Back in the middle of the pandemic when the new vaccines (such as they were) were beginning to roll out, Massachusetts Republican Governor Charlie Baker introduced one of the strictest mandates seen in the nation. All executive branch workers in the state, along with the police and other first responders, had to be vaccinated or either resign or be fired. There was no option to submit regular negative COVID tests offered. Applications for medical or religious exemptions were “accepted,” but basically none of them were approved. More than 1,000 workers lost their jobs.

But this week, it would appear that portions of that policy are changing, if only on an unofficial basis. A number of fired workers are being offered their jobs back by Baker’s office. The former workers have been contacted by state officials to see if the state “may have an answer” for them. The Governor’s office told reporters that there has been no “official” change in policy “at this time” but talks are underway. So what’s going on here? (Boston Globe)

Massachusetts officials are offering to reinstate dozens of workers who lost their jobs after Governor Charlie Baker required that all executive branch employees be inoculated against COVID-19, a strict policy that, at its inception, was among the furthest-reaching in the nation.

State officials said Tuesday that about 50 employees have been offered their jobs back, a group that labor officials said appeared scattered across agencies and reportedly included the Department of Transportation. More than 1,000 were fired or quit after declining to get vaccinated against COVID-19, officials said in January.

At the time, Baker officials said that those who lost their jobs made up a fraction of the state’s workforce, and that more than 97 percent of the 41,000-plus executive branch employees subject to the vaccine requirement were in compliance.

The underlying reason for this sudden move toward generosity seems clear to staffers who spoke to reporters on background. The state is facing a shortage of workers in a tight labor market and too many jobs remain vacant. So this appears to be more a matter of desperation than any sort of admission of an error or a policy shift based on new data.

They needed some sort of mechanism to bring the still-unvaccinated workers back without looking like they were breaking their own rules. So the people who have been contacted are mostly people who were denied medical or religious exemptions. Those applications are now being “reviewed” again. In order to get the people they need, it would appear that the state will have a “change of heart” and begin approving exemptions to the mandate. So their reasons for requesting an exemption were insufficient last year but they suddenly pass muster now? Is anyone actually buying this load of malarkey?

While it’s too soon to say for sure, this at least appears to be part of a larger trend that’s unfolding around the country. Vax mandates are beginning to fall like leaves in the autumn. In nearby New York State, the state supreme court just ordered the government to reinstate all of the people fired because of its vaccine mandate and give them retroactive back pay to boot. But how do state and municipal governments simply say “never mind” and allow unvaccinated people to return to their careers as if none of this ever happened? And what of all of the people who took the vaccines against their will because they couldn’t afford to lose their jobs? There is no way to “unvaccinate” them now.

From the beginning, we were repeatedly told that the vaccines would prevent people from catching or transmitting the disease. That justified the demand that all workers be vaccinated or face termination. But as we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt, neither of those things about the new experimental vaccines was true. They may have reduced the severity of the disease for some people, but the vaccinated were still readily able to both catch COVID and transmit it to others. (Trust me on this one. I only got my first negative test last week.) So the underlying argument supporting the mandates was a falsehood all along.

There were potentially as many lives ruined by the mandates as there were by the disease. When all of this is in the past, I can’t escape the feeling that history will not look back kindly on the people who cooked up these ideas and ushered in an era of authoritarian intolerance.