Tag: mandatory vaccination

9th Circuit and COVID Jabs

A lot is going around on social media related to the 9th Circuit ruling on Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Alberto Carvalho. There is discussion online that this means mandates are done. Unfortunately – that is untrue. This very short substack is to clarify the meaning of this case.

The case is related whether the mRNA jab mandates were allowed under the law. The important point that people are discussing is the part of the case referencing Jacob v. Massachusetts – the case that is relied on to impose vaccine mandates nationally. In the current case the court essentially held that there is a plausible argument that the COVID jabs do not fall under the definition of “vaccine” as it applies in Jacobson.

In Jacobson, the court allowed a small civil penalty to be imposed if someone refused a vaccine in certain circumstances. The definition of vaccine in Jacobson recognized that to be a vaccine an intervention would necessarily prevent the spread of smallpox. In the current case the argument is that, since the COVID jabs do not prevent the transmission of COVID it is not a vaccine but rather a medical intervention. I agree with that argument but this ruling does not mean that argument was won in court.

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American Trapped in Japan Because Non-Citizen Wife Can’t Enter U.S. Without COVID-19 Vaccine Proof

An American citizen is stuck in Japan because his non-citizen wife can’t enter the U.S. without showing proof of taking the COVID-19 jab.

Kion, a U.S. citizen who’s been in Japan for over 15 years, reached out to activist TexasLindsay to tell his story.

Kion met his wife while studying abroad at a language school in Japan around 2009. “We’ve been married for about 15 years,” he said, “and our visa in Japan runs out next year.”

“I’m a U.S. citizen that’s basically stranded outside of the country because my wife [a non-U.S. citizen] is being refused an immigration visa,” he said, explaining that they had applied “about 3 years ago, at the start of the pandemic hoping the madness would be over by the time we got the immigration visa.”

“I thought that since we were moving back, I should look for jobs in the states, and never expected to be stuck this long,” he added.

Turns out the reason Kion’s wife’s visa is being denied is due to the Biden DHS and CDC’s immigration requirement for LEGAL immigrants to show proof a COVID-19 injection within the last 12 months.

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‘Indefensible’: Courts finally scrutinize COVID vaccine mandates as religious infringement

Three years after COVID-19 vaccines became widely available to adults – at which point the CDC already knew they couldn’t stop transmission – courts are finally starting to put their foot down on the most basic legal question: Are mandates at least applied fairly, if not scientifically?

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals not only knocked down the University of Colorado medical school’s original and revised 2021 mandates for discriminating against employees seeking religious exemptions, but knocked the trial judge for “abuse of discretion” by reversing the burden of proof to moot the case.

The Anschutz campus, whose dental school recently created a diversity, equity and inclusion award, made an early pivotal decision on COVID vaccine mandates by scrutinizing the content as well as sincerity of beliefs among employees and students seeking exemptions.

“The Administration’s September 1 Policy is not neutral on its face; the September 24 Policy is not neutral in practice; and both substantially burden” the religious exercise of the anonymous 11 female and six male plaintiffs, according to the majority opinion by Judge Allison Eid, who replaced Neil Gorsuch when President Trump appointed him to the Supreme Court.

“It is manifestly unreasonable to think” the Sept. 24 policy “would reach precisely the same results … by accident,” Eid wrote. “The Administration had spent weeks or months drafting and implementing a policy hostile toward and discriminatory against certain religions, only to adopt a new, purportedly neutral policy that reached precisely the same results.”

University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Vinay Prasad celebrated the ruling for recognizing CU Anschutz administrators “set an indefensible policy,” while the plaintiffs’ lawyers at the Thomas More Society thanked the court for recognizing the university’s “value judgments … reeked of religious bigotry” and violated constitutional rights and “basic decency.”

The ruling is reminiscent of the Supreme Court’s narrow finding against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for “official expressions of hostility to religion” when it punished Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips for declining to make custom wedding cakes for gay couples based on his Christian view of marriage.

