Employees at a Texas hospital have filed a suit over the facility’s mandate that they get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Houston Methodist Hospital, which manages eight hospitals, gave employees until June 7 to get the vaccine or they could be suspended or fired, the lawsuit claims. So 117 unvaccinated employees banded together and filed suit.
“Methodist Hospital is forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment,” the complaint states, according The Washington Post.
The lawsuit noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not fully approved the vaccines, instead issuing only emergency use authorization. They allege the hospital is “illegally requiring its employees to be injected with an experimental vaccine as a condition of employment.”
The complaint also cites the Nuremberg Code, which “bans forced medical experimentations, again in effect arguing that the vaccine is experimental and potentially unsafe,” Fox News reported.
Attorney Jared Woodfill said the hospital is just trying to make money. “To promote its business and increase profits at the expense of other health care providers and their employees’ health, defendants advertise to the public that they ‘require all employees and employed physicians to get a COVID-19 vaccine,’” Woodfill told ABC News.
“This, as a matter of fact, is a gene modification medical experiment on human beings, performed without informed consent. It is a severe and blatant violation of the Nuremberg Code and the public policy of the state of Texas,” he said.
Hospital CEO Dr. Marc Boom in April sent letters announcing that employees must be vaccinated. “Please see the HR policy that outlines the consequences of not being compliant by June 7, which include suspension and eventually termination,” the letter, which was included in the lawsuit, stated.
“CEOS of other health care institutions are calling nearly every day to ask how we are doing it,” Boom said in the note to staffers. “I hope other health care systems and employers will quickly join Houston Methodist in making the vaccine mandatory for staff. The sooner we’re able to end this pandemic, the fewer lives we will continue to lose to it and the closer we can get to normal.”
“When asked about alternative options for employees who did not want to get the COVID vaccine, Houston Methodist told ABC News that it offered ‘religious and medical exemptions, as well as deferrals for pregnant women,'” ABC reported.
Bloomberg News reported that Boom’s internal email “makes no mention of the hospital’s policy to exempt employees who are pregnant, have underlying medical conditions or strongly held religious convictions from vaccine mandates. ‘It is legal for health care institutions to mandate vaccines, as we have done with the flu vaccine since 2009,’ Boom said in his note. ‘The Covid-19 vaccines have proven through rigorous trials to be very safe and very effective and are not experimental.'”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):
COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.… Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history. … CDC recommends you get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as you can.
“Fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance,” the CDC adds.