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June 15, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – A federal judge rejected a lawsuit brought by 117 staff members against Houston Methodist Hospital’s policy requiring all employees to receive a COVID-19 vaccination and in the process editorialized against the workers’ concerns about the vaccines. 

Houston Methodist announced in April that it would be requiring all of its 26,000 employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by June 17, but 178 refused to comply on the grounds that they consider the vaccines currently distributed in the United States “experimental and dangerous.” The hospital subsequently suspended them without pay, NPR reported.

The workers sued, but on June 12 U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes issued a ruling siding with Houston Methodist on the grounds that Texas law only prevents employers from forcing workers to break the law.

“This is not coercion,” the judge argued. “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 added that the workers’ complaint, which he derided as being written in “press-release style,” was “reprehensible” for “equating the injection requirement to medical experimentation in concentration camps … Nazi doctors conducted medical experiments on victims that caused pain, mutilation, permanent disability, and in many cases, death.”

“What is shocking is that many of my clients were on the front line treating COVID-positive patients at Texas Methodist Hospital during the height of the pandemic,” responded plaintiffs’ attorney Jared Woodfill. “As a result, many of them contracted COVID-19. As a thank you for their service and sacrifice, Methodist Hospital awards them a pink slip and sentences them to bankruptcy.” He added that the workers will appeal the ruling.

So far, almost 44 percent of the U.S. population has been vaccinated against COVID-19, with a growing number of medical voices arguing that, between those vaccinations and natural immunity (as several of the suspended Houston Methodist hospital workers had), the country may have already reached herd immunity, rendering forced vaccinations unnecessary at best. Additionally, vaccine mandates are predicated on the assumption that people who believe themselves healthy can unknowingly spread the virus to others, but numerous studies indicate that asymptomatic spread is unlikely.

While many officeholders and media figures blame online “misinformation” for lingering vaccine hesitancy, considerably less contemplation has been spent on how the government’s own actions contribute to mistrust, such as mixed messaging about vaccinated people still potentially transmitting the virus to others, as well as the fact that clinical trials for the currently-authorized COVID-19 vaccines were performed in less than a year, when such trials traditionally take a minimum of two to four years

One of the innovations of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, but that does not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from one to three years on its own — to just three months apiece. 

Vaccine defenders note that the number of deaths and other serious adverse effects reported to have followed the COVID vaccines is an extremely small percentage of the overall vaccine recipients, and that being listed in the VAERS reporting system does not necessarily establish a causal link to the vaccine. But skeptics argue that leaders’ widespread preference for pressuring Americans into compliance and shutting down debate on the subject evidences a clear lack of interest in earning Americans’ confidence by getting to the bottom of those cases. 

Apart from factual questions about safety and effectiveness, some of the COVID-19 vaccines also carry grave ethical concerns for many, particularly religious and pro-life Americans, due to the use of cells derived from aborted babies in the development process. To help pro-lifers make an informed decision, the Charlotte Lozier Institute has a detailed breakdown of all the various COVID-19 vaccines in development and which ones used or did not use abortion-derived cells at any stage of the process.

According to the Lozier document, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were not designed or produced with abortion-derived cells, but abortion-derived cells were used for some of the lab tests conducted on both vaccines. By contrast, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was designed, produced, and tested using abortion-derived cells.