In the private sector, a high-profile vaccine mandate lawsuit by an actor fired from the Fox show “911” is heading to trial over whether Disney-owned 20th Television trampled Rockmond Dunbar’s views as a follower of the Church of Universal Wisdom, which The New York Times profiled in 2003 for its utility in circumventing childhood vaccination mandates.

“It appears that Disney vetted exemption applications on a case-by-case basis, investigating whether the religions constituted true religious institutions and whether applicants actually followed the beliefs,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

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University of Colorado Vaccine Mandate “Motivated by Religious Animus” and “Unconstitutional”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issued a ruling that the University of Colorado Anschutz School Medicine’s refusal to allow religious exemptions to its COVID-19 vaccine mandate was “motivated by religious animus” and unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s Religious Clauses.

The Court ruled that the University’s vaccine mandates granted “exemptions for some religions, but not others, because of differences in their religious doctrines” and granted “secular exemptions on more favorable terms than religious exemptions.” Both of these things were illegal.

The Court reaffirmed the First Amendment principle that government cannot test the sincerity of employees’ religious beliefs.

The University’s mandates violated “clearly established” constitutional rights, the court held.

The 55-page ruling, issued on 7 May, was a reversal of a previous lower-court decision.

The appeal was filed in March 2022 by the Thomas More Society on behalf of 17 faculty and students who claimed that the university refused to respect their religious objections to taking the vaccine.

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reviewed no data when deciding in 2023 to keep its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”

Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”

The agency searched for such data and did not find any.

“The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.

“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.

The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.

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Hospital Pays Job Applicant Who Refused Mandated Flu Shot

A hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich., has agreed to pay a settlement to a job applicant who had been offered a position, but then was arbitrarily rejected because he declined to take a flu shot hospital officials demanded.

News of the settlement comes from Liberty Counsel.

The fight involved Trinity Health Grand Rapids, which previously was known as Mercy Health St. Mary’s. The resolution includes a consent decree that allows paying of some $50,000 to the worker who was rejected.

The case originally was filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and charged the hospital improperly denied a job applicant’s request for a religious exemption to the flu shot.

The requirement for such shots later was dropped by the hospital, which agreed to train leaders on religious rights in addition to paying the settlement.

“According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, even though the hospital’s former flu shot policy allowed for a religious exemption, the hospital determined the applicant’s articulated religious beliefs were ‘insufficient’ to grant the exemption and denied it without an explanation. Trinity Health, which had made a conditional job offer to the applicant, then rescinded that job offer and did not give the applicant an opportunity to address the concerns with his request.”

The EEOC accused the corporation of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The report explained federal law insists that employers make reasonable accommodations for religious employees – unless those accommodations create an “undue hardship” on the company.

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Midwife Who Falsified Vaccine Records for More Than 1,000 School Children Fined $300,000

A New York midwife has been fined after falsifying the vaccination records of more than 1,000 school children after administering them and others oral pellets which she falsely claimed were a viable alternative to vaccines.

Jeanette Breen, a licensed midwife who operated a clinic in Nassau County, gave thousands of the pellets to the children since 2019, the New York State Department of Health’s Bureau of Investigations found, per a press release. 

Breen’s “scheme” started in the 2019-2020 school year as she began administering “a series of oral pellets” as an alternative to vaccines. The “homeopathic pellets” she administered are “not authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) nor approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the Department as an immunizing agent against any disease,” per the Health Department. 

Among the vaccinations she falsified include tetanus, hepatitis B, measles and polio. 

Breen was determined to have broken the state’s Immunization Registry Law and was fined $300,000 as a penalty by the Health Department.

In a statement, State Education Commissioner Betty A. Rosa said that they are “committed to upholding the highest standards of health and well-being within our educational institutions.”

“By intentionally falsifying immunization records for students, this licensed health care professional not only endangered the health and safety of our school communities but also undermined public trust,” Rosa’s statement continued. “We are pleased to have worked with our partners in government to bring this wrongdoer to justice.”

