’re told their kids can’t come to school without their vaccines; all of a sudden, their religion forbids immunization against measles. 🙄 New York State did away with those a while ago; wish we’d do the same.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The devil is in the details though. It is nice to have a mandate but who is going to follow up with teachers and staff. Will vaccine cards be checked or do folks just have to say whether they are vaccinated or not. Who is going to be checking in weekly regarding unvaccinated folks getting their tests, etc. That is a lot of follow up work. And principals will be reluctant to fire teachers mid-year given the teacher shortage. They will be stuck with a substitute all year. Not saying it isn’t a good first step though

You are right, definitely a good first step. It is more work but the more people who are vaccinated, the fewer quarantines and COVID-related outages there will be. I work in a school and the follow-up work from quarantines and infected staff is a lot too. More vaccinations will cut down on that. My understanding is that fully vaccinated staff have to upload their vaccination card and they will get a "time off" award of 8 hours.

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Funny how the coronavirus epidemic is supposedly serious enough to cancel school for a year and a half, but not serious enough to require teachers to get vaccinated.

As of today, they are required to either get vaccinated or get tested weekly. Realistically, we can't get better than that. A few posters who apparently have authoritarian tendencies think you can bludgeon people into compliance, but it just doesn't work that way.

This is just wrong.

Vaccines have been freely available for months and yet a huge share of adults still aren't vaccinated (the vaccination rate in Ward 8 is 24 percent, which is lower than it is in Mississippi). It's probably safe to assume that by now that the vast majority of people who still aren't vaccinated have decided that they aren't ever going to get vaccinated.

That's why everyone from the White House to the city of New York to the NFL is considering much more drastic measures to get people vaccinated. If we don't crank up the pressure, the mutations of the virus will get ever more dangerous and the pandemic will never end. Wearing a mask and just hoping that it eventually ends is not going to solve anything.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-vaccines-delta/2021/08/05/4359ac76-f567-11eb-a49b-d96f2dac0942_story.html

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The devil is in the details though. It is nice to have a mandate but who is going to follow up with teachers and staff. Will vaccine cards be checked or do folks just have to say whether they are vaccinated or not. Who is going to be checking in weekly regarding unvaccinated folks getting their tests, etc. That is a lot of follow up work. And principals will be reluctant to fire teachers mid-year given the teacher shortage. They will be stuck with a substitute all year. Not saying it isn’t a good first step though

It would be nice if DC like NYC added more restrictions on non-vaccinated people - such as can only eat in restaurants if vaccinated. The more inconvenient we make life for these people, the more likely they are to get vaccinated

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The devil is in the details though. It is nice to have a mandate but who is going to follow up with teachers and staff. Will vaccine cards be checked or do folks just have to say whether they are vaccinated or not. Who is going to be checking in weekly regarding unvaccinated folks getting their tests, etc. That is a lot of follow up work. And principals will be reluctant to fire teachers mid-year given the teacher shortage. They will be stuck with a substitute all year. Not saying it isn’t a good first step though

You are right, definitely a good first step. It is more work but the more people who are vaccinated, the fewer quarantines and COVID-related outages there will be. I work in a school and the follow-up work from quarantines and infected staff is a lot too. More vaccinations will cut down on that. My understanding is that fully vaccinated staff have to upload their vaccination card and they will get a "time off" award of 8 hours.

Anonymous wrote:The devil is in the details though. It is nice to have a mandate but who is going to follow up with teachers and staff. Will vaccine cards be checked or do folks just have to say whether they are vaccinated or not. Who is going to be checking in weekly regarding unvaccinated folks getting their tests, etc. That is a lot of follow up work. And principals will be reluctant to fire teachers mid-year given the teacher shortage. They will be stuck with a substitute all year. Not saying it isn’t a good first step though

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Funny how the coronavirus epidemic is supposedly serious enough to cancel school for a year and a half, but not serious enough to require teachers to get vaccinated.

As of today, they are required to either get vaccinated or get tested weekly. Realistically, we can't get better than that. A few posters who apparently have authoritarian tendencies think you can bludgeon people into compliance, but it just doesn't work that way.

