March 23, 2023:- Today the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) responded to my recent request for records of breakthrough cases and breakthrough deaths from September 4, 2022, onward.
My purpose with this request (like the previous requests) was to find out how many people in Massachusetts got injected with products advertised as COVID-19 vaccines and then caught COVID-19 and, of these, how many died of the disease.
Readers of previous posts (e.g. this one) will recall that more than 3,000 “fully vaccinated” people had died of COVID-19 before DPH stopped publishing the figures last July. In the 69-day period June 26-September 3, 2022, the number of “fully vaccinated” people who died from COVID-19 was 314 (that’s in addition to the 3,000+ figure).
September 4, 2022, was more than 6 months ago. What information has DPH collated since then?
How many “fully vaccinated” people has DPH recorded as having caught and died from COVID-19 since September 4? Today’s response states:
At this time, the Department has no records responsive to your request beyond those that have been produced to you in response to prior requests numbered BIDLS-2022-79, BIDLS-2022-99, BIDLS-2022-110, and BIDLS-2022-117.
In other words, since September 4, 2022, DPH has created no records of breakthrough cases and breakthrough deaths. Nary a one. Zero.
Is it really looking for the data? The response from DPH states:
Please be advised that the Department conducts its data analyses periodically as deemed necessary and appropriate. Analyses of COVID-19 breakthrough deaths are conducted, in part, with consideration to current federal guidance. With respect to COVID-19 breakthrough infection, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is reviewing its guidance.
What criteria DPH applies in order to determine whether some analysis of data has become necessary and appropriate is not something that DPH chose to share. But clearly, conducting any analysis after September 4, 2022, must have been unnecessary and inappropriate, in the opinion of whoever makes these decisions at DPH.
As for the CDC reviewing its guidance about breakthrough infection, I don’t doubt it. That review will probably take a good long time and conclude with a rock-solid commitment to convening a group of stakeholders who will think about it some more before resuming the reviewing process.
Remember, thousands of people lost their jobs because they would not or could not get injected with these products, products that public health officials, politicians, and corporate media told us were necessary to stop people catching and spreading COVID-19. Were those officials, politicians, and media mouthpieces telling the truth? Answering that question requires some analysis of the breakthrough data.
But DPH is giving that data a good leaving alone.
If you would like the Commonwealth’s public health officials to resume their analysis so as to find out how effective the vaccines are at preventing recipients from catching and dying from COVID-19, please tell them. Tell Margaret R. Cooke, the Commissioner.
And tell your State legislators. They’re the ones who pass the budget, which gives DPH somewhere north of $170 million, a few bucks of which you might think could go toward analysis of vaccine efficacy.
In the meantime, here’s a picture of the data that DPH has analyzed over the last 6 months about “fully vaccinated” people who caught and died from the disease that the public health officials told them they were “fully vaccinated” against.
February 9, 2023:- How many people got the shots then caught the disease? Once upon a time, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) used to publish the numbers. But then (when the proportion of “fully vaccinated” people who later reported catching COVID-19 hit 11.4%) they stopped.
So I submitted a public records request and learned that the number of breakthrough cases in the 69-day period June 26-September 3, 2022 was 58,199.
What about breakthrough cases recorded after September 3, 2022? I submitted another public records request in order to find out. You can read about the response here.
Because there were still no new figures for breakthrough cases from September 3 onward, in January I submitted yet another request, and today I received the response:
The Department has not found records responsive to your request. The Department herewith informs you it has not stopped analyzing breakthrough COVID-19 cases but conducts this analysis on a periodic basis.
That was exactly what they said in response to my previous request, and the one before that. The DPH says that it conducts its analysis on a “periodic basis,” but clearly the periods are quite long: they have no figures for the last 4 months.
Undue hardship?
Here’s a reminder about why this matters to employees in Massachusetts. If you submitted a request for exemption from the mandate (the No Jab, No Job rule) you may have received a letter telling you that accommodating your request would impose “undue hardship” on the employer. That contention of undue hardship rests on the premise that the shots stop people from catching and transmitting the disease.
