Aug. 22, 2022 - Epoch Times
10:47
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| This right here is a pendulum swinging back and forth. | |
| And many people throughout the years have said that history is a bit like a pendulum, swinging over to one side, reaching an extreme, and then turning right around. | |
| Which is exactly what appears to be happening now in regards to the vaccine mandates. | |
| Because you might remember that throughout almost all of last year, you had cities, businesses, schools, government agencies, hospitals, military units, and so on and so on. | |
| They were all forcing people to take the COVID vaccine or face severe reprisals, ranging from being fired to being kicked out of school and going all the way up to being court-martialed. | |
| However, many of the affected individuals did not take these mandates lying down. | |
| And instead, they have been, to this very day, fighting back within the court system. | |
| And some of these lawsuits are actually starting to bear fruit. | |
| For instance, healthcare workers out in Illinois who were fired due to their hospital's vaccine mandate were just awarded a $10 million settlement. | |
| But once you dig into the details of the settlement, you realize it's a lot deeper than it seems on the surface. | |
| Specifically, what happened in this particular case was that last year, the North Shore University Health System, which owns six hospitals in Illinois, they instituted a broad vaccine mandate for their employees. | |
| However, not all of their workers were on board, and some of them tried to get a religious exemption to the vaccine mandate. | |
| But after North Shore denied all of the religious exemption requests, 13 of their employees filed a class-action lawsuit against the hospital group, arguing that they were discriminated against and that the hospital broke federal law when they refused to grant any religious accommodation request. | |
| Specifically, they were being accused of breaking Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. | |
| Here's part of what their initial legal complaint said back in October of 2021. | |
| And so then, after eight months of legal back and forth within the court system, just a few days ago, The healthcare workers and the hospital chain, they reached a settlement agreement that was then approved by Judge John Ness, who was appointed to the bench by President Trump. | |
| And the settlement agreement, well, besides being the first of its kind within the whole country, is also quite broad in terms of what it means for the workers. | |
| To start with, there is the financial compensation aspect. | |
| Here's what it says specifically on this front. | |
| Quote, | |
| And so what this agreement means in practical terms is that the hospital system will pay $10,337,500 into one big settlement fund for all the workers who were affected by the vaccine mandate. | |
| Specifically, Workers who are covered by this fund include anyone who between July 1st of last year to January 1st of this year had their religious accommodation request denied. | |
| It includes people who were fired or resigned from employment due to the mandate. | |
| And it also includes people who received the vaccine despite having a religious objection to it in order to avoid getting fired. | |
| In total, within this hospital system, about 473 workers fit into one of these three categories. | |
| However, the money will not be divided equally. | |
| According to the terms of the settlement, anyone who lost their job as a result of the mandate is eligible for $25,000. | |
| The 13 actual plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the ones who pushed it forward, they are eligible for not only the $25,000 settlement, but they are also eligible for an additional $20,000. | |
| And those who complied with the mandate and got their vaccine in order to just keep their jobs, despite having a religious objection to it, will be eligible for $3,000. | |
| Furthermore, any of the employees who were fired because of their religious refusal to get the shot will be eligible to be rehired within the next 90 days, and they will retain the seniority level that they held previously prior to getting terminated. | |
| And then lastly, like we just read, as a part of the settlement agreement, North Shore will be changing their no-religious accommodation policy in order to make it consistent with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, meaning that they will have to provide religious accommodations to every person across all of their different facilities moving forward. | |
| Now, as you can imagine, the lawyers representing the healthcare workers in this particular case were thrilled with this decision. | |
| In fact, here's what Mr. | |
| Matt Staver, who is the founder of the Liberty Council, the group behind this lawsuit, here's what he said regarding this settlement. | |
| Quote,"...this class-wide settlement providing compensation and the opportunity to return to work is the first of its kind in the nation involving COVID shot mandates. | |
| This settlement should be a wake-up call to every employer that did not accommodate or exempt employees who opposed the COVID shots for religious reasons." Let this case be a warning to employers that violated Title VII. It is especially significant and gratifying that this first class-wide COVID settlement protects healthcare workers. | |
| Healthcare workers are heroes who daily give their lives. | |
