Opinion/Editorial: Anti-vax suit reduces law to absurdity

This is what America’s anti-COVID vaccine personal freedom movement argues in a new lawsuit against UVa Health. The Family Foundation, a right wing conservative, anti-abortion group, says an individual’s mere expression of a religious objection to vaccines entitles him or her refuse vaccinations, while keeping a health care job that could spread diseases like COVID-19. Those diseases could infect not just colleagues, but people who come to the doctor’s office or the hospital seeking treatment for illness or injury.

The rationale for the suit filed last week offers excellent insight into the Christian nationalist movement now trying to install religion as public policy at all levels across the country.

The UVa suit also sends a message as alarming as it is ironic. The Freedom Foundation filed the suit on behalf of several nurses and other medical personnel who lost jobs because they refused to get COVID-19 vaccinations as required by UVa Health personnel policy. The suit essentially argues that it is unconstitutional to refuse religious exclusions from COVID-19 vaccination for anyone who asks.

This premise lets personal beliefs trump science so thoroughly that they lead to legal constructs which would force medical centers to endanger public health.

Here’s what it boils down to: If I say God told me I shouldn’t get vaccinated from a deadly disease, I don’t have to get vaccinated. But I still get to keep my job working around people I might infect. Those innocent victims obviously don’t want to get infected. But they play second fiddle to my spiritual faith.

This is the notion of personal freedom that runs through the anti-vaccination movement. It has now been reduced to absurdity.

The Freedom Foundation suit said UVA Health offers vaccine exemptions to employees belonging to a list of faith groups that traditionally opposes vaccinations for theological reasons. But it does not offer exemptions to all faiths or individuals.

A UVa Health spokesman told The Daily Progress that because the suit “is a matter of pending litigation, we are unable to comment at this time.”

Conservatives such as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and others have banned vaccine mandates in other parts of American life, including schools and public gathering points. Youngkin et al are perfectly willing – in fact eager—to let vaccination opposition become a litmus test of political loyalty to the Republican Party. But even they have typically been smart enough to let vaccine mandates apply to medical personnel.

That was clearly not enough for the Christian nationalists. They now argue, as the Freedom Foundation does in the UVa Health suit, that any vaccine derived from or tested with long –growing stem cell lines originating from stem cells from an aborted fetus must qualify for a faith-based religious vaccination exemption. What’s more, even if employees already received other vaccines developed with stem cells, an exemption must be given for COVID-19 vaccinations. The reason? Some the employees say they didn’t know stem cells were used in the other vaccines.

The UVa Health lawsuit looks to set a precedent. It seeks to create a class action that, depending on court decisions, could eventually extend from coast to coast.

The Freedom Foundation hopes to create two classes of discrimination victims at UVa Health. The first is a “Disfavored Religions Class.” This would be made up of people whose religion was not on the medical center’s list of exemption-eligible faiths and who were fired or denied employment because they refused COVID-19 vaccinations. The second is the “Abortion Objectors Class.” These are people fired or not hired for refusing COVID-19 vaccinations based on the use of aborted fetal tissue in the original development of stem cell lines that eventually grew into new stem cells used to create or test COVID-19 vaccines.

The absurdity of this construct is self-evident. In the first class, the number of faiths that must receive exemptions is potentially limitless. In the second class, every person trying to criminalize abortion is allowed to get or keep a medical care job while working to take away rights of female colleagues to control personal healthcare.

There is a name for this, but it is not freedom of religion. It is chaos theory.