But if lots of people get the shots and then catch the disease anyway — and in Massachusetts we know that the proportion is at least 12% — that premise vanishes (it wanes, you might say).
We need to know what’s going on, and for how long these pharmaceutical products provide any degree of protection. Otherwise how can we make informed choices about whether to get ourselves and our children injected? Knowing how many breakthrough cases there have been is one important piece of information, information that the State used to deem important enough to publish on a regular basis.
If you would like to help find out what the numbers really are, please let me know. I am not looking donations, just volunteers. To get in touch, use the contact form or send me an email.
December 5, 2022:- Until July 2022, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) used to publish a regular report that stated the number of “fully vaccinated” people who had been hospitalized from COVID-19 and the number who had died. Then, when the number of deaths passed 3,000, DPH stopped publishing its weekly report.
In November I submitted a public records request to DPH asking for the new numbers. Today I received the response.
[T]here have been 314 COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough deaths among vaccinated MA residents reported to the Department between June 26, 2022- September 3, 2022. A COVID-19 breakthrough case is defined as an individual who has tested positive for COVID19 at least 14 days after being “fully vaccinated” against COVID-19.
So there you have it. In the 69-day period June 26-September 3, 2022, 314 people died of COVID-19, a disease against which they were “fully vaccinated.” That number is in addition to the 3,000+ “fully vaccinated” people who had died before DPH stopped publishing the figures.
A reminder of why these numbers matter to those of us who do not know the victims or the families and friends they left behind: Hundreds of people in Massachusetts were discharged from their jobs because their religious beliefs prevented them being injected with products advertised as “COVID-19 vaccines.” Their employers, including State government agencies, contend that letting them continue working without being injected would have been an “undue hardship,” i.e. the un-injected workers were more likely to catch and spread COVID-19 than the injected workers.
That contention rests entirely on the premise that the injections stop you catching the disease. When, if ever, will employers just admit the obvious falsity of this belief? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.
As Allysia Finley points out in today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal:
But by last fall it was clear that vaccinated Americans were catching and spreading the virus. Then the administration rolled out third doses it claimed would strengthen individual and collective protection.
To many Americans, the boosters came as a bait-and-switch. They’d been led to believe vaccines offered a lifelong warranty against infection. Public-health officials at the outset should have set more realistic expectations.
… The CDC’s website in September showed that, since April, Americans who got the original boosters were testing positive at higher rates than those who had only two doses.
Employers — government agencies in particular — that imposed the No Jab, No Job policy under false pretenses should own up and admit that they either did not know the products did not work, or knew and lied about it. Is that really too much to ask? That’s another rhetorical question.
November 9, 2022:- According to the Massachusetts Department of Health’s latest figures, there are 5,555,220 people in Massachusetts classified as “fully vaccinated” against COVID-19. How many have caught COVID-19?
If you have read my recent post, you will know that I asked the department to disclose the number of breakthrough cases that occurred after the department stopped publishing the data, which was when the number hit 617,337 (11.4% of the “fully vaccinated” population).
By way of a reminder, breakthrough cases are people whose healthcare provider reports them as having caught COVID-19 more than 14 days after having been injected with the products advertised as COVID-19 vaccines.
Today the department sent me the latest breakthrough figures, which I added to those that they produced in September in response to a previous public records request.
More than 12%
The number of breakthrough cases in the 69-day period June 26-September 3, 2022 is 58,199.
So the total number of breakthrough cases so far in Massachusetts is approximately 675,000. That represents about 12% of the “fully vaccinated” people in Massachusetts.
October 27, 2022:- How many Massachusetts residents are on record as catching COVID-19 after having who been injected with the products advertised as “COVID-19 vaccines”? Perhaps we will find out soon.
