Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

Biden's mass vax mandate forced firings cause huge shortfalls
in critical staffing, their unemployment claims rejected, and total
loss of work pay goals homes hope and dreams for tens of millions.

Fuck Joe Biden, the idiot Democrats Donkey he rode in on,
and the corrupt Fake News Tech Social dirtbags who prop him up.




Vaccine Mandates & 'The Great Resignation': The Media Pretends There's
No Connection

https://mises.org/wire/vaccine-mandates-and-great-resignation-media-pretends-theres-no-connection

Links in original.

Let me be clear from the start: I do not know the degree to which
vaccine mandates have played a role in the massive voluntary exodus
from the workforce.

I do, however, know that any true journalist would at least entertain
the possibility that the two are correlated. Finding such a journalist
proved to be a difficult task: ABC, CNN, CBS, the Washington Post,
Reuters, CNBC, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York
Times, The Hill, Business Insider, Fortune, FT, Vox, Market Watch, and
even right-wing publishers like the New York Post and Fox Business
have all covered the mass resignations without so much as a mention of
vaccine mandates. The WaPo, citing a single anecdote, went so far as
to suggest that unvaccinated workers are causing others to quit by
making them feel unsafe:

Time magazine, to their credit, at least addressed the possible
relation and tried to provide a counterpoint, citing employee
vaccination numbers in the high 90 percents ahead of mandates, like
Washington, where University of Washington hospitals employees are 97
percent vaccinated—sounds great! They just forgot to do a follow-up
piece after the mandate went into effect … when Washington lost 3
percent of its sixty-three thousand state employees in a single day.
That’s a sizeable percentage when you consider that monthly
separations (terminations and quits) are typically 3–4 percent in the
US and this drop occurred in one day. Not to mention these separations
are added to routine employment frictions.

Now, let’s discuss the awfully interesting correlations between the
announcements of vaccine mandates and the “Great Resignation”:

The US has clocked two consecutive all-time highs for the percentage
of workers quitting within a single month, 2.9 percent for August and
3.0 percent for September (data released on a two-month delay). This
coincided precisely with an onset of highly prominent vaccine mandate
announcements within the private and public sectors, one of the
earliest being Google on July 28, which inspired a tsunami of
corporate signaling throughout the month of August. In a similar
fashion, California set the trend for a series of state-level
mandates, most of which were announced in August, with enforcement to
begin in late September and October. August was indeed the first month
in which this topic seeped into mainstream public discourse, the buzz
increasing in September as Joe Biden announced the mandate for federal
employees.

Right off the bat this seems like a coincidence worth mentioning, yet
none of the outlets listed above did. But there’s more. Historically
upswings in resignations have correlated with commensurate upswings in
hiring (see chart below). As businesses hire more, workers have
freedom to shop around. However, we are not seeing that this time
around, with total hires increasing by 7.5 percent between March and
September 2021 and quits increasing by 24.3 percent during that same
period, a threefold margin.

Now, let’s pivot to look at two states that are handling mandates very
differently—Colorado enacted one of the strictest vaccine mandates
while Arizona became the first state to enact a private sector ban on
vaccine mandates. Colorado subsequently broke its all-time record for
highest quit rate ever recorded with 3.4 percent. To quote the Denver
Post:

    What is unusual about the new record high is that it coincides
with a still relatively high 5.9 percent unemployment rate in Colorado
in August. Normally, elevated unemployment and people voluntarily
jumping ship don’t go hand in hand.

    For example, when Colorado’s unemployment rate was at 5.9 percent
in January 2003, the quit rate was 2.6 percent and it was 2.7 percent
in January 2014, another month with 5.9 percent unemployment.

In September, Colorado shattered this record with an adjusted quit
rate of 4.3 percent (raw rate of 4.7 percent)! Meanwhile, Arizona was
one of only four states to experience a decline in their raw quit rate
moving from July to August, and it did so by the greatest margin. The
raw rate continued to decline in September. So, out of fifty states,
Arizona is demonstrating some of the strongest data contrary to the
Great Resignation trend.

Lastly, let’s shift our focus to what the unvaccinated holdouts are
saying. According to a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation,
72 percent of workers vow to quit if they are not given the option to
test weekly and 37 percent say they will quit even with testing:

Surely some of these vows will prove stronger than others, but we
should note this poll was conducted between October 14 and 24. These
folks are not included in the resignation data we saw in August and
September. Remember, most mandates were not officially in effect
during those months, with the largest mandate of all, Biden’s private
sector mandate, still to come. If these poll respondents stay true to
their word, this could equate to a 5–9 percent exodus from the
workforce, on top of what we have already seen. This will only get
worse if religious exemptions are removed, as is becoming increasingly
mainstream.

Again, this is not proof that vaccine mandates are the primary cause
of the Great Resignation, just evidence that they are likely playing a
role. This is an important message to the publishers at big corporate
media outlets. Conveniently leaving these discussions out of your
articles will not persuade readers these topics are unrelated.
Instead, it will cause them to question how a “journalist” could
publish such negligent reporting. This type of behavior will only
foster more distrust in mainstream institutions.

There’s another, more sinister, symptom of this cognitive
dissonance—it absolves political leaders of accountability. Given
unemployment is a major bipartisan issue, average citizens might
oppose mandates if they thought it would impede reaching full
employment. Take New York, for example, where they revoked religious
exemptions to the vaccine for healthcare workers on November 22, while
recently, New York nurses publicly complained about staffing
shortages, calling them a “dire nursing shortage.” You would think the
governor might adjust her course of action upon hearing this, but in
the made-up world where vaccine mandates have zero impact on
employment, our leaders can get away with callous policy decisions
like this.