Private Sector Vaccine Mandates – Job or No Job

 

 "If an employee believes his or her individual liberties are more important than 

legally permissible conditions on his or her employment, that employee can and should choose 

to exercise another individual liberty, no less significant – the right to seek other employment." 

U.S. District Judge David Bunning in Covington, Kentucky

We are watching a growing trend in many red states: laws or executive orders banning employers from requiring employee COVID vaccine or mask mandates, many such regulations with serious fines or defunding consequences. Politicians usurping medical professionals to enforce a litany of conspiracy theories and false claims of clearly nonexistent individual constitutional rights. For a more detailed analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of this false claim of constitutional entitlement, see my September 18th blog, Attitude Shift – When Over 75% of American Adults Have Received At least One Vaccine Shot. Bottom line: reasonable vaccine and other medical mandates imposed by government to counter serious medical epidemics are unequivocally constitutional. It’s been the law for well over a century.

As if such political interference with medical reality were not enough, this red state plague – reflected in record-breaking infection/mortality numbers and exhaustion of hospital capacity to deal with the serious infections of the unvaccinated – has added sweeping movements to expand those bans to cover any and all vaccine mandates, including those which have been public school enrollment requirements for over half a century. This anti-science, anti-medical reality force, clearly against the will of a majority of Americans, is uniquely happening with significance only within red states. Bringing new outbreaks of old and once-extinguished diseases combined with an accelerant for COVID variants to propagate threaten all of us. After, people can travel across state lines without restriction.

Surely, anti-vaccine mandate believers hold, even applying federal law under the aegis of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), government cannot mandate employees to be vaccinated. But the EEOC has ruled that subject to certain limitations, employers may indeed require vaccine immunization of their workers without violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Title VII or other federal anti-discrimination laws. According to the EEOC’s guidance, this is true even though the COVID-19 vaccine is only authorized under the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), although full approval has now been given. The Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has also imposed employer COVID infection reporting requirements with a clear continuing obligation to maintain a safe workplace for its employees. 

The above under-title quote is taken from a September 22nd federal trial court in Northern Kentucky ruling against issuing a sought-after injunction against a COVID vaccine mandate for its healthcare employees by a private employer – St Elizabeth Healthcare. In that lawsuit, 40 of its hospital employees claimed in their 93-page pleading that the vaccine mandate constitutes “a fraud upon the entire American public,” that hospital workers were “coerced to participate in a medical experiment,” that such workers now “live in fear” from the risks of vaccination, and that St Elizabeth manipulated “their Covid and vaccine issues, including [hospital] occupancy, to spread fear in the community” and were “fully aware and/or recklessly ignored the inaccuracy of both the internal and external reporting regarding COVID-19” in order to fit the hospital's “intended narrative” regarding the vaccine. The workers lost, and the mandated vaccination by October first remained in place. It seems as if attorneys for St Elizabeth were correct in describing the plaintiff’s lawsuit as stating, “incoherent causes of action.”

“Employer vaccine requirements have spawned numerous lawsuits, although most are still in the initial stages…  In recent weeks, numerous large employers have begun to impose deadlines for employees to get vaccinated as COVID-19 infections remain elevated in the United States… Also on Friday [9/24], the Biden Administration spelled out plans to require federal contractors to get vaccinated, which will apply to tens of millions of Americans. 

“The [above noted] class action on behalf of St. Elizabeth employees was based in part on concerns about the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, among other claims… Those suspicions cannot override the law, said [Judge] Bunning.” Reuters, September 26th. But judicial tolerance for these attempts to use the judicial system have consistently fallen on deaf ears. 

“Students suing Indiana University over a vaccine mandate failed to persuade the federal courts to block the requirement, the most recent ruling from a federal appeals court coming [in August]… In June, in the first federal ruling on vaccine mandates, a Texas judge dismissed a lawsuit by hospital employees who declined the COVID-19 shot… The case involved Houston Methodist, which was the first hospital system in the country to require all its employees get vaccinated.” Louisville Courier Journal, September 3rd. For the safety of most of us, let’s hope these courts continue to resist inane efforts to defy medical science during this killer pandemic.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it continues to be disheartening to witness frontline medical employees buy into the false narrative of conspiracy theories, putting the patients who trust them at additional unnecessary risk.