COVID-19
AZ Attorney General Leads Multi State Lawsuit Against Biden for Healthcare Workers ‘Job or Jab’ Mandate
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office announced a multi-state coalition in filing a lawsuit to stop the Biden administration’s overreaching “job or jab” COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sent out a press release explaining the coalition filed the lawsuit and a request for a preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. In the release, Brnovich was quoted:
“The theme of this Veteran’s Day Weekend also applies to our health care workers, who have been on the frontlines since the start of this pandemic. We don’t turn our backs on our heroes…It’s our turn to protect their individual liberties and ensure that all Americans can continue to make their own choices regarding COVID-19 vaccines.”
BREAKING: Our office just co-led a multistate coalition in filing a lawsuit to stop the Biden administration’s overreaching “job or jab” COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers.
Arizona continues to take action to protect individual liberties. https://t.co/Lv0JYLvePo
— Mark Brnovich (@GeneralBrnovich) November 16, 2021
The coalition’s lawsuit alleges that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) COVID-19 vaccine mandate on facilities that receive federal funding for treating patients exceeds the agency’s statutory authority and violates the Social Security Act’s prohibition on regulations that control the hiring and firing of health care workers. It also violates multiple federal laws, clauses, and doctrines and the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
More gravely, the Biden administration’s COVID-19 mandate threatens the well-being of people who rely on services provided by the federal health care programs and the livelihoods of those who provide that care.
“The Vaccine Mandate causes grave danger to the vulnerable persons whom Medicare and Medicaid were designed to protect — the poor, children, sick, and the elderly — by forcing the termination of millions of essential “healthcare heroes,” the complaint reads.
According to CMS, the COVID-19 vaccine mandate targets about a quarter of the nation’s health care workers who have chosen not to get vaccinated. The Biden administration’s core “objective is to coerce the unvaccinated workforce into submission or cause them to lose their livelihoods.” Without the injunction, sought by General Brnovich, the end result will be health care workers losing their jobs and America’s most vulnerable populations losing access to necessary medical care.
The Army only approved just 24 religious COVID-19 vaccine exemption requests out of a total 8,514 requests submitted by active duty soldiers, and 1,602 requests have been rejected while the rest remain pending.
Military.com obtained information showing the Pentagon rushed vaccine exemption denials:
Sean O’Donnell, the Pentagon’s inspector general, wrote in a June 2 memo to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin obtained by Military.com calling attention to a “concerning” trend in which military brass rushed to reject vaccine-exemption petitions rather than giving each request due consideration.
“We found a trend of generalized assessments rather than the individualized assessment that is required by Federal law and DoD and Military Service policies,” he said. “Some of the appellate decisions included documentation that demonstrated a greater consideration of facts and circumstances involved in a request.”
In March, a Texas judge blocked the Navy from dismissing sailors with pending exemption requests and in August, a Florida federal judge ordered class action relief and granted an injunction barring the federal government from enforcing the vaccine mandate for the Marine Corps.
National Review writes, “For the last year, military has been struggling with a recruitment problem. As of July, with only three months left in the fiscal year, the Army had met only 40 percent of its recruitment goal and reduced its active-duty force by 12,000 troops.”
O’Donnell calculated that officials likely gave each appeal a cursory glance rather than a thorough examination, possibly opening the door to litigation from service members who had to resign after they failed to obtain exemptions. Across all the branches, there were about 50 denials per day in a 90-day period, he determined. Over a thousand Coast Guardsmen have already tried to launch a class-action lawsuit in response to their being refused religious exemptions, the publication noted.
“The volume and rate at which decisions were made to deny requests is concerning,” the memo read. “Assuming a 10-hour work day with no breaks or attention to other matters, the average review period was about 12 minutes for each package. Such a review period seems insufficient to process each request in an individualized manner and still perform the duties required of their position.”
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