In late October, NPR wrote an article with the following headline:
Thousands of workers are opting to get fired, rather than take the vaccine
For 33 years, Karl Bohnak worked at his dream job delivering weather forecasts on TV for what he considers one of the most challenging but beautiful spots in the United States — Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
He became so popular that “That’s what Karl says!” became a slogan at his station in the 1990s and even inspired a song.
But Bohnak’s time as chief meteorologist for news station TV6 came to an abrupt end last month. He was fired after refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate imposed by his station’s corporate owner, Gray Television.
“I just did not want to take the shot,” says Bohnak, who is 68. “I felt it was my right as a human being and a citizen of the U.S. to decide what I put in my body.”
Unfortunately for Karl Bohnak, he is living in a very different America from the one he grew up in.
How many other cases like Bohnak’s have there been across the country? The NPR article doesn’t really say; it only offers tidbits:
Across the country, employers are firing workers for refusing to comply with vaccine mandates. Some people are opting to quit their jobs rather than take the shot.
These workers represent only a tiny fraction of overall employees, not even 1% in some workplaces. But it can add up to thousands of people in many states.
This is a vague estimation, and probably intentionally so.
Washington state reports that so far, nearly 1,900 state workers, including the head football coach at Washington State University, have quit or been fired for refusing the vaccine. In Michigan, 400 workers at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit walked away from their jobs. North Carolina-based Novant Health fired about 175 employees. And the list goes on.
…
In June, about 150 workers at the Houston Methodist hospital system quit or were fired for refusing to get a vaccine, out of a workforce of 26,000. One of them was registered nurse Jennifer Bridges, who has led the fight against Houston Methodist. The hospital system announced its vaccine requirement on March 31.
These examples are but snippets of the country at large.
On January 5, NBC News reported that the Mayo Clinic had fired 700 workers over non-compliance with the vax mandate.
Fox News reported a month ago that nearly 32,000 healthcare workers in just New York State alone are out of jobs due to vax mandates:
Four months ago, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a vaccine mandate for health care workers, and those who did not comply faced termination.
Since then 31,858 health care workers at nursing homes, hospitals and other health providers have been terminated, furloughed or forced to resign because they would not comply with the mandate, according to New York health data provided to Fox News. The total number of inactive employees in the state due to the vaccine mandate sits at 37,192 as of Dec. 21.
“We have a massive nursing shortage,” Eric Smith, the statewide field director for the New York State Nurses Association, told the New York Daily News last month. “We have a vacuum in the double and triple digits all across the New York area.”
….
In New Jersey, there have been 238 confirmed firings or resignations across two hospital systems due to vaccine mandates. Fox News asked the New Jersey Department of Health for data on the total number of fired health care workers, but a representative said the department did not have that information.
That’s hard to believe.
We really don’t have any data on how many workers across the country–in all industries, not just healthcare–have lost their jobs due to vaccine mandates. This is probably by design.
All we can really do is piece together these tidbits of data to try and get some sort of idea of how much damage vax mandates have done to the country as a whole.
The government keeps very detailed data on unemployment figures in this country. New figures are released every month, and it’s broken down by age, race, gender, educational attainment, industry–just about everything you could ever ask for.
But we have not been told exactly how many people have been fired from their jobs or quit due to vaccine mandates.
I know the government has the data on this. They just don’t publicize it.
And so, in my view, we have to assume that the data is ugly. Really ugly.
So we’re going to try and figure out just how bad things are–or at least how bad things might be.
As of October 28, Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that about 25% of American workers surveyed worked for a company that had a vaccine mandate:
The study also found that just 21% of those surveyed wanted their employer to require the vax, while 51% didn’t. The latter figure is probably higher now, but it’s unclear by how much.
We can use this as a starting point, though.
We can do our best to come to an estimate here, but it’s very difficult to do because we simply don’t have any up-to-date data.
Back in September, the Hill noted a poll that showed 67% of unvaccinated workers would quit their jobs if required to get the shot.
Today, 71% of working-age adults are considered “fully vaccinated” (I’m assuming this means 2 shots, so this number could drop precipitously when the definition of “fully vaccinated” is changed to mean people who have gotten three shots). If 67% of the 29% that are unvaccinated people willing to lose their jobs over vax mandates, that would come out to about 19.4% of total working-age adults whose jobs are at risk over the vaccine mandate.
