Thousands of healthcare workers in the state of New York are now facing a tough decision: to get the COVID vaccine and continue with their lives as normal, or refuse the vaccine and lose their jobs.
In the midst of this are 17 Christian medical workers who have filed a lawsuit seeking religious exemptions from the COVID vaccine mandate, which requires over 600,000 workers in public and private hospitals and nursing homes in the state to get the vaccine by midnight on Monday to keep on working on Tuesday.
According to the Christian Post, the religious liberty advocate group Thomas More Society (TMS) is representing more than a dozen healthcare workers in New York City, including Baptists and Catholics who oppose the COVID vaccine.
The plaintiffs argue that New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Catholic and Democrat, is "disrespecting and bullying" healthcare professionals in the state into getting the COVID vaccine.
"New York's Governor Hochul is using every strong-arm tactic she can to attempt to coerce employees into taking vaccines against their will," TMS Special Counsel Christopher Ferrara said in a statement. "She is also demonstrating disrespect, at a minimum, if not outright hostility to the deeply held religious convictions of our clients as well as thousands of others."
It's worth noting that Hochul went to Brooklyn's Christian Cultural Center and used God's name to manipulate people into getting the jab. She said unvaccinated Christians "aren't listening to God and what God wants."
Ferrera added that the New York governor is trying to "coerce" people into getting the jab through the COVID vaccine mandate and now "she threatens to declare a state of emergency she herself has created by calling for the firing of dedicated front line health care workers who treated patients for 18 months without being vaccinated - often contracting COVID, recovering, and returning to front line medical care - are now being depicted as disease-carrying villains."
Calling it "demagoguery," Ferrera decried the treatment of medical professionals seeking religious exemptions to the COVID vaccine in New York City. Back in September, U.S. District Judge David Hurd ordered a temporary ban on New York's health department from rejecting employer-approved religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate. The issue herein is the use of fetal cell lines in the development and testing of the COVID vaccines, resulting in an argument against them by the Christian faithful, who are opposed to abortion.
Meanwhile, some Christian medical workers who are fighting New York's vaccine mandates are hopeful for a win. According to Bloomberg, a federal appeals court ruled that New York state must temporarily allow exemptions from the COVID vaccine mandate. The ruling was the result of a case filed by three workers who sued to block New York's COVID vaccine mandate outright.
On Thursday, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Manhattan granted the request of the three healthcare workers in New York, thereby allowing for religious objections while the court decides if the COVID vaccine mandate as a whole is legal. The ruling on the case of the three healthcare workers came just a day after the judges in the federal appeals court heard arguments on a temporary injunction.
"New York cannot target religion for special disabilities," Cameron Atkinson, who represents the three healthcare workers and the nonprofit group We the Patriots USA, said to the panel. Steven Wu, a lawyer for New York state, argued however that the COVID vaccine mandate is "neutral toward religion" and that delays in its implementation "poses the risk of infection, complications, and death to the vulnerable population that they serve."
