The people who run the United States government-funded research center where I work should hang their heads in shame, abandon claims of honesty, and maybe even shut the doors for good.  In their handling of this latest stage of the Covid crisis, they have betrayed their mission to be a trusted partner to the government, violated their own central principle of integrity, and set the stage for the organization’s eventual irrelevance.

University-affiliated research centers (UARC) and federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) were first established during World War II to maintain certain critical needs of the government.  Our research center is full of hard-working smart people who are serious about truth and about maintaining our nation’s security.  As an organization, we boast of our role in providing honest information and feedback to the government.

Regarding the president’s mandate that henceforth any person working on a government contract shall be fully vaccinated for Covid, the company had a choice in how to respond.  Here is what they COULD have said to the government in response:

We have been battling Covid for over 18 months quite effectively with essentially zero cases of transmission in our facilities.  Our employees’ cooperation has contributed to this success.  We don’t see any need to make changes or to threaten the small fraction of our employees who remain unvaccinated.

The mandate does not solve the problem it purports to address.  CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated the vaccines do not prevent transmission of Covid.  The United Kingdom Health Security Agency weekly reports provide data showing Covid transmission rates of vaccinated people are on par with, and likely higher than, transmission rates in unvaccinated people.  According to the CDC and real-world data, interaction with our unvaccinated employees is no more dangerous than with the vaccinated.

We select our employees very carefully and respect their medical choices.  They are among the brightest people in the country, and we think they, along with their trusted medical providers, are in the best position to decide what is in their own medical interest.  It is beyond the scope of a government contract to determine what medical care any employee receives.

We will not discriminate among our employees based on their medical condition.  The mandate requires people with confirmed medical exemptions to the vaccine to go through regular testing and have other restrictions on their working conditions.  A year ago, this type of discrimination based on medical status was banned by OSHA, but now the government has ordered it and has changed the OSHA rules. We still think it’s wrong.

We will not force experimental medical treatments on our employees.  The FDA gave full approval to Pfizer’s COMIRNATY vaccine, but Pfizer has not made the FDA-approved version available in the US.  Instead, they are continuing to sell the Emergency Use Authorized (EUA) version.  EUA products are for patients with a critical need who have exhausted any available FDA-approved remedy for their condition.  They take the EUA treatment voluntarily and with full knowledge that it is not FDA-approved.  EUA status indemnifies the treatment providers and transfers all risks to the patients themselves in exchange for receiving the emergency treatment.  It is highly unethical to coerce employees to receive something that is not fully approved, forcing them to assume all risk.  If an FDA-approved shot exists, that legal entity should be the one provided, with all of the accompanying liability protections for the patient.

Adopting trivial rules trivializes all of our rules.  We have important procedures at our facilities for safeguarding classified physical property and information.  Other company procedures address accurate fulfillment of our contracts, particularly timekeeping.  We are concerned that instituting the procedures called for in the mandate under the claim of protecting people from Covid will be seen as, quite frankly, bogus, and this “Covid theater” is certain to decrease the level of respect among our employees for our other more critical procedures.

Our company did not reply as above and instead agreed to accept contracts with the novel, government rule that only vaccinated individuals can work on those contracts, even though vaccination status (which differs from actual immunity) is somewhat irrelevant to an employee’s fitness to fulfill the terms of the contract.  Dishonestly, the people in charge pretend that the new rule is all about keeping people safe when it is simply about following orders.  One wonders if there is any contract stipulation that would be egregious enough to trigger our organization, as a trusted partner, to tell the government, “We are sorry, but this is a line we cannot cross.”  Maybe our organization is not as critically important as we claim and we have no room to challenge improper edicts without certain loss of contracts.  It’s our job to tell the emperor he has no clothes.  Instead, we go along to get along.  This is how once-respected and important institutions fade into bloated bureaucracies feeding at the trough of government largesse.

Oh, and one more thing.  The people pretending that the unvaccinated are so dangerous are the same ones that sit in judgment of my colleagues’ genuine religious objections to the vaccine.  These objections vary, but one whose importance is even greater than all this Covid nonsense concerns the use of stem cells from aborted fetuses in the process that produced the vaccines.  While the lives that produced those cells perished years ago, there is an ongoing commerce in body parts harvested from live fetuses targeted for termination.   Any use of these parts for the welfare of older, more powerful people is high-tech cannibalism.

Graphic credit: Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0

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