Investigative Report: A powerful network is helping support resistance to vaccine mandates

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Thu, 2021-05-27 19:37 — mike kraft

Resistance to vaccine mandates is building. A powerful network is helping. A New York firm has filed suit or sent letters to employers in several states, part of an effort spearheaded by one of the largest anti-vaccination groups in the country. Isaac Stanley-Becker Washington Post

The Americans lodging complaints against coronavirus vaccine mandates are a diverse lot — a sheriff’s deputy in North Carolina, nursing home employees in Wisconsin and students at the largest university in New Jersey.

But their resistance is woven together by a common thread: the involvement of a law firm closely tied to the anti-vaccine movement.

Attorneys from Siri & Glimstad — a New York firm that has done millions of dollars of legal work for one of the nation’s foremost anti-vaccination groups — are co-counsel in a case against the Durham County Sheriff’s Office. They’ve sent warning letters to officials in Rock County, Wis., as well as to the president of Rutgers University and other schools.

The legal salvos show that a groundswell against compulsory immunization is being coordinated, at least in part, from a law office on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. And they offer a window into a wide-ranging and well-resourced effort to contest vaccine requirements in workplaces and other settings critical to the country’s reopening — a dispute with sweeping implications for public health, state authority and individual rights.

“The message is, ‘Maybe you should reconsider because you don’t want to end up in court,’ ” said Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. “I think that works.”

Most employers shy away from mandating coronavirus vaccines

The Informed Consent Action Network, a Texas-based nonprofit group founded by former daytime television producer Del Bigtree that campaigns against requiring vaccines, in part by citing unsubstantiated or debunked claims about their dangers, has advertised Siri & Glimstad’s services and sought plaintiffs for challenges to mandates.

Even before the pandemic, legal services were core to these advocacy efforts. The nearly $1.3 million paid by ICAN to Siri & Glimstad in 2019 — the most recent year for which a tax filing is publicly available — was the nonprofit’s single largest reported expenditure.

At stake in this latest contest is whether hospitals, law enforcement agencies and others can require employees to take a vaccine that was made available in an expedited process permitted during a public health emergency — and, likewise, whether schools may require the shots for students, faculty and staff members in the same way many require familiar vaccines for measles and chickenpox. There is little case law on the matter, with only one vaccine, for anthrax exposure, previously cleared in a similar way.

Employers are expected to cite the expansive evidence supporting the safety and efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines, as well as the extraordinary health risks created by the current emergency, said Kerry A. Scanlon, a former Department of Justice official who oversees labor and employment litigation at Chicago-based law firm McDermott Will & Emery.

Scanlon believes employers are in a strong position to defend compulsory vaccination, but he said many might shy away from it simply to avoid costly litigation. ...

ALSO SEE: Indiana University reconsidering vaccine mandate for students after political opposition

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