Police officers and firefighters challenge Gainesville’s “hideous” vaccine mandate

A nurse immunizer delivers the AstraZeneca vaccine to a patient at a COVID-19 vaccination clinic in Sydney, Australia on August 25, 2021. REUTERS / Loren Elliott

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• Companies
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• Many Florida city officials, including police officers and firefighters, say they’d rather quit than get vaccinated
• They say the vaccine won’t slow the spread of COVID

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(Reuters) – More than 200 Gainesville, Florida employees have filed a lawsuit to crack down on the city’s demand that their employees receive COVID-19 vaccines or be fired for violating their constitutional rights.

The workers, represented by ChildersLaw’s Seldon Childers, filed a complaint in a state court Thursday, claiming that there were various less intrusive alternatives to vaccination and that many city workers would simply quit or retire instead of being forced to get a vaccine.

The Gainesville City Commission passed a mandate on August 5 that stipulates that city workers and contractors should receive vaccines or face dismissal by October 14.

However, many of the plaintiffs have “enduring and robust natural immunity” as the lawsuit claims they are already infected with COVID, and masks and antibody treatments could be as effective as vaccines in slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

“In their insane rush to resolve a stubborn problem that was not caused by plaintiffs, the city has come up with a hideous scheme to force plaintiffs to take unwanted and unnecessary COVID vaccines by taking away their livelihoods, pensions, and more Dreams threatened, “wrote Childers in the complaint.

Plaintiffs say the mandate violates their constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, privacy and physical integrity.

Shelby Taylor, a city spokeswoman, said worker health and safety was a top priority.

“The city has taken the necessary steps to achieve this priority and stand by this decision,” said Taylor.

Several U.S. cities and states have announced that they will vaccinate public workers, including Chicago, San Diego, New York City and California, amid a surge in COVID cases and the recent approval of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine American Food and Drug Administration. However, Thursday’s lawsuit appears to be the first to challenge any of those mandates.

Plaintiffs said it was unnecessary to require vaccines from workers and was not rationally related to the mandate’s purpose to slow the spread of COVID-19. Because the vaccines don’t prevent transmission of the highly contagious Delta variant, vaccinating workers are unlikely to reduce secondary infections, they said.

And by mandating vaccines, the city risks a “catastrophic collapse” if large numbers of employees quit or are laid off, plaintiffs said.

According to the lawsuit, the Stadtwerke, which operate the municipal utilities, already had 10% fewer employees than needed at the end of July. And in a recent internal survey, nearly 60% of the agency’s 150 employees said they would quit, retire, or accept termination if they needed to get vaccinated, plaintiffs said.

In addition to making constitutional claims, plaintiffs said the mandate violates a Florida law that prohibits state agencies from requiring individuals to provide evidence that they received COVID-19 vaccines “in order to have access to, access to, or services from the operations of the government agency in that state ”. . “

The case is Friend v City of Gainesville, Florida Circuit Court, Alachua County, No. 133500511.

For the plaintiffs: Seldon Childers of Childers Law

For the city: Not available

Continue reading:

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Daniel Wiessner

Dan Wiessner (@danwiessner) reports on labor and labor law as well as immigration law, including litigation and policy making. He can be reached at daniel.wiessner@thomsonreuters.com.

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