Tangle - The new vaccine rules.

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced a new slate of federal vaccine requirements that could impact as many as 100 million Americans. The new rules impose different mandates for both private and federal employees. We’re looking at the reactions from the right and left, our take, and a listener question about Ivermectin.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at https://www.readtangle.com/--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host and Tangle's founder, Isaac Saul, and today is a special day. It's the first day we're doing this for real. We are live. If you're listening to this we are really launching. This has been in the works for a while so thank you so much to everybody who has asked for this, who said they wanted this

newsletter to be in a podcast audio form and all the people who have written in and supported and subscribed and done all the stuff that has helped make this possible. Today's podcast is a good one, an interesting one, a big one. President Biden last week announced a new vaccine mandate for millions and millions of Americans, and that's what we're going to be covering and focusing on today. But as usual, before we jump in, we will start with some quick hits. Number one, House Democrats are expected to propose raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 26.5% and a three percentage point surtax on individual income above $5 million. This is a new plan that they are kind of coalescing

behind, so I would keep an eye out on that as it develops. Number two, the FBI released a newly declassified document on its investigation into the 9-11 attacks detailing contacts between the hijackers and several Saudi officials. Number three, Senator Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, once again said he won't vote for Biden's $3.5 trillion spending plan in its current form, proposing the cost be slashed by about $2 trillion. Number four, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will testify twice before Congress this week on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. His first appearance is expected to happen today. Number five, North Korea said it fired new long-range cruise missiles in a test over the weekend.

Okay, so with the quick hits out of the way, we are going to jump into today's topic, which is the vaccine mandates that Joe Biden announced last week. On Thursday, President Joe Biden said a new slate of federal vaccine requirements that could impact as many as 100 million Americans will go into place. The rules impose different mandates for both private and federal employees. All employers with more than 100 workers, which covers roughly 80 million Americans, will be required to either test their employees for the virus weekly or mandate vaccination. Employers violating the new rules could face penalties of up to $14,000 per violation, and employers must provide paid time off to employees

to be vaccinated. Meanwhile, with limited exceptions, all federal employees and contractors must be fully vaccinated with no option to opt into weekly testing instead. This will impact about 4 million workers. Another 17 million health care workers in hospitals and clinics that receive Medicare or Medicaid fund reimbursements will also need to be vaccinated. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, will be tasked with implementing and enforcing the mandates. and Health Administration, OSHA, will be tasked with implementing and enforcing the mandates. Operating under broad authority, it was granted in the 1970s to create an emergency temporary standard to protect employees from, quote, grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards. Biden announced that he would

double federal fines for airline passengers who refuse to wear masks, send additional federal support to schools trying to reopen, and called on large entertainment venues to require vaccinations or proof of negative tests for entry. The Department of Health and Human Services will also require vaccinations in Head Start programs and schools run by the Department of Defense and Bureau of Indian Education, which is expected to impact about 300,000 employees. On Thursday, Biden said, what more is there to wait for? What more is there to see? We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. Two months ago, President Biden had declared the United States independence from COVID-19. He also said he would not issue vaccine mandates,

and his administration said it was not the role of the federal government to do so. Instead, the administration spent the last few weeks trying to compel Americans to go get the shot. But as those efforts have stalled, the rapid spread of the Delta variant has torn through the country, overwhelming some hospitals and areas with lower vaccination rates. While about 75% or 208 million Americans have at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose already, we're still averaging about 1,500 COVID-19 deaths a day, the most since winter. The CDC said 99% of hospital admissions are among those who are not fully vaccinated, and about 62% of Americans say they support mandates in the workplace. That's according to USA Today, an Ipsos poll that came out recently.

83% of unvaccinated Americans say they do not plan to get the vaccine shots at any time and more than 39 million Americans have already been infected with COVID-19 with over 650,000 who have died. We're going to take a look at some reactions from the left and the right to this news and then my take. news and then my take. All right, so first we're going to start with the right. So far, it appears pretty clear cut that the right opposes the mandate, mostly on the grounds that they believe it is federal overreach. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the mandate was, quote, overkill in a free country. Many large businesses already require vaccinations or regular testing, and some have offered workers financial incentives to get inoculated,

