July 26, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A large healthcare system in New Jersey has fired six supervisors for their refusal to take any of the experimental coronavirus vaccines. None of the COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. are fully approved, having been given only Emergency Use Authorization by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
It is unclear whether any of the six employees will take legal action.
RWJBarnabas Health, the healthcare provider with well over 100 locations in New Jersey, said that 99.7% of its supervisors had been fully vaccinated or received an exemption, according to ABC 7.
“All team members at the supervisory level or above will be required to have completed their course of vaccinations no later than June 30, 2021,” the system announced in a mid-May news release.
In Texas, a judge has previously ruled that Houston Methodist Hospital could force its employees to take the experimental COVID vaccine as a condition of employment. Federal Judge Lynn Hughes argued in June that mandating people take the vaccine at the risk of getting fired did not amount to “coercion.”
“Methodist is trying to do their business of saving lives without giving them the COVID-19 virus. It is a choice made to keep staff, patients, and their families safer,” Hughes said at the time.
RWJBarnabas Health has been operating a mass vaccination clinic for seven months now and has partnerships with universities such as Rutgers.
Meanwhile, the largest healthcare workers union in the country has voiced its opposition to mandatory vaccination policies. “Whether there is a legal challenge that we can make, or whether it’s just a pure organizational challenge that we can make, we are not going to just give in,” the local leader of a New York Service Employees International Union said in June.
New York’s nurses’ union has called for “independent scientific reviews of all vaccine trial data at both the federal and state levels to assure those who wish to be vaccinated of the safety of all FDA approved COVID-19 vaccines.”
The survival rate for COVID among healthy individuals, especially those younger than 65 years old without underlying conditions, is near 99.99%.
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