The professionals — nine doctors, five nurses, a nuclear medicine technologist, a physician liaison and a rehabilitation therapist — are seeking a judgment declaring the mandate “unconstitutional, unlawful, and unenforceable,” according to the lawsuit.
“The Vaccine Mandate emerges in the context of an atmosphere of fear and irrationality in which the unvaccinated are threatened with being reduced to a caste of untouchables if they will not consent to being injected, even ‘continuously,’ with vaccines that violate their religious beliefs,” the complaint said.
They are seeking a temporary statewide restraining order against the mandate followed by a permanent injunction, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit names New York Attorney General Letitia James, Commissioner Howard Zucker of the State Department of Health and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul as defendants in the complaint.
CNN reached out to Hochul’s office but was told it doesn’t comment on pending litigation. CNN also reached out to the Department of Health and the Attorney General’s office for comment and was referred to the Department of Health.
Debate surrounding vaccine mandates has picked up since President Joe Biden announced a new plan to tackle the pandemic last week, which includes vaccine requirements in some workplaces.
Health experts and many officials have called vaccine mandates a necessary step to protect the population and slow the spread of the virus. But there has also been blowback from some state leaders, such as Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who have called the announcement at the federal level an overreach and pledged to challenge it in court.
Pope Francis declares vaccination ‘the moral choice’
The plaintiffs cited religious convictions that prevent them from being inoculated with vaccines that they said “were tested, developed or produced with fetal cells line derived from procured abortions.”
Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna used cell lines originating from fetal tissue to test their vaccines but they are not used in vaccine manufacturing or production, whereas fetal cell lines were used in Johnson & Johnson’s “development, confirmation and production,” according to Dr. James Lawler, an infectious disease expert at Nebraska Medicine.
Those cells are thousands of generations removed from the original fetal tissue, said Lawler.
No major religious denomination has taken a stand opposing vaccination. Pope Francis declared it “the moral choice because it is about your life but also the lives of others.”
Last month, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas sid it would not issue letters of exemption on religious grounds, according to a communication obtained by CNN.
“For the past several months, our Holy Father Pope Francis has made it clear that the various forms of Covid vaccines are morally acceptable, urging Catholics across the globe to become vaccinated, not only for their own safety and well-being, but also out of concern for the weak and vulnerable in our midst,” Bishop George Leo Thomas said.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/us/new-york-covid-vaccine-mandate-lawsuit/index.html
