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Six Oregon workers subject to state warrants over COVID-19 vaccine are asking federal judge to demand Oregon make an exception for people like them who have acquired some degree of natural immunity after getting sick from the virus.
They argue in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene Thursday that the state needs to more closely tailor its immunization mandates for school workers, healthcare workers and state government employees to exempt workers who already have some immunity to the virus because they contracted and recovered. .
The workers say in their lawsuit that the state’s vaccination rules, which Gov. Kate Brown passed last month, force workers like them “who have robust natural immunity, to choose between their health, personal autonomy and their career”.
For employees, getting the vaccine “would involve more risks than benefits” and it is “extremely unlikely” that they will pass the virus on to others, they wrote.
In fact, unvaccinated people who have recovered from COVID-19 infection are more than twice as likely to catch the virus a second time as fully vaccinated people who have been previously infected, the CDC reported on. last month, based on a study of nearly 750 COVIDs. Kentucky patients.
In the lawsuit challenging the vaccine requirement, a Malheur County prison officer who works at a state prison said his doctor “had advised him that it was medically unnecessary to be vaccinated against COVID-19,” and that his decision not to be vaccinated is medically recommended. The lawsuit did not name the doctor, and a Freedom Foundation lawyer was not immediately able to provide this information.
The other five plaintiffs are an EMT from Aurora, an office manager at an orthodontic practice in Klamath Falls, a bus driver for the Beaverton School District, a prison officer at a state prison who makes a living from the across the border in Idaho and a special agent in charge of an investigative unit from the Oregon Department of Justice which is from Clackamas County.
Oregon’s immunization mandates require school districts and healthcare employers to verify all employees who do not qualify for a religious or medical exemption are vaccinated before October 18 or face daily fines. State officials have until that date to justify their vaccination. The state specifically said that evidence of a history of COVID infection does not qualify employees for exemptions, according to the lawsuit.
The employees are represented in the case by the Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization linked to conservative and libertarian billionaires that espouses libertarian causes and focuses its work in Oregon on discouraging union membership from public servants. Separately, these same unions are also pushing the governor to approve broader exemptions from the mandate to vaccinate state employees. After predicting in early August that the terms of those broader exemptions could be resolved within a week, SEIU 503 communications director Ben Morris wrote in an email on Friday that the union is now simply “confident that we will achieve a deal well in advance of the October 18 deadline “.
Through a spokesperson, the governor declined to comment on the trial.
The lawsuit offers little scientific evidence to support workers’ concerns about the vaccination.
Studies in recent months have shown that “hybrid immunity,” when people infected with COVID-19 get vaccinated later, can cause people to produce a very potent immune response, NPR reported this week. Some recent articles have called this phenomenon “superhuman immunity”.
At the same time, there is no evidence that people with COVID are at a higher risk of side effects from vaccines, according to FactCheck.org. The fact-checking site noted that people’s immune systems typically require “repeated exposure to gain protection over time.”
Still, there have been unsubstantiated claims circulating that people who have recovered from COVID would be at risk of serious health effects if they were vaccinated. And the six Oregonians who are suing to block parts of the state’s vaccination warrants are citing some of that information in their lawsuits. For example, they three times refer to the warnings of Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, a former assistant professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Noorchashm admitted that his warnings are based on a “prognosis” and not on real scientific studies.
The complainants also cited a recent review of existing research on whether people could experience serious side effects if they were vaccinated after contracting COVID. But far from establishing a link between vaccines and adverse health effects, the authors of the article only concluded that “we cannot rule out the possibility …”
Another research article cited by state officials, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August, reported a very small increase in cases of heart inflammation in people vaccinated: 1 to 5 per 100 000 people. However, researchers noted a greater increase in heart inflammation or myocarditis in patients who contracted COVID: 11 per 100,000, as reported by Reuters.
As to the legality of state warrants, the six plaintiffs argue that they violate their constitutional rights to privacy and liberty in the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
The trial is done not to mention the Jacobson v. Massachusetts Supreme Court of the United States in 1905, in which the court ruled in favor of the city of Cambridge on a smallpox vaccination warrant which it adopted during an epidemic. Plaintiff Henning Jacobson refused to be vaccinated because he said he and his son had bad reactions to previous doses.
Jason Dudash, Freedom Foundation director for Oregon, said the government allowed Jacobson to be vaccinated more than a century ago: pay a $ 5 fine. “They gave him an alternative,” Dudash said. “That’s really what we’re trying to accomplish with this lawsuit… Right now it’s one size fits all.”
Dudash pointed out that a California professor filed a complaint on September 2 based on the argument that he had natural immunity to a previous COVID infection and should not be subject to his college’s vaccine mandate. Dudash said the Freedom Foundation case in Oregon is modeled after an August lawsuit against George Mason University by a law school professor Antonin Scalia at the university who had COVID and opposed the vaccine mandate. The case was never tried, since the university granted an exemption to the professor.
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that everyone in the CDC Kentucky Study has already contracted COVID-19.
– Hillary Borrud; [email protected]; @hborrud
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