San Francisco is going to mandate a logical step in the face of the resurgent Pandemic.
All City employees must be vaccinated.
Reading the overwrought statements by some employees one could draw the conclusion that a portion of San Francisco’s workforce has been infected by a hungry bug-catcher from an off world colony.
‘hungry bug-catcher’ – Liz Heidhues 2020
Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle 8.9.2021
Nearly 200 San Francisco employees are attempting to rebuff the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate and other protocols like testing and mask wearing for city workers, submitting identical, conspiracy-tinged letters suggesting the city is infringing upon their “God-given and constitutionally secured” rights.
“Almost all of the statements are either absurd, misleading, meaningless, and are written not to solicit any serious response but to be deliberately hostile for political purposes,” said Dr. Lee Riley, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley.
Concerns raised in the letter about the contents of vaccines or other products, or their safety and efficacy, are baseless, said Dr. Robert Siegel, an infectious disease expert at Stanford.
“This came from some kind of conspiracy factory,” Siegel said.
Many of the products the letter suggests as potentially dangerous vaccine additives — including lipids (fat), sodium chloride (salt) and sucrose (sugar) — are consumed by people daily, Siegel said. Other products mentioned in the letter include chemicals commonly found in the environment.
“The whole thing is just garbage,” he said.
Siegel said the contents of the letter raised concerns about the judgment of those who signed it.
The letters, which began streaming into San Francisco’s HR department in late June, came after city officials announced they would require city employees — with certain exceptions — to get inoculated or risk losing their jobs.
The letters say the workers would submit to the vaccination mandate only if the city accedes to a long list of demands and disclosures around vaccine safety that health experts said were “nonsensical” or false.
Vaccination data released to The Chronicle on Friday showed at least 167 fire department employees remained unvaccinated, or about 9.5% of its workforce. At the Sheriff’s Department 161 were reportedly unvaccinated, making up about 16% of its employees. About 7.7% of city employees across all departments have not received at least one shot.
City fire officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In an interview, Shon Buford, president of San Francisco Firefighters Local 798, said labor leaders wished department heads had created more of a dialogue around the vaccine mandate.
Buford said because union leaders did not have the time to vet the letter, he was unable to endorse it or comment on its contents.
The letter, titled and framed as “conditional acceptance” of the city’s vaccine and mask mandates, poses an eight-page, 41-point list of its demands to meet the vaccination requirement.
It cites discredited theories about dangers of the vaccine, testing and masks, and asks city officials to prove the negative before they will consent to the city’s mandates.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/In-conspiracy-tinged-letters-200-S-F-employees-16375674.php
Lee's Perspective 