Court decides NY must now reinstate - and make up for even more - for those fired over COVID vaccine mandates

The chickens are coming home to roost over the Left’s pandemic policies this week. First, as we covered at BASEDPolitics, the score is in on the debate over school lockdowns. The data is so damning it has Democrats out here looking like track stars—that’s how fast they’re trying to run away from their old policies.  And now, the New York Supreme Court just landed a blow over vaccine mandates. In a lawsuit against the City of New York, the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and its Commissioner, the New York Department of Sanitation, and the New York City Mayor a group of plaintiffs argued that public employees “should not have been terminated for their noncompliance” with vaccine mandates. The Court agreed with them writing, “Based upon the Petitioners’ vague denials of their exemptions, the fact they were kept at full duty for several months while their exemptions were pending, the Mayor’s Executive Order granting exemptions to certain classes of people, and the lifting of the private sector mandate, this Court finds the Commissioners Orders of October 20, 2021, and December 13, 2021, as well as the Mayor’s Executive Order No. 62 to be arbitrary and capricious.” https://twitter.com/RaheemKassam/status/1584940471562170369   But wait, it gets better. The Court not only found that the state was wrong to fire public employees who resisted their vaccine mandate, and that it must rehire them, they also ordered they be paid back wages for the time they lost. https://twitter.com/MarinaMedvin/status/1584930051166208000   The backstory is this: All of the plaintiffs were former sanitation workers who were fired in February of 2022 for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Keep in mind that sanitation workers were considered “essential” throughout the pandemic and therefore had to go to work throughout it—long before there was a vaccine and back when, thanks to the government’s incompetence, New York was losing hundreds of people a day to the disease. To show their appreciation for these people’s work in such uncertain times, the city fired them for having the audacity to want to choose what chemicals they put in their own body. We’re by no means anti-vaxxers here at BASEDPolitics (in fact, I’m pretty sure we’ve all had the jab). But it is a basic universal principle that governments never have the right to tell people what to put in their bodies (or what not to, as is the case with the War on Drugs).  Still, I’m very sympathetic to the concerns people had with the COVID vaccine, and the way vaccines are legally shielded in the US in general. This one in particular was rushed to market (for good reason), but wanting to wait to see the long-term effects of something like this is perfectly reasonable—especially when the government protects the manufacturers of vaccines from transparency and accountability for any harm that may occur from them. No one should have ever had their right to earn a living threatened by the government in this manner. This is an excellent outcome. Justice will be served for these people. But this decision can’t make up for the true impacts of vaccine mandates. Don’t forget the federal government also pressured private businesses to make their employees get vaccinated. Many more people lost their jobs, or were forced to put something in their bodies just so they could go to work—and you’d have to be a bigger optimist than me to think they’ll get justice as well.

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