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New York to drop COVID jab mandate for health workers, but legal questions remain – LifeSite

(LifeSiteNews) – The government of New York state is admitting defeat on its efforts to force COVID-19 vaccination on public healthcare workers, announcing in court this week that they are dropping the case, months after a rebuke from the New York Supreme Court.

The mandate, originally imposed by former Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo in August 2021 and made permanent last June under his successor Kathy Hochul, led to the firing, furlough, or forced resignation of more than 30,000 health employees, prompting a lawsuit by the group Medical Professionals for Informed Consent.

In January 2023, New York Supreme Court Judge Gerard Neri ruled that state health officials “overstepped their authority by sidestepping the Legislature and making permanent the mandate meant to limit transmission of Covid in hospitals and healthcare facilities,” and that the mandate was henceforth “null, void, and of no effect.”

The state was expected to appeal the ruling, but The Epoch Times reported that during a May 24 hearing state attorneys instead announced, “due to the changing landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic and evolving vaccine recommendations, the New York State Department of Health has begun the process of repealing the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for workers at regulated health care facilities,” and was therefore dropping the case.

“This is a big win,” plaintiffs’ attorney Sujata Gibson said. “I cannot underscore enough how significant this is, not only for the 34,000 doctors, nurses, and other health care workers who have been unable to work in this state since 2021, but also for the millions of New Yorkers who have been impacted by the dangerous and crippling staffing crisis that resulted from their forced exodus from the field.”

However, the matter is not entirely settled. The formal repeal of the mandate has not yet occurred, and while no new enforcement actions will be undertaken, penalties for prior violations remain up in the air. Further, the state asked the court to reverse Neri’s January ruling for the sake of protecting other vaccination requirements, and the court adjourned without rendering an opinion on whether it should stand or fall.

“Our fight is not over. In a blatant show of gamesmanship, the state had the gall to ask the Court not only to drop the appeal, but to also vacate … the decision below, without reviewing it on the merits,” Gibson said. “Courts cannot allow defendants to get out of legal consequences of a final ruling by simply stopping the unlawful conduct mid-appeal. New Yorkers must be able to use the lower court’s ruling as precedent so that this never happens again.”

Evidence supports the doubts that many Americans continue to harbor about the safety and the necessity of the COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed and released under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take.

The federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting system (VAERS) reports 35,387 deaths, 200,669 hospitalizations, 19,666 heart attacks, and 26,955 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of May 12. An April 2022 study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection itself cannot fully account for the myocarditis numbers, despite common insistence to the contrary. Jab defenders are quick to stress that reports submitted to VAERS are unconfirmed, as anyone can submit one, but U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “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 containing red flags. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows 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 September, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland, which found that 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.”

In December 2022, Republican U.S.  Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin hosted a roundtable discussion during which civil rights attorney Aaron Siri detailed data from the CDC’s V-Safe reporting system revealing that 800,000 of the system’s 10 million participants, or approximately 7.7 percent, reported needing medical care after COVID injection. “25 percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48 percent sought urgent care,” Siri added. “Also, another 25 percent on top of the 7.7 percent reported being unable to work or go to school.”

Another study by a team of American, British, and Canadian researchers, published last December by the in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found that COVID booster mandates for university students – a relatively healthy group at relatively low risk from the virus – do far more harm than good: “per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation).”

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