While the vaccine is being promoted by the press and Biden administration, some medical professionals are not willing to be forced into vaccine with 117 unvaccinated staffers from Houston Methodist Hospital filing a lawsuit Friday to avoid the hospital’s new COVID vaccine mandate.
The lawsuit against Houston Methodist was filed by Jared Woodfill, a Houston-area attorney: “Methodist Hospital is forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment.” the lawsuit states.
Woodfill states that employees should have freedom of choice to take the vaccine without “force, deceit, fraud, threat, solicitation, or any type of binding or coercion.”
This lawsuit is similar to the those filed by New York-based law firm Siri & Glimstad against the Durham County Sheriff’s Office and their warning letters to officials in Rock County, Wis., as well as to the president of Rutgers University and other schools.
Dr. Marc Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist responded to the lawsuit with the following statement:
As of today, 99 percent of Houston Methodist’s 26,000 employees have met the requirements for the vaccination mandate. We are extremely proud of our employees for doing the right thing and protecting our patients from this deadly virus. As health care workers, it is our sacred obligation to do whatever we can to protect our patients, who are the most vulnerable in our community. It is our duty and our privilege.
It is unfortunate that the few remaining employees who refuse to get vaccinated and put our patients first are responding in this way. It is legal for health care institutions to mandate vaccines, as we have done with the flu vaccine since 2009. The COVID-19 vaccines have proven through rigorous trials to be very safe and very effective and are not experimental. More than 165 million people in the U.S. alone have received vaccines against COVID-19, and this has resulted in the lowest numbers of infections in our country and in the Houston region in more than a year.
