Hospital employees sue over mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy for workers

A Houston hospital was hit with litigation Friday for allegedly making its employees and doctors get the COVID-19 vaccine to keep their jobs.

The litigation might interest employment law attorneys, who have been advising employers across the country in debates about whether to ask employees to take the shots before coming back to work in person.

Plaintiff counsel Jared Woodfill, who has made a cottage industry during the pandemic of suing over business shutdowns and mask requirements, is representing 117 plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit against The Methodist Hospital, which operates in Houston and its suburbs.

“Plaintiffs have been terminated from their jobs, and others are in imminent and immediate danger of being terminated from their jobs for refusing to take an experimental vaccine,” said the petition in Bridges v. The Methodist Hospital, filed in Montgomery County district court. “For the first time in the history of the United States, an employer is forcing an employee to participate in an experimental vaccine trial as a condition for continued employment.”

Dr. Marc Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist, said in a statement that he’s proud of the 99% of 26,000 hospital system employees who took the vaccine to protect patients from the deadly virus.

“It is unfortunate that the few remaining employees who refuse to get vaccinated and put our patients first are responding in this way,” Boom said. “It is legal for health care institutions to mandate vaccines, as we have done with the flu vaccine since 2009. The COVID-19 vaccines have proven through rigorous trials to be very safe and very effective, and are not experimental.”

Thousands of deaths?

The lawsuit stated that Methodist was the first major health care system in the nation to make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for employees. It alleged the company CEO issued an ultimatum: Employees must take the vaccine if they want to keep their jobs.

The plaintiffs alleged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved the drug. They argue that clinical trials on the shots must last two years before being proved safe and effective enough for FDA approval.

The suit also alleged that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a system to report vaccine injuries, and has gotten reports of 4,434 deaths and 12,619 serious injuries from the COVID-19 vaccines between December 2020 and May 10.

Before the pandemic, only 666 vaccine deaths were reported between 1997 and 2013, the lawsuit alleged.

“If the experimental vaccine was any other vaccine or drug, it would have already been removed from the market,” the lawsuit said. “Usually, a new drug is withdrawn after 50 deaths.”

The plaintiffs alleged this is a signal about the vaccines’ safety, and they claimed their employer shouldn’t force them to be in “dangerous trials as a condition for employment.”

Typically people have a choice about whether they want to be part of an experimental medical product trial, but the hospital hasn’t told employees they can refuse the shots, the complaint said.

“The only choice the plaintiffs have is to join the experimental trial and be injected with the experimental vaccine or be fired,” the lawsuit said. “Medical experiments, better known in modern parlance as ‘clinical research,’ may not be performed on human subjects without the express, informed consent of the individual receiving treatment.”

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are all employees at Methodist hospital locations in Houston and its suburbs of Baytown, Willowbrook, Sugar Land, The Woodlands and more.

The hospital system announced its vaccine policy April 1, and implemented it in phases, said the petition. It allows employees to submit documents to get an exemption for a medical condition, such as pregnancy, or religious beliefs.

But plaintiffs alleged the hospital has “arbitrarily” denied these exemptions.

If an employee didn’t get the vaccine or an exemption, administrators first put them on a two-week unpaid suspension, and eventually terminated them, the lawsuit claimed.

Woodfill, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said that he got an advertisement from Methodist in the mail that was “bragging” that its employees were vaccinated. He claimed the hospital system was using this as a marketing ploy to get more business.

“Many of these individuals have spent their careers at Methodist. They have worked up the ladder. They have seniority now,” Woodfill said. “They are being told, ‘You participate in this trial, or be fired.’ This has never happened in the history of our country—that an individual is forced into a vaccine trial that is less than 1 year old.”