The Business Case for Promoting the New Boosters

Leaders need worker wellness for the health of their company

One of the key stakeholders in stakeholder capitalism is the employee. You could argue that the employee is the key stakeholder, because without employees you’d have no stakeholders at all. This is why employers need to stay aware of today’s health environment and its effect on their employees. Employee sickness, absenteeism, and poor morale related to illness harm the entire company.

A wave of sickness

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects a new wave of Covid this winter that could more than quadruple the current infection rate, which aligns with projections of a major winter wave by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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More than a nudge

So you think that creating peer pressure where some team members are likely to pressure holdouts to get the shot so they can get a free vacation is good for the employee and the team? Especially when the CDC itself now says there is a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer bivalent vaccine?

Maybe you need to re-read Thaler and Sunstein's book about what a nudge is.

A Terrible Take

I agree with the first commentor.

I am disappointed to see this kind of content coming from QualityDigest. How about doing an appropriate root cause analysis of the whole covid pandemonium? Even a simple investigation shows that the solutions that have been implemented, "nudged", and even forced were way out of line with an appropriate solution for the problem the world was faced with in regards to covid.Healthy people only end up a couple days out of work due to covid (speaking from experience). This problem is no different than a regular cold or flu. Which even flu vaccines don't provide a meaningful solution to that problem- instead healthy employees is the best prevention of the concerns the author has presented. Let's encourage companies to actually improve the health of their employees, not some highly inefficient lifetime of boosters campaign.

Quality Digest - Seriously bad take allowing this.

The writer of the artical sums up what is wrong with the world. I am going to force (just nudge this time) people into my way of thinking, instead of letting people make their own informed decisions? People know about Covid, they have had it or seen the effects it has on people. They are also starting to see the effects the "vacine" has had on some people, and they are sometimes much worse then anything covid has done. This artical is propaganda for big pharma.

Get the vaccine unless your doctor tells you otherwise

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/13/pfizer-covid-booster-likely-doesnt-carr… "CDC says it’s ‘very unlikely’ Pfizer booster carries stroke risk for seniors after launching review"

Vaccines do carry a small risk, and this includes the annual flu vaccine. I could have died from flu (which became pneumonia) in graduate school and I got the flu vaccine every year since. I have not have had any major problems with influenza ever since. Covid-19 has killed more than a million people and messed up a lot of survivors for life with damage to organ systems. I have never tested positive for Covid and, if I ever did have it, it was obviously not serious enough to require hospitalization.

Covid-19 is obviously something you want to keep out of your workplace, period. It's like poor quality; you don't want to give it, get it, or take it home with you.

Very disappointed to see this.

Very disappointed to see these products promoted on Quality Digest, especially in 2023, when it is widely recognized that they do not prevent people catching or spreading SARS-CoV-2 and that prior infection generally confers more robust and longer-lasting immunity.

As paraphrased by Don Wheeler, Deming's Operational Definition is the series of questions that one must answer in order for words to have meaning in business: (1) What do you intend to do? (2) By what method will you do it? (3) By what mechanism will you judge that it has been done?

Another commenter was quick to quote the CDC about these products, and the CDC certainly makes a lot of claims about them, but it is not always clear that these claims mean what people suggest that they mean. Words like "safe and effective" must have operational definitions in order to be meaningful from a quality perspective.

Take a word like "effective." (1) What do you intend to do? I intend to take five doses of a vaccine in a span of less than two years and then contract the virus I was vaccinated against, twice, as CDC director Rochelle Walensky did. (2) By what method? By taking as many doses of mRNA as are made available to me. (3) By what mechanism will I judge? By a positive antigen test confirming that I've contracted SARS-CoV-2 for the second time after being five-times vaccinated against it. Now when I say "effective," you know exactly what I mean, regardless of any preconceived notions. This is the power of the Operational Definition, and the clarity that it offers will be crucial for any business trying to decide how best to make its workers take drugs that they otherwise don't want.

Good points

How about we let businesses focus on creating goods and services that their customers want. Let them "nudge" their employees to accomplish their objectives more efficiently, effectively, and easily.

Let the employees focus on their own health needs with their doctors.