Employer Vaccination Mandates Under Scrutiny Post COVID-19

From presidential candidate Donald Trump’s promise to reinstate military members who were fired for not getting COVID-19 shots to a federal court decision favoring employee vaccination preferences, vaccine mandates at work appear to be coming to an end.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, Illinois ruled employees at Wisconsin health care system Aspirus, Inc. can go forward with their claim that they were unlawfully denied a religious exemption from having to accept a COVID-19 shot. Aspirus claimed the employees’ real reason for not wanting the shots was secular, not religious.

Public Employees Protected

In 2023, Texas updated Section 81B.003 of the state’s health and safety code prohibiting vaccination mandates for state and local government employees. Before the change, employees had to prove a health risk or religious convictions to be granted an exemption.

Texas has taken the lead in prohibiting government agencies from issuing mandates for people to get vaccinated. Similar laws have passed in Florida and 11 other states: Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah.

Private Employees’ Rights Unclear

Private employers are a different matter says Javier Perez, a board-certified labor and employment law attorney with Crain Brogdon LLP in Dallas

“Despite the new protective laws for [government] employees, unless there is a specific law prohibiting employer vaccine mandates, employers can still, generally speaking, impose workplace vaccine mandates so long as they do not discriminate,” said Perez, a board-certified labor and employment law attorney with Crain Brogdon LLP in Dallas. “The employer has wide discretion to decide what the rules of the road are in their workplace.”

The dynamics in the workplace have changed, says Perez.

“My sense of the job market is that employers can replace people who won’t comply,” said Perez. “But with a lot of jobs pivoting to remote work—more than we thought possible—it’s kind of an easy way, on a temporary basis, to work around those risks.”

Mandates ‘Have Backfired’

Despite the lack of clarity in employer-employee relations, the tide is turning against vaccine mandates and other COVID-related work rules, in particular failures to accommodate religious exemptions, says Douglas P. Seaton, J.D, Ph.D., president of Upper Midwest Law Center.

“These mandates, based on shoddy or no science, have backfired because they have resulted in serious levels of suspicion of the bona fides of all new government regulation, especially when ‘science’ is claimed to be the rationale,” said Seaton.

‘Simply Shut Up’

In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Massachusetts could not pass a vaccination mandate to protect the individual but could do so “to protect the public from a dangerous communicable disease.”

Historically, the public health bureaucracy had been relatively circumspect in exercising that enormous power to control individual behavior, says Linda Gorman, director of the Independence Institute’s Health Care Policy Center. Things began to change in the 1990s when public health researchers and government health bureaucracies were captured by the notion that the British, Canadian, and European health care systems were better than the U.S. system because they were government-controlled.

“They apparently believed that health would improve, and costs would fall, if patients, doctors, and suppliers would simply shut up and do as they were told,” said Gorman.

‘Power Is Attractive’

The COVID-19 pandemic tested that power. Instead of systematically providing the best available information to individuals about the new COVID vaccine and allowing informed consent, the bureaucrats resorted to brute force to make people do as they were told, says Gorman.

“Power is attractive, and I see no sign that the health bureaucracy will give up its vast powers without a fight,” said Gorman. “The tragedy is the backfire has made people suspicious about all vaccine recommendations, and unknown numbers of people will die and suffer severe health consequences as a result.”

The COVID overreach made credentialed experts’ ethical failings evident, says Gorman.

“It is now obvious that government health bureaucracies see no harm in lying about efficacy, disease risk, and data quality in order to achieve their own end,” said Gorman.

“The first question is, ‘What do we do about it?’” said Gorman. “The second is, “Who should people trust for the accurate information they need to make informed decisions about their medical care?”

Kenneth Artz ([email protected]) writes from Tyler, Texas.

Related Topics:#HeartlandDailyNews COVID-19VaccineMandates EmployerVaccineMandates KennethArtz

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Deborah Birx Came Directly from USAID

Published on March 7, 2025

Todayville

From the Brownstone Institute

By Debbie Lerman

Deborah Birx, who became the White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator on February 27, 2020, came directly from USAID – the department everyone now knows to be a front for CIA propaganda and regime change operations. [ref]

She served as U.S. Special Representative for Global Health Diplomacy, a joint USAID and State Department office that had ” developed a strategic approach to accomplish their shared mission that focuses on robust diplomacy and development as central to solving global problems.” [ref]

Almost exactly five years ago, the public was told that Deborah Birx was appointed by Vice President Mike Pence who, on February 26, 2020, took over coordination of the U.S. government’s response to the novel coronavirus. [ref]

The announcement said:

Ambassador Birx is a world-renowned global health official and physician. She will be detailed to the Office of the Vice President and will report to Vice President Mike Pence. She will also join the Task Force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. She will be supported by the National Security Council staff. [ref]

This announcement contains hints that Birx was not chosen by public health agencies or officials. Rather, she appears to be coming from the national security apparatus, and “will be supported by the National Security Council staff.”