the board said. A few have been more forceful. Yet many businesses have been reluctant to mandate shots because they respect individual conscience or worry some employees will quit. Workers have been hard to hire amid the incentives Democrats have created not to work. Mr. Biden thinks that's not his problem. Employers understandably have concerns about compliance and enforcement. Are they supposed to pay for unvaccinated workers' weekly testing, and what kind of proof of testing or vaccination must they require? Will franchisees and corporations be liable as joint employers? Nobody knows. Mr. Biden may be reading the polls that show vaccine mandates are popular, at least among Democrats. He. Biden may be reading the polls that show vaccine mandates are popular, at least among Democrats. He promised last fall to kill the virus and declared victory too early

in June. Now he's trying to blame the virus surge on everyone else in angry accusatory rhetoric. So that's the Wall Street Journal board's argument, basically saying, look, you know, there are some pros to this kind of incentive, but the burden is going to be huge on employers. In the New York Times, Reason magazine's Robbie Suave said the mandate was a big mistake. He said the president's plan is certainly well-intentioned. The vaccines are the only tried-and-true strategy for defeating COVID. Government officials should both encourage vaccination and make it easier to get vaccinated. officials should both encourage vaccination and make it easier to get vaccinated.

However, forcing vaccines on a minority contingent of unwilling people is a huge error that risks shredding the social fabric of a country already being pulled apart by political tribalism. On top of that, Suave said the president should not and likely does not have the power to unilaterally compel millions of private sector workers to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs. Biden is presiding over a vast expansion of federal authority, one that Democrats will certainly come to regret the next time a Republican takes power. Moreover, he wrote, the mechanism of enforcement of presidential decrees smuggled into law by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration is fundamentally undemocratic. Congress is supposed to make new laws, not an unaccountable bureaucratic agency. In the New York Post, John Podorec said Biden's announcement was bizarrely incoherent. He told the American people without qualification that fully vaccinated people

are at incredibly low risk. Only one out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized for COVID per day, Biden said. Then he promised to shield them against the evil people who are threatening their very lives. We're going to protect the vaccinated from unvaccinated co-workers, he said. But Joe, you just said the vaccinated were already protected. The danger in what Biden himself called an epidemic of the unvaccinated is to the unvaccinated. That is what all the data show. Ninety nine percent of hospitalizations and more than 99% of the deaths from the Delta variant are among the unvaccinated. What's happening with the Delta variant is terrible, Poderitz said. And Biden spent a lot of the speech importuning the unvaccinated

to get the shot. They should. If they don't, they're incredibly stupid. And yes, this means you. But it's not a crime to be stupid or to be a fool's parent. People do self-destructive things all the time. All right, so that is the take from the right, and here's what the left has to say about this. For one, the left supports the mandate, arguing that this moment in time justifies it. The Washington Post editorial board said the plan will almost certainly run into logistical and legal hurdles, but it was justifiable at a time of national emergency. The Delta variant is running rampant every single day on average, taking more than 1,000 lives, putting more than 11,000 people in hospital beds, and causing more

than 130,000 new infections, the board wrote. The death toll from this pandemic now exceeds all the U.S. military combat deaths in all wars in the 20th century. It just makes no sense to go on being savaged by a virus when an effective tool to fight it is widely available and free. Every possible method should be used to reach the estimated 80 million unvaccinated eligible Americans. Persuasion, incentives, and yes, coercion. The summer surge in infections may be easing and it may take the government weeks to implement Mr. Biden's plan, but any progress towards getting an additional 20 or 40 million Americans vaccinated will be worth the effort, as will a rollout of boosters that could substantially add to vaccine immunity.

In his more muscular approach, the board said, Mr. Biden plans to have the Occupational Safety and Health Administration compel employers to impose the vaccine mandate on their employees. It is the same logic as government mandating construction workers to wear a hard hat, the same as reasoning public schools requiring students to be vaccinated against measles and other contagious diseases. Legally, Biden's expansive use of executive power is sure to be challenged in the courts. In normal times, we would not want to see such power used for less pressing needs, Meanwhile, in the New York Times, two ACLU lawyers argued that vaccine mandates are not a violation of civil liberties. While the permissibility of requiring vaccines for particular diseases depends on several factors,

when it comes to COVID-19, all considerations point to the same direction, they wrote. The disease is highly transmissible, serious, and often lethal. The vaccines are safe and effective, and crucially, there is no equally effective alternative available to protect public health. In fact, far from compromising civil liberties, the vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties. They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated, and communities of color hit hard by the disease. While the vaccine mandates are not always permissible, they rarely run afoul of civil liberties when they involve highly infectious and devastating diseases like COVID-19. Although this disease is novel, vaccine mandates are not.