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College Vaccine Mandates: Here to Stay?

It is January 2024, and Covid vaccine mandates persist at 70 of the top 800 colleges in the US, and who knows if they will ever let them go. If you are a healthcare major, nearly every clinical partner site still mandates that healthcare students take the most updated Covid vaccine (often no exemptions accepted) even if those sites are affiliated with colleges and universities that do not currently mandate Covid vaccines.

It is truly remarkable with all that we have learned about these novel medical treatments that colleges can still coerce students into taking them. In fact, it is truly remarkable that any college ever announced Covid vaccine mandates in the spring of 2021 given that by this time the CDC (upon which the colleges dutifully and explicitly relied) knew they were ineffective at preventing infection and transmission. So, while we have all come to understand that mandating students to take Covid vaccines does very little if anything to protect the vulnerable members of the community, this remains the single biggest reason colleges put forth to explain why they mandate(d) them.

When colleges began preparing to return to in-person learning in the Fall of 2021, they built Covid dashboards to keep track of infection rates on campus. At that time, there were both large college systems and small colleges that never mandated Covid vaccines and that fared better week-to-week with Covid infection rates than other large and small colleges that mandated Covid vaccines.

I analyzed colleges in New Hampshire over several months only to find that the University of New Hampshire, which never mandated Covid vaccines and has triple the undergraduate enrollment of Dartmouth College, consistently had less Covid infections on their dashboard than Dartmouth, which announced a Covid vaccine mandate in April of 2021. I wrote to Dartmouth administrators countless times to point this out, but I either got no reply or no acknowledgement of my observations. Dartmouth ended their Covid vaccine mandate on April 11, 2023, two years after they implemented it, and after over 98% of their campus community had taken the initial series and at least one booster.

Prior to fall 2021, to help ensure a high uptake of Covid vaccines, Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General at the time, wrote an “Open Letter to Leaders in Higher Education” urging them to mandate Covid vaccines on college campuses. If colleges choose not to mandate Covid vaccines “we are asking leaders to take strong steps to get as close as possible to 100 percent of their students, faculty and staff vaccinated early in the academic year.” 

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Fauci FINALLY confesses to Covid failures – admitting lab leak is credible, praising Trump on China and revealing he told schools to impose vaccine mandates

Dr Anthony Fauci admitted that the lab leak Covid origin theory was credible as he shed more light on the chaotic decision-making process behind the scenes of America’s pandemic response.

During his second day of marathon grilling by Congress, the former White House advisor confessed that the lab leak – the idea Covid was engineered and accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan – was ‘not a conspiracy theory’.

The U-turn is significant because he was the chief architect of a 2020 paper that discounted the theory. Fauci’s friends and former colleagues also spearheaded a paper in the Lancet that called believers conspiracy theorists and racists.

Fauci, 81, sat before the House coronavirus subcommittee for a second seven-hour stretch of questioning on Tuesday about the pandemic response that he oversaw and its myriad flaws.

The infectious disease expert said that data did not support recommendations to keep six feet of distance from another person and that vaccine mandates he personally advised likely increased vaccine hesitancy.

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Supreme Court Wipes Out Three Rulings Rejecting Federal COVID Vaccine Mandate

The U.S. Supreme Court vacated the rulings in three lower court cases that had challenged the Biden administration’s federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal agency employees and military service personnel. The decision by the nation’s highest court to grant the Biden administration’s request to set aside the previous judicial rulings rejecting a federal COVID vaccine mandate erases the legal precedent set by the lower courts.

The Appellate courts were split in their decisions about the COVID vaccine mandate with those challenging the federal vaccine mandate succeeding in some cases and the Biden administration prevailing in other cases.

The Supreme Court majority instructed the lower court to dismiss the cases as moot after the vaccine mandates were rescinded. By wiping out the historical record, the Supreme Court has ensured that any legal challenges to future vaccine mandates will be cases of first impression without precedent.1 2

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