NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) – The Big Apple has forced nearly 2,000 teachers and classroom aides out of their jobs over their refusal to take COVID-19 vaccines, with the latest round of firings claiming an estimated 850 workers.
The New York Post reported that with the passing of the latest deadline (September 5) for unvaccinated workers to either take the shot or being “deemed to have voluntarily resigned,” 450 of roughly 1,300 complied and returned to work from a yearlong unpaid leave, with the remainder losing their jobs.
That brings the total terminations since the end of October 2021, when the mandate for municipal workers took effect, up to approximately 1,950.
“I’m angry, I’m hurt, to be cast aside like I was nothing,” says 15-year Brooklyn elementary teacher Rachelle Garcia, who is losing her job after being denied a religious exemption. “Because I couldn’t give a proper goodbye to my students, other teachers told me they kept asking, ‘When is Ms. Garcia coming back?’ That made me cry so much.”
The municipal mandate, which NYC’s Democrat leaders have left in place despite ending the private employer mandate effective November 1, may be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court; Politico reported that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas has agreed to bring up the matter at an October 7 conference to decide which cases the Court will take. The case was submitted by NYPD Detective Anthony Marciano, who is unvaccinated but has natural immunity from prior infection.
Many religious and pro-life Americans have moral objections to knowingly taking any product tainted by abortion in any way, as even outlets supportive of the shots, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science and the left-wing “fact-checking” website Snopes, have acknowledged is the case with the COVID-19 vaccines currently in widespred use.
According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used aborted fetal cells during their vaccines’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design & development and production phases.
Many Americans also harbor grave concerns about the necessity and safety of the COVID shots given the superiority of natural immunity, COVID’s low risk to most otherwise-healthy individuals, the vaccines’ failure to prevent infection, their accelerated development under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative giving them only a fraction of the evaluation and development time vaccines normally take, the lack of transparency from their manufacturers, and mounting evidence of serious adverse effects.
In March, it was found that 11,289 cases of pericarditis/myocarditis after COVID vaccination were reported to the U.S. government’s federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) between January 1 and February 25, which was already 47% of the 24,177 reports for the same submitted in all of 2021. An April study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection alone cannot account for such cases, despite claims to the contrary.
COVID shot defenders claim that VAERS offers an exaggerated view of a vaccine’s potential risks, as anyone can submit a report without vetting it, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention researchers have acknowledged “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
Further, VAERS is not the only data source indicating cause for concern. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) has been similarly alarming, showing that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
Last month, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland that found the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” while the “Moderna trial exhibited a 6% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” for a combined “16% higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients.”