As of December 2021, there were about 155 million people employed in the country, according to BLS.
If 29% of them–roughly–are unvaccinated (44 million), and 67% of those unvaccinated people are willing to lose their jobs over the vax mandates, that would come out to about 30.1 million Americans.
Now obviously not all of these people have lost their jobs or quit due to the vaccine mandates, because not every worker is required to get the vaccine by their employers.
If we just take the KFF poll–which found that 25% of Americans work for a company that requires the vax–at face value and figure that 25% of those 30.1 million Americans are either at risk of losing their jobs or have already lost their jobs, that comes out to ~7.52 million Americans.
Now, the KFF poll is a bit outdated as it’s from October, meaning it could be the case that more companies have implemented vaccine mandates for employees, which in turn would mean that more than 25% of American workers are subject to vaccine mandates.
But we also know that some companies have lifted their vaccine mandates for employees, such as Starbucks.
This is a very rough estimate I’m making here, but it’s really all we can do because the government won’t simply give us the data on how many people have been fired over vax mandates.
This 7.5 million figure could be way off, but at least we have some sort of a ballpark figure we can work with.
What this figure doesn’t tell us is how many people have already lost their jobs due to vaccine mandates. KFF found back in mid-October that 5% of unvaccinated workers had already lost their jobs due to vaccine mandates. That would translate, conservatively, to ~2.25 million people that had already lost their jobs to vaccine mandates by October 2021. Probably even higher than that because my vaccination rates are as of today, and vaccination rates were even lower back in October 2021, meaning more people were unvaccinated and at risk of losing their jobs back then.
And so that 25% figure–the share of American workers subject to vaccine mandates–is probably skewed to the low side because it didn’t include the people who had already lost their jobs to employer vaccine mandates.
There are so many variables in play here it’s making my head hurt, but I think it’s pretty safe to say the number of people who have lost their jobs due to vax mandates is easily in the millions, and that if the Biden OSHA vax mandate had been allowed to stand, it would have put tens of millions of Americans’ jobs at risk–remember, there are 30.1 million unvaccinated Americans willing to lose their jobs over the mandates.
Obviously not all of them would’ve been subject to the OSHA mandate, and some of them would’ve opted for the onerous testing alternative, but we can safely say the OSHA mandate would have resulted in millions and millions of people getting fired–on top of the people who have already been fired.
I have been saying for months now that vaccine mandates are a huge part of the “supply chain issues” that have persisted. The corporate media simply won’t talk about it, but probably the vaccine mandates are a huge reason for the current labor shortage.
Obviously there are other factors in the understaffing problem that pervades much of the economy–including people who are simply terrified of Covid-19 and won’t leave their homes–but one of the biggest factors is the vax mandate. It has already cost millions of people their jobs.
We’re talking about at least 2.25 million people that have already lost their jobs due to vax mandates, and a further 7.5 million who are either at risk of losing their jobs or already have. Given that the data is a few months old we have no idea how many of those 7.5 million people have been fired already. From what I know personally, for companies with vaccine mandates, the deadline has already passed, meaning most people who back in October were at risk of being fired have probably already been fired.
So it’s possible, if not probable, that 10 million people have been fired or quit over the vaccine mandates.
As far as the overall hit to the economy, I guess we could estimate this by taking the average amount of dollars contributed to GDP per employed individual and multiplying it by the number of people that have lost their jobs due to vaccine mandates.
Or: If x million people lose their jobs, GDP suffers by y.
To get the average contribution to GDP per employed person, we simply take the US GDP figure (about $21 trillion) and divide it by the total number of people employed (about 155 million).
The number we get is $135,483. That’s how much GDP suffers when one person loses their job.
Let’s go through the numbers for a variety of scenarios:
- If 1 million Americans lose their jobs, GDP goes down $135 billion.
- If 2 million, -$271 billion GDP.
- If 4 million, -$542 billion GDP.
- If 8 million, -$1.083 trillion GDP.
- If 10 million, -$1.35 trillion GDP.
- If 16 million, -$2.16 trillion GDP.
- If 30 million, -$4.06 trillion GDP.
