Group of staffers at Houston Hospital sue to stop its vaccine mandate

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Sun, 2021-05-30 13:15 — mike kraft

117 staffers sue over Houston hospital’s vaccine mandate, saying they don’t want to be ‘guinea pigs’ Houston Methodist Hospital says 99 percent of its 26,000 employees have received the shots. Derek Hawkins Washington Post

A group of 117 unvaccinated staffers from Houston Methodist Hospital filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to avoid the hospital’s coronavirus vaccine mandate, saying it’s unlawful for bosses to require the shots.

The staffers join a growing list of employees challenging compulsory immunizations at businesses, colleges and other workplaces essential to the country’s reopening. Vaccine mandates have faced mounting resistance from anti-vaccination groups and some Republican politicians, even as health officials promote the proven safety of the vaccines and millions of Americans line up to get the shots every week.

The lawsuit against Houston Methodist was filed by Jared Woodfill, a Houston-area attorney and conservative activist. It appears to mirror a legal strategy used by a New York-based law firm, Siri & Glimstad, that is closely aligned with one of the country’s biggest anti-vaccination organizations but unaffiliated with the Houston litigation.

The complaint, filed in state court, says Houston Methodist’s vaccine mandate violates a set of medical ethics standards known as the Nuremberg Code, which was designed to prevent experimentation on human subjects without consent. The code was created after World War II in response to the medical atrocities Nazis committed against prisoners in concentration camps. ...

Experts said the notion that the vaccines were “experimental” or based on an untested technology was incorrect.

“This claim is absurd indeed,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, told The Washington Post.

“There were tens of thousands of people who were in the Phase 3 clinical trials for the mRNA vaccines, and no safety concerns were found,” Iwasaki told The Post in an email.

An experimental vaccine is one that has not gone through clinical trials and authorization or approval processes. While the coronavirus vaccines used in the United States have not received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, they have completed rigorous clinical trials and have been authorized for emergency use. Pfizer this month asked the FDA for full approval of the coronavirus vaccine it developed with German company BioNTech. ...

Marc Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist, said it was legal for health-care institutions to require vaccines. Houston Methodist has done so for the flu vaccine for more than a decade. ...

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