Readers of this post will recall that the Department of Public Health stopped publishing the number in July 2022, when the number hit 617,337, i.e. 11.4% of all the “fully vaccinated” people in Massachusetts. I submitted a public records request asking the Department for records showing the number of COVID-19 breakthrough cases from July 6 to the date of the response.
According to State Epidemiologist Catherine Brown, the number of breakthrough cases reported in the period June 26-August 6, 2022 (41 days) was 38,015.
But what about after August 6? They could not say, because:
The Department does not have a responsive record for data after August 6, 2022, as the analysis is not performed routinely, and no analysis has been performed beyond that date.
Not regular, but periodic
Why has the Department not analyzed data beyond August 6, 2022? To find out, I submitted another public records request. Today I received the response, which says:
The Department herewith informs you it has not stopped analyzing breakthrough COVID-19 cases. The Department conducts this analysis on a periodic basis.
The Department, you see, no longer performs the analysis on a “regular” basis but it does still does so on a “periodic” basis. Naturally, I have submitted a new public records request asking for the latest numbers (how many “fully vaccinated” people has the Department recorded as having caught COVID-19 since August 6, 2022).
But it is worth noting that the Department is still keeping count of breakthrough cases (periodically, not regularly) but no longer publishing the numbers. To be clear: It has the numbers; it’s just not telling us what they are.
Why stop publishing?
Back in July I submitted a public records request asking why the Department had stopped publishing the numbers of breakthrough cases (something it continues to analyze on a “periodic” basis, apparently). The department told me that it would take a while to collate those records.
I am still waiting. And I can keep waiting. And then, when I have waited long enough. I will ask a judge to tell the Department to hand over the public records.
October 11, 2022:- This post is about the Massachusetts Public Records Law but also about something even more important. What could be even more important than the Massachusetts Public Records Law? I hear readers asking. The answer: Whether it should be (a) you and your conscience or (b) the government that gets to define your beliefs as religious or non-religious.
What sort of beliefs can be religious, or philosophical, or both?
Here is an example. I believe (among other things) that there is such a thing as evil, by which I mean the innate human desire to obtain pleasure by causing suffering. I am a Christian, so perhaps I should call this a religious belief. But I believed the same thing when I was not a Christian. I did not believe in the survival of the individual human personality beyond death and I did not believe in God, but I certainly believed in evil. Does that make the belief philosophical instead of religious?
How to go about putting my belief in the existence of evil into one of those two categories, as if they were mutually exclusive, continues to puzzle me, even though the belief in question is my own and I have spent considerable time pondering the subject. How much harder, then, to neatly taxonomize someone else’s beliefs about the nature and purpose of life; right and wrong; sin, forgiveness, and redemption. What an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking. But State government has decided that it is up to the task.
No Jab, No Job
Governor Baker’s No Jab, No Job order required State employees to be injected with products advertised as “COVID-19 vaccines.” The order allowed public employees to request exemptions from the mandate on the basis of their religious beliefs. When approximately 600 employees of the Department of Corrections requested religious exemptions, I gather that nearly all of them received letters telling them that they had “articulated a philosophical viewpoint not a religious belief.”
The difference between philosophy and religion is not obvious. As the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts stated:
Few beliefs are entirely isolated from a belief system, and in any event there are not always bright lines that would readily permit beliefs to be sorted into the categories of “religious” and “non-religious.”
Together Emps. v. Mass Gen. Brigham Inc., No. CV 21-11686-FDS, (D. Mass. Nov. 10, 2021), aff’d, No. 21-1909, 2022 WL 1236952 (1st Cir. Apr. 27, 2022).
Never mind not always; are there ever “bright lines” between beliefs that are religious and those that are philosophical? Distinguishing the one from the other requires some grounding in metaphysics and the opportunity to discuss the matter at length and in depth with the individual whose beliefs are at issue.
Because the nature of ideas is complex, classifying any given statement of belief in a binary manner as either (a) philosophical or (b) religious presents a challenge. But with enough time and skill I suppose a reasonably competent professor of philosophy or theology could pull it off. Classifying approximately 600 such statements from employees of the Department of Corrections in just a few weeks would present more of a challenge, I should think. Just how did the folks in HR manage it?
