Monday, October 25, 2021

Coronavirus Update 10-25-2021: Lawsuits challenging employer vaccine mandates are borderline frivolous


More than 130 employees of the City of Chicago have filed a lawsuit against their employer challenging its Covid-19 vaccine mandate. CNN has the details:

"The mandate, and the Executive Orders, violate the constitutional and fundamental rights of those who either choose not to be vaccinated, or choose not to disclose their vaccination status to either the state, or their employers," the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit will fail. Period.

As both Bloomberg Law and The Wall Street Journal recently reported, workplace Covid-19 vaccine mandates are surviving nearly all court challenges.

Bloomberg Law quotes said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law: "What we've seen so far in the courts really demonstrates how durable and well judicially supported vaccine mandates are." The article continues: "Companies, which have a legal obligation to keep their workers safe, generally can require inoculation via their power to set and enforce the terms of employment, lawyers and scholars said." That statement is 100 percent correct.

In fact, of the 39 federal lawsuits filed thus far this year challenging a workplace vaccine mandate, all of the mandates themselves have survived. The three cases in which the mandate did not stand inviolate involved mandates that failed to provide for any exceptions for disabilities under the ADA or sincerely held religious beliefs under Title VII, or imposed a reasonable accommodation without any engagement in the interactive process.

The bottom line? If you impose a vaccine mandate in your workplace and allow for reasonable accommodations for disabilities and religion, the probability is very, very high that your mandate will survive a legal challenge by anti-vax or vax-hesitant employees.