In state court this time, in what should be one of the friendliest venues available to them.
A new lawsuit filed Monday in Montgomery County against Houston Methodist claims the hospital wrongfully terminated 62 employees over their COVID-19 vaccine requirement.
The suit, filed by attorney Jared Woodfill, alleges the hospital’s COVID vaccine mandate goes against Gov. Greg Abbott’s statement that the government can’t mandate vaccine passports in Texas, that breakthrough infections pose a problem with the current COVID-19 vaccines available and that there was no exception for people who have not been vaccinated because they previously caught COVID-19 as a result of their employment.
In June, a federal judge tossed a lawsuit filed against Houston Methodist Hospital over its COVID-19 vaccine requirement, finding that the mandate “was not coercion.”
Houston Methodist became the first hospital in the nation to require a COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of employment. The health system’s human resources policy required employees to be fully vaccinated by June 7, or risk suspension and eventual termination.
[…]
Woodfill, the former Harris County GOP chairman who is representing the 62 plaintiffs, noted in an interview that Abbott has repeatedly said vaccines will not be mandated by the state.
Specifically, he noted Abbott’s most recent order, in which the governor said Texans “have the individual right and responsibility to decide for themselves and their children whether they will wear masks, open their businesses and engage in leisure activities.”
Woodfill said Abbott’s order “articulates or identifies a public policy for the state of Texas, that you can’t just force people to comply with.”
In the first lawsuit filed against Houston Methodist, Woodfill and more than 100 plaintiffs argued the vaccine requirement was unlawful. The complaint likened the vaccine requirement to a violation of the Nuremberg Code, the set of medical ethics created following World War II in response to Nazi atrocities.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes called the comparison “reprehensible” in his June ruling tossing the lawsuit. Woodfill and the plaintiffs have appealed the ruling.
More than 170 employees at Houston Methodist were fired after not receiving the COVID-19 vaccine by the June deadline, according to the hospital.
Houston Methodist CEO Marc Boom said Monday he was “not surprised” by the complaint.
“It just seems to completely rehash the other lawsuit, which was very clearly and definitively overturned and dismissed by Judge Hughes,” Boom said. “We would expect the same thing in this case.”
See here, here, and here for some background on the federal lawsuit. While Montgomery County is likely to be as pro-COVID a location as Jared Woodfill could find for this nonsense, the fact remains that Texas is a strongly pro-employer state, and that will be a high hurdle to overcome. As the story notes, multiple other hospital systems including (finally) Texas Children’s and St. Luke’s have initiated similar mandates, so there doesn’t seem to be any fear of the legal risk on their part. I expect this will get swatted back, but with Montgomery County you can never be too sure. We’ll keep an eye on it.
31 days and counting……..
Just a reminder that the original lawsuit was filed in Montgomery County as well. And it was pulled to federal court by Methodist the next day. It was not originally filed in federal court.
If the plaintiffs were serious, they would not have hired a clown like Jared Woodfill as their attorney.
The plaintiffs should get a better attorney but many attorneys don’t want to be bothered with cases that aren’t a lot of money, such as malpractice.
The angle to take would be that the vaccines are all being administer under an investigational new drug application.
I emailed the FDA and asked doesn’t coercion to take an investigational product amount to a violation of the Common Rule? They sent me an avoidant reply, saying that the FDA doesn’t regulate school district policies and employer/employee relations. I wrote back. Said, that’s not my question. Isn’t this a violation of the Common Rule? Is not “investigational” equivalent to “experimental?” They wrote back and referred me to their fact sheets, which state that the vaccines are investigational and not approved for any purpose at this time. I wrote back. I had already read the fact sheets. I asked my question once again. They referred me to the manufacturers of the vaccines. I said, no, the manufacturers don’t regulate human subject research, they only make the product. No response from the FDA.
Conclusion: The human subjects rights are being violated by coercive measures to take an investigational substance.
“Conclusion: The human subjects rights are being violated by coercive measures to take an investigational substance.”
so you concluded that your original hypothesis was correct, despite accruing no new information confirming it?
what a researcher.
Joel: This hypothesis is now advanced to a theory, pending any evidence to the contrary and, my legal ability, which interprets “investigational” as synonymous with “experimental,” and my understanding of the Belmont Report.
What a thought. The FDA and the CDC gassing us at the behest of their corporate rulers.
The irony of hospitals firing seasoned workers who were previously known as ‘healthcare heroes,’ and then complaining that their remaining staff are overworked and demanding the state import expensive traveling nurses, is really rich. Think on that…..they fired heroes, in the middle of a purported crisis. That would be like drumming out thousands of Audie Murphy’s from the military during WWII.
Between the hospital administrators that made these boneheaded decisions, and the staff that was so overwhelmed that they had time to make dancing tik tok videos and take a knee to support communism, I feel bad for everyone else in the healthcare system that just wants to go to work, do their job, and maybe help people along the way.
Did the hospital administrators who fired their staff also participate in the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan? The parallels are eerily similar. Instead of waiting until all the American civilians, and Afghans we wanted to save were rescued, we pulled out our troops FIRST. The hospital administrators, instead of waiting until the ‘crisis’ was over, THEN firing the recalcitrant nurses, decided to do things ass backwards……just like Biden’s Afghanistan debacle.
No, Bill, no thousands of Audie Murphy’s were fired. 170 deserters from the mission of caring for the health of their patients were kicked out. As a potential consumer of health care at a hospital, I appreciate that the hospital administrators care about treating me with staff who don’t put me at risk for COVID, tuberculosis, flu, hepatitis, or whatever.
Re: firing of unvaxxed nurses
It might be added that there are many employees of hospital systems that are not nurses, though the breakdown of the population that was let go is a data question and as such cannot be meaningfully discussed in the abstract.
Funny, this article FROM Houston Methodist doesn’t mention healthcare deserters, only “Front Line Heroes.”
https://www.houstonmethodist.org/giving/ways-to-give/additional-giving-initiatives/front-line-heros-appreciation-program/
Can you tell me the EXACT day the fired nurses went from Front Line Heroes to deserters? Before they were fired, were they deserters, and was patient care negatively impacted because they turned out to be deserters?
Since fully injected people can still contract the Wu flu and presumably infect others, like our own governor, for example, how, exactly is injecting all the hospital staff guaranteeing you that you won’t risk getting the Wu flu, tuberculosis, flu, hepatitis, or whatever?
Prior to the EUA injections, how did Methodist guarantee you wouldn’t get the Wu flu, tuberculosis, flu, hepatitis, or whatever? Did the deserters follow PPE and other safety policies then? Did they ever stop wearing the PPE and going through the safety protocols?