Schools, health care facilities, and the U.S. military and many other institutions have long required vaccination for contagious diseases like mumps and measles that pose far less risk than coronavirus does today. In Slate, Ben Mathis Lilly said Biden was, quote, going nuclear. He sort of took a different approach to this argument. If you're going to have to put up with the political opposition calling you the Hitler of vaccines regardless, President Joe Biden appears to have reasons, you might as well also get the benefit of curtailing the pandemic by putting vaccine requirements in place. Mathis Lilley argued that the public health rationale for these requirements is strong. Only 64% of American adults are fully vaccinated, which has manifestly not been enough

to stop COVID-19 from spreading. Biden may have concluded, like more and more state-level Democrats, that the Delta variant has made the U.S. public as a whole less interested in tolerating the danger presented by unvaccinated individuals, and that a crucial portion of that public blames Democrats for Delta, despite the party's pro-vaccine position simply because it's in power at the national level. All right, and now on to my take here. So at the end of July, I wrote about vaccine mandates, and I sort of conceded that I wasn't really sure where I landed. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural

who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. I have to be honest, I. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. you know, Biden and the administration was saying that they weren't going to implement this vaccine. That presumption was based largely on the Biden administration's own professed belief that a mandate from the government wouldn't be that helpful,

and I was apparently wrong to take that at face value. Now, though, there are two separate questions that I think should be addressed. The first is whether the vaccine mandate will be, quote, good for the public at large. The second question is whether the federal government does or should have the authority to do what Biden is doing. The first question, I think the answer is yes. The data on vaccination protecting Americans from serious illness is pretty much incontrovertible now. While Biden's convoluted argument that, you know, vaccines will keep us safe and that the unvaccinated are endangering the vaccinated is kind of head spinning. It's also ridiculous to presume that people remaining unvaccinated

only impacts the people who are unvaccinated. Even if outbreaks of COVID-19 aren't going to kill the vaccinated, they can overwhelm hospitals, shut down schools, cost the public money, endanger people who for whatever reason can't get vaccinated, and bring all sorts of other burdens on the public at large even economically i mean the fact that this vaccine spreading so rapidly means that companies are being forced to shut down or limit space in dining rooms or whatever it is and clearly a large percentage of that spread is being driven by people who haven't gotten the vaccine so it impacts all of us it's not just a choice that impacts you in a vacuum. At the very least, I hope Biden's announcement will spur some employers to move

swiftly to avoid punishment and try to enforce the mandatory testing or the vaccination. I mean, hopefully we'll see a bump in vaccination rates, which is a win. If we don't, we'll get the testing, which should slow down the spread if people know that they have COVID. I would have preferred the Biden administration to address the millions of Americans who have already had COVID-19. I know natural immunity is a big thing a lot of people care about here and want to be part of the equation, and that it appears the Biden administration is not sort of addressing that either by giving exemptions or additional guidance for people who have had COVID is a little bit of a sticking point for a lot of people on the right. But even so, if you've had COVID, I mean, I linked to this in the newsletter.

There are quite a few studies out there that show, you know, the protection you get from getting vaccinated after you've had COVID is actually better than the regular vaccinated person gets. And it's better than just someone who has natural immunity gets. So, you know, together it's, you sort of get this hybrid immunity. Long story short, still a good thing to get vaccinated. Still reduces your chance of getting reinfected

or spreading the virus or getting really sick, even if you've already had COVID. The second question here is a lot more complicated to me. A lot of people have magically become experts in the 1905 Supreme Court decision Jacobson v. Massachusetts overnight. I think I had like 20 people tweet the Supreme Court ruling at me in the last week. In that ruling, the court ruled against a man named Heading Jacobson who was trying to refuse the vaccination for smallpox. Effectively, the court told Jacobson that one man's liberty cannot deprive his neighbors of their liberty, too.

