In conspiracy-tinged letters, 200 SF employees push back on city’s vaccine mandate

The letters say the workers would submit to the vaccination mandate only if the city accedes to a long list of demands and disclosures around vaccine safety that health experts said were “nonsensical” or false.

About 103 of the approximately 192 workers who submitted missives are employed by the Fire Department. Public Utilities Commission employees making up the second-largest group, with about 36 people sending the letter, according to H.R. officials.

Last week, the president of a union representing sheriff’s deputies said the department would face a wave of resignations if the city enforced its vaccine requirement. Six Sheriff’s Department employees sent the letter.

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San Francisco is requiring all 35,000 city employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus once a vaccine receives full approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

The arguments posed by the letter have no legal bearing, as state and federal laws allow for such conditions of employment. Human Resources Director Carol Isen responded to each sender, reaffirming the city’s vaccination policy and the Sept. 15 vaccination deadline for those working in high-risk settings. The city did not respond directly to any of the claims made in the demands.

In a statement to The Chronicle, human resources officials said they were glad that over 80% of city employees have been vaccinated.

“We are working with all City departments, employees and union partners to answer any questions about COVID-19 and the highly transmissible Delta variant,” the statement read. “We will continue our robust outreach to every employee to ensure that they know that infections and deaths from COVID are preventable and that vaccines are readily available, safe, effective, and the only way to end the pandemic.”

Still, some experts said the reluctance expressed in the letter is particularly concerning coming from employees in public safety, who come into close contact with civilians, hospital patients and people incarcerated in city jails.

“Almost all of the statements are either absurd, misleading, meaningless, and are written not to solicit any serious response but to be deliberately hostile for political purposes,” said Dr. Lee Riley, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley.

Vaccination data released to The Chronicle on Friday showed at least 167 Fire Department employees remained unvaccinated, or about 9.5% of its workforce. At the Sheriff’s Department, 161 were reportedly unvaccinated, making up about 16% of its employees. About 7.7% of city employees across all departments have not received at least one shot.

City fire officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In an interview, Shon Buford, president of San Francisco Firefighters Local 798, said labor leaders wished department heads had created more of a dialogue around the vaccine mandate.

Buford said because union leaders did not have the time to vet the letter, he was unable to endorse it or comment on its contents.

The letter, titled and framed as “conditional acceptance” of the city’s vaccine and mask mandates, poses an eight-page, 41-point list of its demands to meet the vaccination requirement.

It cites discredited theories about dangers of the vaccine, testing and masks, and asks city officials to prove the negative before they will consent to the city’s mandates.

Among other “conditions,” the letter asks the city’s H.R. department to ensure that wearing a face mask will not subject employees to discrimination and to demonstrate that COVID-19 vaccines are free from a host of substances, including mRNA, lipids, formaldehyde and antibiotics.

“That’s a set of very extreme claims,” said Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, a law professor at UC Hastings College of the Law who reviewed the letter at The Chronicle’s request.

Reiss said the language and style of the letter seemed to be influenced by “sovereign citizen” lore, a set of fringe political beliefs in which the adherents attest that they are immune to government laws.

“This is not a document with legal validity,” Reiss said in an email.

Concerns raised in the letter about the contents of vaccines or other products, or their safety and efficacy, are baseless, said Dr. Robert Siegel, an infectious disease expert at Stanford.

“This came from some kind of conspiracy factory,” Siegel said.

Many of the products the letter suggests as potentially dangerous vaccine additives — including lipids (fat), sodium chloride (salt) and sucrose (sugar) — are consumed by people daily, Siegel said. Other products mentioned in the letter include chemicals commonly found in the environment.

“The whole thing is just garbage,” he said.

Siegel said the contents of the letter raised concerns about the judgment of those who signed it.

“These are people who are entrusted with the health of the public,” Siegel said. “How do you know this person is ever going to comply with things that are the best interest of public health? (The writer) clearly has no way of judging the cost-benefit of things, and so his judgment is deeply under concern.”

In March, the state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing concluded that employers may require a vaccination as long as the employer does not discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics and provides reasonable accommodation for those with a disability or sincerely held religious beliefs.

Similar guidance from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states that employers, with certain restrictions, can require a COVID-19 vaccination for all employees entering the workplace.

Since the pandemic took hold last spring, San Francisco has been a leader in enforcing safety restrictions and guidelines that often predate and go further than those of other cities across the country.

The vaccine requirement for city workers is among the most stringent in the country, with many other jurisdictions and health care institutions offering the choice to either become vaccinated or submit to regular testing.

Dr. Warner Greene, a virologist and senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, called the letter “just a grab bag of half-baked ideas to try and justify or overturn a wise public health decision.”

He noted that the letter raises several complaints that already have been dismissed in court, either in other states during this pandemic or in previous years. “This is grasping at straws,” he said.

“Businesses have a responsibility to provide a safe workspace, and it is in that light that requiring vaccinations is OK,” Greene said. “I think that this public servant is not really interested in protecting the public, but has concerns about protecting themselves. They’re not concerned about public health at all.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the wrong department as having the second-highest number of employees who sent the letter. Following the Fire Department, the Public Utilities Commission had the second-highest number of senders.

Megan Cassidy and Erin Allday are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com, eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy, @erinallday