COVID kills more Americans than guns, cars and flu….combined
We are fortunate and have widespread availability of vaccines yet we find that the overwhelming majority of deaths caused by COVID19 are to be found in unvaccinated people We discuss how businesses should approach these challenges focusing on the local data and emerging cases and providing incentives for employees to make the choice to be vaccinated and disincentivizing behavior that adds risk to the workplace and other employees
Mandates don’t work especially well but finding a pathway to address the disinformation that continues to circulate that includes helping everyone be part of the solution and not sharing or distributing information before checking its veracity
The way out of this pandemic is together – not individually
Raw Transcript
Nick van Terheyden
Hi, this is Dr. Nick on the incrementalist here with incremental insights for better business better health.
Fred Goldstein
And I’m Fred Goldstein with accountable health here helping employers look at their employee health benefits programs as well as employee health improvement programs. So, Nick, we’re watching nationally, I believe the numbers are going up in almost every single state due to the Delta variant. What do they look like really what’s happening out there?
Nick van Terheyden
COVID-19 kills more people in the United States of America than guns, cars, and the flu. combined. That’s a lot of people that are still this is this is a real problem. And I think we have to accept that. What is extraordinarily frustrating is we have had not only all the tools that we learned about new about from almost 100 years ago, but also all the new ones. And indeed, the development of a slew of vaccines that are extraordinarily safe and effective. But we’re still struggling with this.
Fred Goldstein
Yeah, pretty amazing. When you think about it, people keep saying, well, doesn’t this mean the vaccines aren’t working. But it’s pretty simple to figure this thing out. If about 45 46% of the population is vaccinated, that’s about half, but 98% of the infections or so I hear are happening in the non vaccinated? It shouldn’t if it were even, it should be even and it’s not. It’s been very frustrating to watch this from my perspective.
Nick van Terheyden
Right. And, you know, we’ve seen the government come out and say that, you know, health emergency of deaths and misinformation. I mean, I think that’s been true for a number of years, certainly, some folks online who have struggled and been on the receiving end of some pretty severe and nasty vitriol, inexcusable, we really need to do better. But what can businesses do, to try and counter this Because ultimately, we’ve, I think, even for the people that don’t believe in vaccines, we’ve all got the same intent here, which is, we want to get back to some normality, whatever we define that hours, back to going to football or, you know, sports events, going to concerts going to work or maybe not going to all of those things. How do we do that for it?
Fred Goldstein
Well, I think it’s an interesting question. Now, because we’ve got First off, you’ve got to figure out does the local government or the state government even allow me to set up various rules, or to try and create an environment that I believe is safer? So for example, if you’re in an organization that is not allowed to have a mask mandate, or a vaccine mandate for your company, that creates some some issues. I think employers really need to look at number one, what’s going on in their community? What is the rate? You know, as we’re talking about these two different communities now, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated? And clearly even in in northeast and Florida, where I live? I think that it’s about 45% vaccinated in Duval County, which is Jacksonville proper. But we have some counties to the west of us that are 20%. And so where is your company, consider that first and understand what the rate is? And then begin to say, as we’re hearing others do, does it make sense for me to maybe take a step back, look at wearing masks at the workplace? And how do I either incensed or potentially disincentive, certain behaviors, and we’re seeing some of that from the cruise industries and others.
Nick van Terheyden
I think that’s a good point. This is not about mandates, you know, this country is not mandating things, I get that. And he does a pretty poor history of mandatory requirements of, you know, the these kind of health care things. We saw that with smallpox many years ago. But, you know, developing the incentives that work and different incentives work in different places. We saw that, you know, the big wind, sort of, you know, get vaccinated, you could win a million dollars seem to work in some instances, we found small incentives along the way, you know, maybe just the Starbucks card or giving people coffee. And, you know, to your point, that negative or the disincentive, Well, sure, you can still come to work, but we’re going to put you in a safer place so that you don’t disrupt our work environment. We’re going to require you to go through testing. But I think the big driver for me is we really need to overcome this fear of vaccines with appropriate information and an understanding of those in individuals and where they’re coming from. And helping them understand that they really are safe. They’re not just this, wow, we’ve just created them, we’ve got no experience we really do. And the data is astoundingly positive, both in terms of effectiveness and safety. You know, it’s
Fred Goldstein
fascinating because they keep coming up with other reasons why the vaccine might not be good. And it keeps moving to the next one, as we’ve seen, and this is sort of a typical history. So I would ask people, when you see things like this on the internet, or somebody bring something up, go to a source, and you’ve talked about this net quite a bit, go to a valid source, go to the original source of the data, and find it there, try to understand what it means I can tell you the truth, you know, this vaccine reporting system, so I was on it on the app. And every day for the first couple of weeks, I got in saying, am I sick of I’ve been to the doctor and he symptoms etc. And then it went to about every week, I think, or something, I’m not really sure what the the tempo of that is. But I finally got one that said, Have you been to a doctor? It didn’t say, Have you been to a doctor for COVID? So I answered, Yes. And it never asked me what it was. And about a week later, I actually got a phone call. And I think they’re sampling. And they said, can you tell us what happened? And when I said, Look, this is completely non vaccine related. They said, Oh, we’ll remove that. But there’s still I’m sure a ton in there that either don’t get the call, or didn’t answer the call, or not being sampled to determine that those those, you know, things that happened, the occurrences are not vaccine related in many cases, and and that’s what people use that database in appropriately, things like that.
Nick van Terheyden
I think that’s such a great example, the fact that they’re now essentially going back and cleaning the data. That’s exactly the point about this misrepresentation of the 7000 deaths, you know, completely inappropriate. I have one additional element of caution. This is not easy flows. And I’ll give you a good example, the list of predatory publishing journey journals that essentially take anything total junk, and will publish it essentially, to allow people to be published. There’s a whole history as to why that’s even the case why there’s a business case for this, but it occurs. So you can’t just say, Oh, that’s the American Association of conglomerated orthopedists as an example, I’m making this up and say, Oh, that’s a great journal. That must mean it’s, you know, valid orthopedic inflammation. So you even have to go a little bit further. So this is tough to do. But it’s, you know, your point is exactly right. Make sure you go down that. And if you don’t know, ask some people that you can trust. consensus isn’t always right. We know that. But I think consensus for the most part is following the science. Right? And science
Fred Goldstein
changes over time. It’s constantly evolving. That’s the scientific process. And then, you know, consider the fact that look around how many people have you seen who are vaccinated, who are dying? It’s just not happening. Right, there have been hundreds of millions of vaccines given. So it’s just going to be interesting to see how over time This suggests, I am a little concerned that even once it gets a full authorization, and I noticed that they just filed apparently today, expecting by January, but it could be sooner much sooner, depending on the data. I’m sure there will be something else that comes up. And so just be ready that it’s going to take a while but there have got to be some things as employers you consider to create a safe work environment for all of them. And also consider that that employee may have somebody home at their house with an immune disorder and they are definitely at high risk. So with that, this is Fred Goldstein with accountable health. Thanks so much for listening. And if you have more information, please go to accountable health LLC COMM
Nick van Terheyden
And this is Dr. Nick on the incrementalist here with incremental insights for better business, better health.