But the terms of that debate were actually slightly different. For one, Jacobson was fighting a law, while Biden has enacted an executive order without any congressional authority. So the real question here is not, can the government mandate vaccines? We see the government mandating vaccines in all different ways for all the time. I mean, you know, kids can't go to public school without getting certain vaccinations. This stuff happens. The military has mandatory vaccines. It happens. It's out there. There is a precedent for it. And there is some Supreme Court precedent and legal precedent for this to hold up. But the mechanism that Biden is using to

implement this mandate is actually what's really important here. So the question is whether OSHA has the authority to punish private businesses using this emergency temporary standard power, which is a prospect that looks a lot less certain. Under the same authority, OSHA has even struggled to regulate asbestos or benzene, which are these toxic chemicals that it is directly involved in regulating. And so I'm a little bit skeptical that it's going to be able to withstand challenges to, you know, a law that's going to or an executive order, rather, that's going to allow OSHA to collect $14,000 fines from companies for not forcing their employees to get vaccinated. fines from companies for not forcing their employees to get vaccinated. It's also true that this order from OSHA is going to be coming before a federal court system that has been remade in the conservative image over the last few years, including at the Supreme Court level. So it's going to be a different court receiving this argument and these legal arguments than the one

that we had 100 years ago during the Jacobson versus Massachusetts fight. So I just, you know, I'm skeptical that this is going to hold up if these legal challenges are brought, which they already are coming in waves. At the same time, I do want to sort of put a bold print on something, which is that, you know, describing this as like a vaccine mandate, I think is reasonable. But this whole like government authoritarian Nazi takeover, whatever, I mean, just give it a rest. It's not right either. For the vast majority of Americans, there's still going to be a choice. It's binary, yes, but it's get tested or get vaccinated.

You don't want to get vaccinated. You work for one of these private employers, then you need to get tested regularly. And I know that that's a burden, but to me, as somebody who, you know, really does not like wearing a mask, does not like social distancing, I, you know, it's depressing and weighs on me and gives me anxiety. And I really don't appreciate or enjoy those kinds of measures. Getting tested regularly is a good solution. I mean, you know, you have to do something. If people out there are refusing to get tested, they're refusing to wear a mask, they're refusing to social distance, and they're refusing to get vaccinated, then like, I don't, I don't know what to do with you. I mean, you have to pick something. You have to do your

part for society as a whole in some way. And so there's an option here. It's maybe not the option a lot of people want, but it's better than just, you know, an all-out forceful vaccine mandate, obviously. All this being said, though, you know, the real burden is going to fall onto the employers who have to navigate this huge logistical hurdle of either getting people vaccinated or getting them tested. Until OSHA writes and releases this rule, I'm not really sure what that burden is going to look like, but I promise you it'll be big. So I guess to put a pin on all of this, you know, I'm hopeful that this encourages more vaccination or more testing. I think both those things would be great. Delta is a huge issue. Clearly, it's interrupting daily life for a lot of people. I mean, literally 1,500 people are dying a day. At the same time, I am skeptical that the Biden administration can enforce this mandate without overstepping its authority. And I've written repeatedly about, you know, my sort of knee-jerk dislike for federal overreach like this,

and I think this is a good example of that. All right, so that's it for my take on this story. We are going to pivot a little bit to another COVID-related story, thanks to a reader question that came in. Greg D. from Boston, Massachusetts wrote in and said, What's going on with ivermectin? How did this become such a thing on the right? And is it actually a thing or is the left media blowing it out of proportion?

Okay, so for those of you who don't know, quick five-second recap. Ivermectin is sort of the latest drug to be heralded as a miracle treatment and perhaps even a preventative measure for COVID-19. It's mostly been in the headlines because of the fact that there's an ivermectin for animals. It's like an anti-parasitic. It exists both for humans and for animals, but you can buy it over the counter without a prescription as like a dewormer basically for animals. And some people actually appear to be doing that, which is not good. Don't

do that. They're trying to treat themselves preemptively or treat COVID. And, you know, some people are getting really sick, obviously, because they're taking a dewormer for, you know, an antiparasitic for animals. The CDC and the FDA have both advised against using the drug to treat COVID-19, the human version of the drug. And the National Institute of Health has said that there's not enough evidence for or against it. So a few things. I mean, first of all, I don't think that there's that many people using ivermectin. I think the story has definitely been blown out of proportion. I suppose it's impossible to know. Obviously, there's people

on Facebook and stuff posting about using it, whatever. But it's also, you know, the coverage of this has been a little bit unfair, I think. You know, this is not a horse medication. I mean, it is, yes, if you take the horse medication version of it, but there's a human version of ivermectin, and it won a Nobel Prize in 2015 for treating parasitic diseases. It's actually an incredible drug, and it's very safe. And if it's prescribed by your doctor for a specific reason, it's totally okay to take. Even in Latin America and some places in in europe doctors are experimenting with it to treat covid19 so there's there's more context here than just like oh people are eating horse paste that's

