Full Disclosure

 

I don't want to write this post, but I don't think I can duck the issue.

I was unofficially informed that apparently it will be the policy of my employer to require all employees, presumably including myself (they think), who have not received any COVID vaccinations, to submit to twice-weekly testing for COVID. This would involve shoving a swab up both nostrils two times a week, indefinitely.

Um...no.

If they try that, and make it official, my opening answer will be to invite the person who puts that suggestion into action to tell me exactly how far up their ass they'd like to stick that policy, and would they like my assistance in that endeavor?

Followed by the following blizzard of queries:

1) Who told you I did or did not get vaccinated?

2) Do you have a copy of my signed authorization to release that personal health information to any third party?

3) Lacking any such authorization, how would you possibly know my actual vaccination status?

4) Lacking that knowledge, how do you know which employees to even approach with this suggestion?

5) "Have I been vaccinated against COVID?" That's none of your fucking business.

6) Now you're asking me if I'm vaccinated against COVID? Again, that's none of your fucking business.

7) Submitting to receiving experimental therapies and becoming an unpaid medical guinea pig with respect to their effectiveness and potential complications was not and is not a condition of my employment. If it were otherwise, you'd have noted that from the outset. Trying to bluster and bootstrap it in now as if it were anything less than that is egregiously intrusive, entirely recockulous, and wholly unwelcome.

8) None of the vaccines for COVID are authorized for anything but emergency use. The makers have no liability for what happens to those who receive them. To date, the VAERS reports over 11,000 deaths from those COVID vaccines in just the U.S., and a quarter of a million adverse events. More of both deaths and adverse reactions than the total for every vaccine ever invented in human history, combined, for as long as we've kept records. Those COVID vaccines are therefore unsafe at any speed. And you have no more right as an employer to compel me, either directly, nor by onerous policies for non-compliance, to receive such an experimental therapy, any more than you could demand I submit to gender reassignment therapy, get an abortion, or have a limb amputated.

9) It's my body, and my choice. Shall we call in the company's legal counsel, and see how they'd like to sell the case against that legal position in court?

10) Ask counsel how they'll feel when the next three words I bring into the conversation are "hostile workplace environment". Then go over words like "mental stress and cruelty", "back pay", and "treble damages, plus all legal costs".

11) There are literally hundreds of other communicable diseases I (or any other employee) might or might not bring to work, many of which have no available vaccine. Are you going to test me for those bi-weekly as well? Why, or why not?

12) Are you going to be testing every other employee of the company for those dozens to hundreds of other communicable diseases? Why, or why not?

13) If I'm being singled out and categorized, isn't that the definition of "arbitrary and capricious"? How does corporate counsel like his odds in court defending that plan?

14) Why would you think you need to test me now, 18 months into a pandemic, for a disease for which I've shown no symptoms whatsoever, ever, to date, despite being a front-line caregiver with the sickest of the sick non-stop since the outset?

15) Are you aware the CDC reports that 75% of those fully vaccinated are the overwhelming bulk of those with the newest COVID variant? Will you be testing everyone twice a week, given that that's a far more sensible policy than proposing to test unvaccinated persons (bearing in mind you have no valid idea to which of those categories I belong)?

16) Are you aware that the CDC also reports that vaccinated persons carry the same amount of communicable virus in their bodies as unvaccinated persons? What's your plan to deal with that, and how do you intend to protect the unvaccinated from those vaccinated super-spreaders?

17) Are you aware that according to the CDC, despite being fully vaccinated, a person could suffer a more serious infection than an unvaccinated person? Knowing that to be the official position of the US government agency responsible for propagating communicable disease policy and procedure, why in hell would you suggest anyone get vaccinated, since it confers no immunity to the disease, no inability to spread the disease, and promises no diminution of symptoms if infected, despite getting the vaccinations?

18) In light of the above official CDC reported information, isn't promoting further vaccinations just about the most gobsmackingly dumbass thing you possibly could do, short of suggesting that people lick toilet bowls?

19) Given everything in #1-18, above, would you like to continue this discussion with lawyers, a judge, and a jury, in open court, or would you rather just quietly shitcan this silly-assed scheme, and allow all parties to pretend it never happened?

I'm old, ornery, and smart, and I won't be taking any shit, but I'll happily give it out by the metric fuckton if they try to push this sort of nonsense. I like my odds.

If my employer wants to test my resolve to go all "No, fuck YOU!", and become the poster child for why employment is not indentured servitude, they've grabbed the wrong tiger's tail. If they want to be the poster child on what not to do, I can only warn them that the stove is hot. But as Mark Twain said about the man who picked up the cat by the tail, they're about to learn something which they can learn in no other way.

I'll keep you posted, as appropriate.

If I'm betting, I'd give good odds this jackassery will be quietly strangled to death in a basement broom closet in about 5 minutes' time. Time will tell.