Now, this isn’t just based on how much money the average American contributes to their employer’s bottom line. It’s also how much that person spends. If a person loses their job, they lose their source of income, and so their spending drops, too. They’re not buying homes or cars, they’re not making major purchases (like appliances), and in general they’re cutting back on everything because they cannot afford anywhere near as much anymore.
And as far as what the net loss to GDP is, who’s to say? Maybe some of the people who got fired over vax mandates were replaced–possibly by someone who was previously unemployed. It’s impossible for us to go about calculating the net loss to GDP because there are so many different possibilities. But it’s safe to say that if 10 million people lose their jobs in the span of a few months, that’s going to leave a serious dent in the economy. That’s over 6% of the total US workforce. Even 1 million job losses would take a toll.
Now, the BLS currently says the US unemployment rate is 3.9%, and shows no significant spike over the past few months that would indicate mass firings and quits, so I don’t really know how to square this with the numbers I calculated. We do know that at the very least, per the KFF poll, at least 2.25 million people lost their jobs due to vaccine mandates.
Maybe it’s showing up in job quits, which hit a record of 4.5 million people just in the month of November 2021 alone, and was 4.1 million in October. We don’t yet have data for December for some reason, but each month since July 2021 has seen more than 4 million job quits, so we have every reason to believe December job quits were at least 4 million as a conservative estimate, but probably considerably higher than 4 million. You can see job quits skyrocketing since the summer:
Maybe this is where the vaccine mandate job losses are showing up, but that’s just a guess.
As you can see, this is very messy business and there are tons of variables in play here, so these are all very rough figures.
I am not a professional economist, so my numbers could be way off. But unfortunately the professional economists are not looking in to this matter so the amateurs have to do it.
The bottom line is that mass firings/quits caused by vaccine mandates have the potential to absolutely devastate the US economy–if they haven’t already. Since we know at least a couple of million people have already lost their jobs due to the mandates, GDP has already suffered by hundreds of billions of dollars.
We probably averted a massive recession when the Supreme Court struck down the OSHA vax mandate given that 67% of unvaccinated Americans were willing to lose their jobs.
Something we haven’t even looked at is the effect of vaccine mandates on businesses like bars and restaurants. Beyond just businesses losing employees, we also have businesses losing customers due to vax mandates, primarily in deep-blue big cities.
Open Table, an app that allows people to reserve tables at restaurants, has been publishing data on how the restaurant industry is faring in the Covid-19 era compared to the pre-Covid-19 era, and it’s bad:
Reservations are down 41% in LA, 48% in Boston, 64% in Manhattan, 59% in DC, and 66% in San Francisco.
Now obviously this is not all due to the vaccine passports, as people in those cities are more likely to be vaxxed up. Some of it is due to the liberals in these cities being terrified of OMICRON 😱.
But when you look at data for other cities where vaccine passports aren’t in effect–like Miami–restaurant reservations on Open Table are actually up compared to 3 years ago:
Some cities’ restaurant industries are back to normal, or even better than normal. But many cities are seeing their restaurant industries devastated. It would appear that restaurants in cities that have vax mandates in place are doing way worse than cities that don’t have vax mandates in place.
Another factor could be people moving out of a lot of these deep blue cities and moving to red states where Covid restrictions are minimal.
The common theme here is that we really don’t know the true extent of the damage vaccine mandates have inflicted on this country. The government obviously does not want us to know how many people have lost their jobs over mandates, and how much economic damage has been inflicted on the country.
In fact, the government is absurdly trying to argue that vaccine mandates are good for the economy.
Brandon’s economic adviser Jared Bernstein back in November said vaccine mandates are the key to GDP.
The White House economic adviser stressed that he cannot speak for individual companies but he said, “I can tell you, from the perspective of economic analysis … and I’ve looked at really almost every important variable I can find … that does certainly make the case that vaccines and economic progress, strong growth, revenue growth, income growth, wage growth, jobs, GDP, industrial production, every variable I look at seems highly and positively elastic to these wiggles in the caseloads. That’s certainly the implication of what we’re seeing.”
Yeah, that would be true–if the vaccines actually prevented transmission of the virus.
But they don’t.
So we’re getting the worst of both worlds: we have an economy hamstrung by both a spreading virus and vaccine mandates.
You could not devise a worse policy if you tried.