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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

The most likely explanation is here [1]. Pilots (and apparently some air traffic controllers) are doing a sickout to protest vaccine mandates, presumably to make the powers that be understand just how difficult they can make things for the country if they proceed with intended mass firings. But the sickout is technically illegal, so nobody will acknowledge it. That is why you won't see a clear explanation of this incident - probably ever. You've never seen anything like it because we have never been in a situation where a significant percentage of the population is being threatened with the loss of their livelihood unless they take something that many consider to be quite dangerous.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28824370

Edit: deleted link to tweet, comment below points out that it was from a suspect Twitter account.

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> unless they take something that many consider to be quite dangerous.

Of course, zero pushback on this nonsense idea

Is it nonsense that the vaccines may be dangerous or that many consider the vaccines to be dangerous?

The former. But saying it this way is just like the GOP saying that "many people are concerned about election integrity" after they spent months lying to the public that it was a giant fraud.

It's such a nonsense idea that Finland and Sweden recently halted Moderna vaccination for under-30s males due to, in the views of their health authorities, the risks outweighing the benefits? https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-pauses-use-mode...

> recently halted Moderna vaccination

In favor of Pfizer for that age group. Not in favor of "don't get the vaccine".

For a healthy person under 35, the odds of dying or having to be hospitalized shortly after receiving the vaccine are slightly higher than the odds of dying from COVID [1]. While the odds of any of these events, including dying from COVID, are low, there are certainly risks. We are faced with only bad choices in this pandemic - take a vaccine that has a high death/hospitalization rate relative to other vaccines, or roll the dice with COVID.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28829574

I'm sorry, but you just can't rely on VAERS data for a comparison like this. Literally anyone can submit a report to VAERS.

It’s the best data we have on this. The CDC officially denies any causal link between the vaccine and death [1]:

”A review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records, has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines”

I can find 10 credible news reports of healthy individuals that died within 48 hours of receiving the vaccine in a minute of searching, so we know that the number 0 is complete nonsense.

Since the CDC numbers are comically wrong, we have to go to the next best source. The CDC itself is creating vaccine hesitancy by lying and misrepresenting statistics, which leads people to wonder what else they are lying about. Just the idea that they report adverse reaction rates based on number of doses administered, and not the number of vaccinated people, intentionally cuts the effective incident rate per person in half since two doses are required. That calls into question everything else they do. Nobody cares if it’s the first or second dose that kills or injures them. So the next best source is VAERS.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...

Agree. Have family members in the pilot's union and in the air traffic control union.

The White House thinks they can force unilateral changes to the union contracts.

If the unions admitted to what was going on, the White House would have more legal authority to intervene more directly with the unions.

The parent comment above is being downvoted in favor of the top comment - which is a baseless pro-union comment.

It's so strange. Do people really prefer to push an agenda here rather than understand the nuance and truth of what is going on?

> The White House thinks they can force unilateral changes to the union contracts.

Well, yes. Contracts can't override Federal regulation. "Sign this contract exempting you from OHSA protections" won't (generally) fly, right?

What federal regulation gives the federal government the magical ability to mandate a medical procedure without consent?

OHSA, for employers subject to it. Medicare puts a lot of hospitals under their jurisdiction standards-wise, as well. Same for airlines. You'll note they've limited the mandate quite a bit to areas where there's wide court agreement the Feds have jurisdiction.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/us/politics/biden-vaccine...

> Experts said that legal challenges to the rule were all but assured, but precedent is most likely on Mr. Biden’s side. In the past 20 years, “every standard that has been challenged in court has been upheld by federal judges,” David Michaels, a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health who was a head of OSHA during the Obama administration, said in an interview.

> OSHA also has the authority to quickly issue a rule, known as an emergency temporary standard, if it can show that workers are exposed to grave danger and that the rule is necessary to address it. The rule must also be feasible for employers to enforce.

At the state level, there's plenty of legal precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts

I don't find pilots refusing vaccines in significant numbers plausible in the slightest. Airline pilots have to comply with plenty of regulations and they're continuously trained to comply with safety regulations. Thus you don't become a pilot or don't remain one for long if you're allergic to safety regulations. If there's one occupation where expert recommendations are respected, it's aviation, and for good reasons -- the safety record of the industry speaks for itself.

Pilots in the US are an extremely conservative bunch. On my pilot group's FB page, the number of times I've read "Let's go Brandon!" in response to this supposed sickout are numerous. Every trip I hear the far-right Breitbart, Newsmax media narrative, and links from similar pseudo news blog sites are posted all the time. It's impossible to fly to SFO or LAX without a comment on homelessness, taxes, liberals, etc. Once, when I happened to be alone on my way to the hotel, a van driver in Trinidad asked my why the pilots are always talking about guns. Many US airline pilots are full-on anti-vax and claim that they'll be fired before being forced to get the vaccine.

> On my pilot group's FB page

Social media has optimized the process of finding groups of people that think just exactly like you do. The fact that you are listening to one specific echo chamber that feels this way does not tell you that the entire industry feels this way.

Consider the following counter-example: United Airlines also has a vaccine mandate, and got well over 99% compliance.

I’ve been an airline pilot for a long time and work for a large airline. In the US, pilots tend to be quite culturally conservative. It’s not my naive generalization. Yes, if the mandate happens most will get vaccinated, but there will be plenty of kicking and screams leading up to it.

I have a lot of friends in ATC, and it's similar there. It's anecdotal, but I talked to two of them things morning. One said the sickout is indeed real, while the other says it absolute isn't. They are literally on other sides of the country from each other, so idk if it's regional or just bullshit.

Literally heard “Let’s go Brandon” on the emergency frequency today in airspace too far from land for it to not be an airliner or other commercial craft (in contrast to the usual meowing).

> United Airlines also has a vaccine mandate, and got well over 99% compliance.

But how many employees left UA along the way?

Not sure why you are getting downvoted - if you purge the unvaccinated of course the percentage of the remaining employees who are vaccinated is going to go up.

Hell the president was bragging that was exactly how they got to those percentages over the weekend.

Well united airlines employees also once beat a man unconscious and dragged him out of an airplane to make room for more united employees. Maybe they hire a different sort of person there.

Not only that, but pilots must go through extensive medical examination in order to get their medical certificates, and for Airline Transport Pilots (ATP) they need to get them renewed every 6 or 12 months, depending on their age. They are entirely used to their medical status gating their employment!

Just make COVID-19 vaccination a requirement to pass your medical, and be done with all this hand-wringing.

The tweet you linked is an account that's linked to at least one disinformation farm.

Think about it for two seconds, if that really happened, there would be hundreds of witnesses, everybody would be talking about the flight number, there would be cell phone videos and corporate social media responses. None of those things exist, so either everybody on the plane, the airport, and all their friends and relatives are in on the conspiracy except this one bot account, or they're making shit up to stir up conservatives, which is what they've done all day every day since joining the site in January 2017.

I just looked at the account...you are correct, it does seem to be a very right-leaning account, so I deleted the link. The tweet seemed credible, but given the mass-downvoting in this thread, I'll err on the side of caution. Regardless, the tweet was an afterthought, not the main point of the comment.

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