Further supporting this supposition, on March 11, 2020, at a Heritage Foundation Talk, Trump’s National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, when discussing what the White House and NSC were doing about the virus, said:

We brought into the White House Debi Birx, a fantastic physician and ambassador from the State Department. We appreciate Secretary Pompeo immediately moving her over to the White House at our, well at the President’s, request. [min. 21:43 – 21:56]

In other words, Birx was “moved over to the White House” by the Secretary of State, at the request of the National Security Council.

The National Security Council Was in Charge of the U.S. Government’s Covid Response

These facts about Deborah Birx’s appointment to the Task Force are consistent with the government pandemic planning documents that show the NSC – not the HHS, CDC, NIAID, or any other public health agency – was in charge of the U.S. government’s Covid response policy.

Investigating Deborah Birx’s Role in the Covid Response

In August 2022 I published a series of articles investigating how Deborah Birx got the job on the Task Force, the bogus science she promoted, and her relationship with the public health officials on the Task Force.

Here are excerpts from, and links to, those articles:

How Did Deborah Birx Get the Job?

Deborah Birx, an immunologist and Army Colonel who worked for the Department of Defense and US Military on AIDS research, served as Directory of the CDC’s Division of Global HIV/AIDS and as the US Global AIDS Coordinator [ref], was appointed White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator on February 27th, 2020.

She had no training or experience in epidemiology, novel pathogen pandemic response, or airborne respiratory viruses like the coronavirus.

She was offered the position by Matt Pottinger, Deputy National Security Advisor for China, who told Birx that if she did not take the job American lives could be lost.

In her “excruciating story” of the pandemic, Silent Invasion, Deborah Birx does not even try to make coherent scientific or public health policy arguments in favor of the Chinese-style totalitarian measures she advocated. Instead, she provides self-contradictory assertions – some downright false and others long disproven in the scientific literature.

It Was Birx. All Birx.

We know Birx was not working with President Trump, although she was on a task force ostensibly representing the White House. Trump did not appoint her, nor did the leaders of the Task Force, as Scott Atlas recounts in his revelatory book on White House pandemic activity, A Plague Upon Our House. When Atlas asked Task Force members how Birx was appointed, he was surprised to find that “no one seemed to know.” (Atlas, p. 82)

Yet, somehow, Deborah Birx – a former military AIDS researcher and government AIDS ambassador with no training, experience, or publications in epidemiology or public health policy – found herself leading a White House Task Force on which she had the power to literally subvert the policy prescriptions of the President of the United States.

Debi Does Lockdowns

It is my (as yet unproven) theory that the lab-leak cabal, for which Birx was a primary agent in the US government, wanted to impose strict lockdowns all over the world.

Whatever their motives, the goal seems very clear: Get as many countries as possible to lock down for as long as possible, at least until vaccines become available.

But locking down entire countries full of healthy populations was never an accepted or ethically/medically/scientifically supported pandemic response, and people might object to such draconian measures. So Birx+cabal had to create enough panic to make it happen.

Given this connection between the U.S. government’s Covid response, the CIA-adjacent USAID, and the National Security Council, maybe those who say they are interested in full transparency can answer the questions presented here:

Hey, Jim Jordan: Ask Fauci Who His Bosses Were!

And the crucial questions raised by the Covid Dossier.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Debbie Lerman

Debbie Lerman, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practicing artist in Philadelphia, PA.

COVID-19

Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich says her trial verdict now delayed to unknown date

Published on February 28, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich said she is “disappointed” in the Canadian “justice system” that her and convoy co-leader Chris Barber’s verdict for their mischief trial, which supposed to have been released in two weeks, has now been delayed to an unknown date.

In a X post late Thursday, Lich shared the news with her followers, noting, “We just received news that our March 12th verdict date is unfortunately being postponed.”

“At the end of our criminal (longest) mischief trial last August, when Her Honour set the verdict date, she let us know the court system assigned her a full trial schedule to help clear the backlog from the Covid years,” wrote Lich.

“This is the sad state of the justice system in Canada. While we are disappointed in yet another delay in our case, we know the importance of the upcoming decision not just for us, but for all Canadians.”

Lich said that as soon as she is told when the new verdict date will be, she will let everyone know.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Lich and Barber’s verdict was supposed to have been announced on March 12.

They both face a possible 10-year prison sentence. LifeSiteNews reported extensively on their trial.

Lich and Barber’s trial concluded back in September of 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.

Last week, Lich shared a heartwarming letter she received from a child, who told her to “keep fighting” for everyone and that “God will protect” her from the “enemy.”

Lich was arrested on February 17, 2022, in Ottawa. Barber was arrested the same day.

In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government enacted the never-before-used Emergencies Act (EA) on February 14, 2022.

During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, one protester, an elderly lady, was trampled by a police horse, and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister.

Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23.

The EA controversially allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters, conscript tow truck drivers, and arrest people for participating in assemblies the government deemed illegal.