| And indeed, this law firm is now pushing ahead with other vaccine-mandate-related lawsuits across the entire country, not only within healthcare systems, but also in private industries as well, like airlines. | |
| Here's specifically what he said, quote, We have been working with thousands of employees across the country. | |
| Many of them faced the same jab or job mandate that was the issue in North Shore. | |
| Furthermore, outside of this lawsuit, there was another small victory in a vaccine mandate case against the U.S. Air Force. | |
| Specifically, about a week and a half ago, a federal judge officially blocked the U.S. Air Force from either expelling or otherwise punishing over 9,000 troops who applied for a religious accommodation waiver for the COVID vaccine. | |
| Now, in that case, it is a temporary injunction while the case is still playing itself out in court, but I thought it was worth mentioning here as well. | |
| And that moving forward, we might be seeing a lot more of these sorts of rulings, due at least in part to the CDC's own recent change in guidance. | |
| That's because just several months after the White House announced the coming winter of death for those who are unvaccinated, well, the CDC has come out and they officially changed their COVID guidance, essentially removing the distinctions between people who are vaccinated versus those who are not. | |
| Specifically, new guidance, which was issued about eight days ago, rescinded many of the CDC's former recommendations, including different treatment of vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals. | |
| The new guidance says in part that, quote, risk for illness from COVID-19 is considerably reduced by immunity derived from vaccination, previous infection, or both, and that persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection. | |
| Now, if you've been following this story, then you know that this is the first real significant acknowledgement from the CDC regarding natural immunity that's come out in the last two and a half years. | |
| And so, given the fact that many of the mandates that have gotten into effect across the entire country since the year 2020 have been using the CDC's guidance as their justification, well, it can be reasoned that if these entities don't change their mandates to at least acknowledge natural immunity, like the CDC has done, well, they could be liable for more lawsuits as well. | |
| Which is actually what the president of the new Civil Liberty Alliance told us here at the Epoch Times. | |
| Quote... | |
| We don't have a new lawsuit in the works yet. | |
| But if we see that colleges and universities and public employers are not responding to the new CDC guidance the way that they should be, then we would certainly tee up a new lawsuit. | |
| Because the thing that the judges have said so far is that it was rational for these employers to follow CDC guidance. | |
| But now the CDC guidance is different. | |
| And if they're now going forward with these mandates, for example, against people who have natural immunity in the teeth of the CDC guidance on that question, then I think it's going to be much harder for them to win even a rational basis challenge to their policies. | |
| And so what it looks like is happening is that after reaching an extreme, well, the pendulum is swinging back. | |
| If you'd like to read more about any of these lawsuits that we've discussed thus far in today's episodes, the links will all be down there in the description box below. | |
| And I hope that as you're making your way down there to those links, you take a quick detour to smash that like button so this video can be shared out to ever more people. | |
| And also, if you haven't already, subscribe to this YouTube channel as well, that we can get this type of honest news content delivered directly into your YouTube feed every time we publish it. | |
| All right, just to pause here for a super quick moment, I wanted to mention that the sponsor of today's episode is a super cool company called Secure. | |
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| And then lastly, over on Epic TV, we just published a phenomenal interview between myself and the president of Americano Media discussing how, down in the South, a Soros-backed group purchased pretty much the only conservative radio station in the Spanish language. | |
| However, many of the people actually moved on over to Americano. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| This is a global, well-organized, well-funded, you know, operation that is working against all of us. | |
| And they've been pushing this left-leaning agenda, this hate, this invite. | |
| Same crap we see here, right? | |
| Same type of politics, the exact same thing, same strategies. | |
| So now we created Americano in order to counterbalance that until we're going to bring civil discourse back to politics. | |
| But more importantly, we're going to give a voice to Hispanic conservatives. | |
| We want to make sure that Hispanics understand the sharp contrast between failed Marxist policies that have failed over 100 times in 100 years and capitalism. | |
| And we understand that this is the greatest nation in the history of the world and we have to fight for it. | |
| We have to protect it. | |
| Now, if you'd like to watch that interview in its glorious entirety, you can do so over on Epic TV, our awesome no-censorship video platform. | |
| The link will be right there at the very top of the description box. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman, from the Epic Times. |
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