not totally what's happening um i i know some people are doing that i agree that boggles the mind um but yes all that being said we we need more information. I mean, one of the most popular studies touting the human ivermectin treatment for COVID-19 was actually retracted because of some discrepancies in the data. So we don't have a ton of peer-reviewed medical research on its efficacy against COVID-19. It has not aced a trial in humans. So if your hesitancy about vaccines is that it's unproven, it would be a bizarre thing to do and a total contradiction to go out and take a drug that's literally unproven. That being said, it looks like there's some better data coming. There are a few studies that are just wrapping up, some big studies that I think need to be peer-reviewed on ivermectin, just like all the

other treatments that have been out there, that have been proposed out there, I'm hopeful that the results are promising. I mean, this would be a great thing if a drug that's widely available and safe and that doctors are already prescribing is actually a great COVID treatment. So, you know, don't take medical advice from political newsletter. Don't do anything that your doctor doesn't tell you. There's more nuance to the ivermectin story than, you know, what you've seen in the headlines, I'm assuming. Don't forget, if you want to ask a question and submit something, you can do that by replying to our newsletter, which you can find at readtangle.com. Come straight to your inbox, click reply, write in, fill out a form, whatever,

and we can answer your question in the newsletter and on the podcast. Okay, today's story that matters is about college students who are apparently using a lot more cannabis and drinking a lot less booze. The Monitoring the Future study, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has been tracking drug and alcohol use among 19 to 22-year-olds since 1980. 44% of college students reported using cannabis in 2020, which was an increase of 28% in 2015. Daily or near-daily use rose from 5% to 8%, and at the same time, alcohol use dropped from 62% in 2019 to 56%. With the percentage reporting that they had been drunk in the last month coming down from 35% to 28%. So binge drinking also dropped markedly. The full picture here is, you know, we don't know whether this is COVID-19 related or people being home, not the same kind of social life. But the Washington Post

has a very interesting story about this, about how this kind of drug use is changing, which obviously, you know, for the future of the country is an interesting story to keep an eye on. All right, and today's numbers section 64%, that is the percentage of hospital staff at facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement, the ones that will fall under this mandate, which are estimated to already have been vaccinated. So 64% of those staff have already been vaccinated. 75 days is the amount of time federal workers will have to get themselves vaccinated now that this mandate is going into place. 97,666 is the number of Americans estimated who were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Saturday. 11 times is how much more likely people who are unvaccinated from COVID-19 are to die from the virus than people who are vaccinated. And 10,000 is the number of pharmacies in America that will offer free testing under the new COVID-19 plan that Joe Biden laid out last week.

Okay, today's have a nice day section is actually another COVID-19 story. I don't mean to COVID-19 overwhelm you. I know we haven't actually covered the virus as the main story in a while, and there are a lot of COVID stories percolating out there. So today, it was just kind of a COVID-19 theme. Researchers in Arkansas believe they have found the cause of long-haul COVID-19 symptoms. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, UAMS, believes that an antibody that appears weeks after the initial infection attacks and disrupts the key regulator of the immune system. About 30% of patients with COVID-19 deal with lingering symptoms like fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, whatever. And they believe if this hypothesis is correct about the antibody, they can develop an effective treatment for the so-called long haulers. John Arthur, who's one of the people leading the study, said,

If our next steps confirm that this antibody is the cause of long COVID symptoms, there are medications that should work to treat them. If we get to that phase of research, the next step would be to test these drugs and hopefully relieve the people of the symptoms they're having. So there's your good news story appropriately for COVID-19, given some of the doomsdaying the rest of this newsletter is. All right, guys, well, thank you so much for tuning in. Again, this is podcast number one. If you have thoughts, feedback, responses to how we did this and how it sounds and what you think, as always, you can reach me just by replying to the newsletter or write to me at Isaac, I-S-A-A-C, at readtangle.com. Today's podcast was written by me, Isaac Saul, the Tangle News founder, and it was edited and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. The music for the podcast was done by Diet75. Our newsletter is edited by Sean Brady, Bailey Saul, and Ari Weitzman. It is also produced by my social media manager and right-hand Magdalena Bokoa. Thank you so much for tuning in. And as

always, if you want more, go to readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.