Vaccine mandates are good and highly effective

As with state troopers, so it goes with healthcare workers: a lot of guff about threatened resignations, very few actual resignations in response to vaccine mandates, even if the failure of some reports to include denominators in headlines makes resistance seem much more widespread than it is:

Come on people pic.twitter.com/aXpXBEwlPs— Jordan Weissmann 🗽 (@JHWeissmann) September 28, 2021

Airline workers too, although again you have to look for the data in a story framed to center alleged holdouts:

Some mandates seem to have converted hesitant workers. United Airlines said 97% of its workers have been vaccinated even before its deadline took effect Monday. But employers are still dealing with holdouts. Alternatives for those employees include weekly testing, working remotely or away from other staff, or ultimately, termination.

None of this should be surprising, given that the “principle” that vaccine mandates are bad even if vaccines are good was invented in spring 2021. And this goes double when you’re talking about well-compensated civil service jobs. I’m a Ph.D. with 15 years of experience who has what I would consider one of the 20 or so best teaching jobs available in the US to someone in my subfield, and the starting salary of a MA state trooper is higher than mine. The idea that they were going to resign en masse because they had to get a COVID shot just like they had to get a measles shot in kindergarten was always the emptiest of threats. And even though they often get positive-to-fawning coverage the outliers generally deserve coverage about as sympathetic as surgeons who resign because they believe that rules preventing them from performing surgery with silverware they just used at the Cheesecake Factory violate their personal autonomy.