Two RNs at Boston hospital for burned children sue over their firing for refusing what they call experimental Covid-19 shots

Two registered nurses fired by Shriners Children's Hospital Boston for refusing to get Covid-19 vaccinations yesterday sued the hospital, charging that the hospital, with "evil motive or intent," was doing the bidding of federal and state governments and so deprived them of their 14th-Amendment rights to refuse when they ordered employees to become "human subjects in federally funded research activities" and get vaccinated.

Nurses Ashley Petrowski and Tracey Abbey filed their suit in US District Court in Boston. They are represented by two lawyers, one based in Boston and David J. Schexnaydre of Mandeville, LA.

Federal court records show Schexnaydre has been busy over the past couple of years filing numerous similar suits across the country against hospitals, including Shriners hospitals in Texas and Washington state, and state governments, including Washington state and California. Unlike his suits in other states, his Boston suit does not include the state or state officials as defendants.

In recent months, federal judges in several states have tossed his suits, saying, among other things, that protecting against a deadly virus is a legitimate government interest, even if private facilities were somehow being controlled by the government in this case, which judges have said they were not.

In the Texas Shriners case, the judge specifically dismissed the charge that Shriners was acting as an arm of the government in requiring employees to get vaccinated against Covid-19, saying that the hospital's decision to offer vaccinations under an agreement with the federal government was different from its private, non-governmental decision to require employees to get vaccinated.

In the Washington Shriners case, the judge concluded that because the 14th Amendment most immediately applies to people in certain classes, such as people targeted because of their race, ethnicity or gender, and that people refusing shots are not one of those classes, a court would have to determine whether the particular state action in question - in this case to require employee Covid-19 vaccinations - serves a "legitimate" state interest. The court concluded that the goal of the vaccination requirement, "to slow the spread of COVID-19," was a legitimate state interest - especially in the context of a challenge brought by "former healthcare workers employed by a children’s hospital."

The judge in the Washington Shriners case discounted the argument the vaccines were experimental, in a decision that noted that in August, 2021, the federal government formally approved the sale of a vaccine by Pfizer, with a brand name and all, and that vaccine was identical to the one that was already in use under an emergency federal order:

These claims fail from the outset because, as this Court and several others have now concluded, Plaintiffs cannot establish that the Proclamation [by Washington governor] subjected them to any kind of "investigational" drug use. ... [T]he Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine available to Plaintiffs before the October 18 deadline was not "investigational" but instead fully approved by the FDA: the Pfizer-BioNTech and Comirnaty vaccines were identical in all but name.

The Boston Shriners hospital issued its vaccine mandate in September, 2021 and gave employees a month to either show proof of vaccination or file for a medical or religious exemption.

Schexnaydre has appealed all his losses; to date, no federal appeals court has ruled on them.

The case by Petrowksi and Abbey is different from most of the anti-vaccination cases filed to date in federal court in Boston, because according to their complaint, they not only refused shots, they refused to even ask for a medical or religious exemption, allegedly on 14th Amendment grounds, that even asking them to seek an exemption is a violation of their 14th Amendment rights to be allowed to continue working "without penalty or pressure."

The right is a federally secured right with which no other person can interfere by requiring an individual to seek a religious or medical exemption to exercise that right.

Other cases filed here have typically involved fired workers who either claim their religions forbid them from getting shots - because their body is a temple that shall not be defiled or because they claim the vaccines are the product of aborted fetuses - or because they say they have suffered ill effects in from their first shot or from other vaccines in the past and didn't want to risk their health.

According to their complaint, the two Shriners RNs claim that all of the Covid-19 vaccines allowed starting in late 2020 remained "unlicensed investigational new drugs" even as millions of people got them.

By ordering workers to get the shots, the hospital was participating in experiments run by the federal and state governments, they charged. Federal law gives them the right to not participate in medical experiments and the 14th Amendment grants them the right to be treated equally with the vaccinated - in this case, remaining on their jobs at a hospital that treats children at particular risk of infection - and to have their requests to go unvaccinated heard by "an impartial decision maker."

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees Plaintiffs the right to (1) enjoy the benefits of a federal program (a property right), (2) exercise statutory entitlements (a property right), (3) refuse public disclosure of their private health and identifiable information (right to privacy), (4) refuse to become human subjects under federally funded research activities (right to bodily autonomy and integrity), and (5) refuse unwanted investigational drugs and unwanted medical treatments (right to bodily autonomy and integrity), without incurring a penalty or losing a benefit to which they are otherwise entitled.

The two Shriners RNs are seeking enough damages both to make them whole and to make Shriners think twice about ever trying something like what they did ever again.