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:people are confused about Weingarten’s statement, apparently made on a TV show. unclear what AFT’s position actually is about mandatory vax.

https://mobile.twitter.com/crampell/status/1424392084472094722

Only you are confused. As I just said, the AFT supports negotiating mandates. This has been the case all along.

A mandate involves more than just shots in arms. What are the ramifications for those who can't or won't vaccinate? Will vaccination status be made public? Will sick leave be allowed for anyone who suffers from vaccine side effects? Will the mandate apply to potential booster shots? Etc. etc. All of that has to be worked out.

But a mandate is black and white, there should be zero negotiation. If you can’t or won’t get vaccinated, you no longer have employment in education. By throwing in “… we’ll what about people that…” isn’t a mandate, it’s a choice. And considering that teachers in this area were pushed to the front of the line in February, if they don’t have vaccines now, they need to drop everything and get a shot -CVS, Walgreens etc.- are open very late, some open 24 hours. Get it now or get your resume together because you will no longer be employed.

Sadly for you, I guess, life is a bit more complex than your imagination. In reality, some folks have medical reasons not to be vaccinated. Moreover, employment contracts cannot simply be broken on a whim. Thankfully, both the Bowser administration and the WTU took a more serious approach than what you are advocating and were able to reach a mutually-acceptable agreement.

Hi Jeff. Can we get some sources on your assertions? Can you point us to the specific language in WTU's collective bargaining agreement that prevents the city from imposing a vaccine mandate on teachers? Also, doctors will tell you that almost no one has a valid medical reason for not getting vaccinated. Those are rare.

I am quite sure that the DC government could have imposed a mandate. I am similarly sure that if the mandate included penalties affecting employment, it would have been challenged in court and would have been essentially worthless. But, not having a copy of the contract on hand, I can't provide you the specific language. This reality has been clear to anyone paying attention to the ongoing discussions.

I have no idea how common medical exemptions are and I really don't care. Nor do I care about religious exemptions which I personally find even more absurd. But just about every mandate includes such exemptions so there is no reason for DC to be different. If those claiming exemptions want to get tested weekly for the indefinite future, that's their choice I guess. Personally, I'd do a different cost-benefit analysis.

Anonymous wrote:Funny how the coronavirus epidemic is supposedly serious enough to cancel school for a year and a half, but not serious enough to require teachers to get vaccinated.

Anonymous wrote:The devil is in the details though. It is nice to have a mandate but who is going to follow up with teachers and staff. Will vaccine cards be checked or do folks just have to say whether they are vaccinated or not. Who is going to be checking in weekly regarding unvaccinated folks getting their tests, etc. That is a lot of follow up work. And principals will be reluctant to fire teachers mid-year given the teacher shortage. They will be stuck with a substitute all year. Not saying it isn’t a good first step though

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:people are confused about Weingarten’s statement, apparently made on a TV show. unclear what AFT’s position actually is about mandatory vax.

https://mobile.twitter.com/crampell/status/1424392084472094722

Only you are confused. As I just said, the AFT supports negotiating mandates. This has been the case all along.

A mandate involves more than just shots in arms. What are the ramifications for those who can't or won't vaccinate? Will vaccination status be made public? Will sick leave be allowed for anyone who suffers from vaccine side effects? Will the mandate apply to potential booster shots? Etc. etc. All of that has to be worked out.

But a mandate is black and white, there should be zero negotiation. If you can’t or won’t get vaccinated, you no longer have employment in education. By throwing in “… we’ll what about people that…” isn’t a mandate, it’s a choice. And considering that teachers in this area were pushed to the front of the line in February, if they don’t have vaccines now, they need to drop everything and get a shot -CVS, Walgreens etc.- are open very late, some open 24 hours. Get it now or get your resume together because you will no longer be employed.

Sadly for you, I guess, life is a bit more complex than your imagination. In reality, some folks have medical reasons not to be vaccinated. Moreover, employment contracts cannot simply be broken on a whim. Thankfully, both the Bowser administration and the WTU took a more serious approach than what you are advocating and were able to reach a mutually-acceptable agreement.

Hi Jeff. Can we get some sources on your assertions? Can you point us to the specific language in WTU's collective bargaining agreement that prevents the city from imposing a vaccine mandate on teachers? Also, doctors will tell you that almost no one has a valid medical reason for not getting vaccinated. Those are rare.