On Tuesday, Judge David Hurd of the Northern District Court of New York granted a temporary restraining order (TRO) for all health care workers against the state’s vaccine mandate.
The state has until Sept. 22, to respond to the judge’s order. If the governor’s legal team opposes the TRO conversion to a preliminary injunction, both legal teams will meet on Sept. 28 for the judge to hear arguments.
The Liberty Counsel, a non-profit law firm, announced it has filed a separate case against Governor Hochul, Dr. Zucker, Trinity Health, Inc., New York Presbyterian Healthcare System, Inc., and Westchester Medical Center Advanced Physician Services, P.C.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “This is a great victory for all health care workers in New York who have sincerely held religious objections to the COVID shots. New York is required to abide by federal law and the U.S. Constitution to provide protections to employees who have sincerely held religious objections to the COVID shots. Governor Hochul and New York health care facilities cannot override federal law and force health care workers to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs by forcing them to inject an experimental substance. All New York health care workers have the legal right to request reasonable accommodation for their sincerely held religious beliefs and forcing COVID shots without exemptions is unlawful.”
As CBN News reported, 17 medical professionals have sued the state of New York in federal court to stop what their lawyers call the “patently unconstitutional vaccine mandate for health care workers.”
Attorneys with Thomas More Society, a non-profit national public interest law firm, filed the lawsuit Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York. They allege the state’s vaccine mandate attempts to nullify protections for sincere religious beliefs granted under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even though days earlier the state of New York had afforded protection for religious beliefs in its prior health order.
“What New York is attempting to do is slam shut an escape hatch from an unconstitutional vaccine mandate,” Thomas More Society Special Counsel Christopher Ferrara said in a statement. “And they are doing this while, knowing that many people have sincere religious objections to vaccines that were tested, developed, or produced with cell lines derived from aborted children.”
Ferrara is representing the health workers in the federal case against the state, along with Thomas More Society Vice President and Senior Counsel Peter Breen, Senior Counsel Stephen Crampton, and Counsel Michael McHale.
The lawsuit seeks a Temporary Restraining Order and a preliminary injunction, then a permanent and final injunction against the vaccine mandate’s prohibition of accommodations of sincere religious beliefs.
As CBN News reported, New York set a deadline for all healthcare workers in the state to get vaccinated if they wanted to keep their current positions.
In August, a mandate was issued that all employees at hospitals and long-term care facilities across New York get their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccination by September 27.
Since the mandate was announced, many medical professionals have resigned their positions in protest. As CBN News reported over the weekend, one New York hospital announced that it will temporarily stop delivering babies for at least two weeks due to a shortage of medical staff after 30 people resigned at that hospital over COVID-19 vaccination mandates.
Ferrara called the vaccine mandate “a brazen power grab by people who think they can get away with anything.”
“Never in the history of New York state, never in the history of the world, has a government sought to forcibly impose mass vaccination on an entire class of people under threat of immediate personal and professional destruction,” he explained. “This is just another example of how COVID regimes are completely out of control. The federal judiciary has a duty under the Constitution to put a straight jacket on this institutional insanity.”
The suit alleges that, in addition to violating the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution by purporting to strip away Title VII protections, the vaccine mandate also violates the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution.
“These plaintiffs are not – I repeat – not anti-vaxxers, as the fake news media calls them,” Ferrara said. “They are in fact in favor of voluntary vaccination with informed consent, but they oppose jack-booted coercion by the state to take a vaccine their religion forbids them to take. This is America, not Red China.”
Note that the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute reports abortion-derived cell lines were not used in the development or production of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines but sometimes were used in lab testing. The Institute reports that abortion-derived cell lines were used in the development and production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as well as in lab testing.
HD Editor’s Note: Why Is This News Biblically Relevant?
Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council, in a recent article, “Vaccine Mandate Sticks It to Freedom,” wrote:
For a president who pledged to bring unity to the country, this order — “get the shots or lose your job” — will only bring more of the same: division and distrust. And, in an irony that even the liberal media can’t ignore, his heavy-handed approach will almost certainly turn more people against the very vaccine he claims to promote! But unfortunately, Biden, who was an honors student at the Obama School of Mandates, never learned that the more control government exerts, the more resistance they create. Even now, dozens of governors, attorneys general, and conservative leaders are rallying their troops for an all-out legal war. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster (R) spoke for a good number of Americans when he vowed, “We will fight them to the gates of hell!”
And he’ll have plenty of company from his counterparts in Florida, Texas, Georgia, Iowa, Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and every other state that understands this road will lead to an endless string of intrusive dictates that will have far-reaching consequences for civil liberties, conscience rights, religious freedom, human dignity, parental rights, and more.
Nothing about these unilateral actions has anything to do with the actual facts. Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, argued on “Washington Watch,” that this isn’t about “following the science.” It’s about following “the dictatorial whims of whoever is talking to President Biden. If we were following the science,” she said, “we would have open discussion. We would have all of the evidence put out in front of people so that they can make the decision. We would stop trying to obstruct, forbid, ban, intimidate people from getting early treatment for COVID. We would be getting some of our facts straight.” There’s plenty of evidence, Orient pointed out, “to show that people have recovered from the illness, have a robust immunity, at least as good as some of the vaccines.” And yet, there’s no accommodation for early treatment and no acknowledgement of natural immunity. It is, as so many experts have agreed, “about politics” — nothing more.
Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) insists, Americans need to be on guard. Individuals and their doctors should be making health care decisions, she argued, not the government. It may be easier to institutionalize one side’s opinion — “But you know what? We call that communism… We are a nation of freedom, free people, and free choice… [The Left] wants power and control.” And yet, as long as these troubling questions go unanswered, Americans have a responsibility to draw a bright red line and resist — otherwise, it will only be the beginning of the end of our rights. As a nation, we must decide: do we want to accept this soft despotism? Or will we work for freedom?
Many also who have read the Bible and what it says about future events, state that vaccine mandates have become jaw-droppingly similar to what we read in Revelation 13 regarding the “mark of the beast.”
In this chapter, the Bible speaks of a coming global leader who will mandate a “mark” on the right hand or on the forehead. Without this “mark”, people will be restricted from being able to buy or sell.
It is very important to state here, that we do not believe the vaccine to be this mark for a myriad of reasons, which the Bible makes clear. However, it does seem undeniable that what we are currently witnessing is being used to desensitize people to such Government overreach and is a harbinger of things the Bible says will come.
As Terry James explains, “If you know Jesus Christ for salvation, according to Romans 10:9-10, you will never have to worry about taking Antichrist’s mark. The current vaccinations for COVID, or for any other disease, is not that prophesied mark. It will come on the scene during the Tribulation, after the Rapture of the Church.“
All these things show clearly the stage is being set and Jesus is coming very soon.
Luke 21:25 KJV – “And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.”