To find out, I submitted a public records request in which I asked for:
any and all public records created in the period March 10, 2020, through the date of the response reflecting or embodying the standards the Department of Correction relied on or used in any way in determining whether requests by employees for religious exemption from Executive Order 595 (EO 595) articulated a philosophical viewpoint as opposed to a religious belief.
I added this explanatory note: “I am requesting documents that show the criteria that the Department used in assessing the nature of the beliefs of those employees who requested religious exemption from the EO 595 vaccine mandate, in particular the documents the Department employed so as to: (1) define religious beliefs; (2) differentiate between religious beliefs and philosophical viewpoints; and (3) assess whether any given employee had articulated a philosophical viewpoint vis-à-vis a religious belief.”
The request, unlike the subject matter, was simple.
First Response
On June 8, 2022, the first response from the Department arrived. It stated:
For the following reasons, the response to your request for records will require more than ten (10) days. The Department needs to search numerous records, segregate them, and redact non-public information pursuant to G.L. c. 4, § 7, cl. 26. Additionally, the Department will calculate charges for production, if any, and send an estimate to you. It is anticipated that the production of the requested records will be completed within eight (8) weeks. If the records are not produced within eight (8) weeks, you will be contacted in writing to advise you about the status of your request.
That same day I replied with a short letter stating that the response fell short of what the Public Records Law requires (the law gives the record-holder 15 days, not 8 weeks). But then the Department’s lawyer asked me to wait, so over the summer I did just that; I waited. But nothing arrived.
In September, I sent a couple of reminders that elicited no replies. Then I submitted a second public records request, identical to the first. This time I received a different response.
Second Response
This time, instead of saying that it would take 8 weeks to collate the records, the Department said that I would not be allowed to see the records at all. Why not? Because an individual whom the Department referred to as my client (he is not) had made a similar request and has an ongoing case against the Department. Here is the relevant quote (I have redacted the name of my non-client):
The Department understands that your client, [NAME REDACTED], requested the same documents from the Department and the Massachusetts Human Resources Division. General Counsel Michele Heffernan responded for HRD [Human Resources Division] and the Department as follows:
Records of the names of those individuals involved with the exemption process, training materials and criteria are not public record as they are part of the deliberative process undertaken by Executive Department agencies. Pursuant to M.G.L. c. 4, § 7, cl. 26 (d), records that relate to interagency or intra-agency memoranda, work products or letters relating to policy positions being developed by the agency may be withheld. Records related to policy deliberations are protected from disclosure. DaRosa v. New Bedford, 471 Mass. 446 (2015). In addition, your client has litigation pending against the Commonwealth, as such, a records request is not the appropriate vehicle information that may be subject to a discovery request.
Mr. [NAME REDACTED] appealed this response. The Supervisor of Public Records responded and decided to close the appeal.
The Department says that it can keep these records secret because they fall within one of the 20-plus exemptions to the Public Records Law’s disclosure requirements that the Legislature carved out, namely the deliberative-process exemption, in that the documents “relate to policy positions being developed by” the Department.
I have appealed this decision to the Supervisor of Records, and will update this post when I learn the outcome.
In the meantime, I remind readers what it is, exactly, that I am asking to see: Documents showing the standards that the Department of Correction used in determining whether employees had articulated a philosophical viewpoint as opposed to a religious belief.
There must have been some kind of rubric, a conceptual sieve for sorting the religious wheat from the philosophical chaff; passages from the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas perhaps, or from the Kabbalah or the Hadith. The HR folks cannot have just pigeonholed all those individuals’ beliefs without reference to some articulated standards. Can they?
If the Department has any such documents, they do not want to disclose them and they claim that they can keep these documents secret because they relate to “policy positions.” That is the exemption set forth in General Laws chapter 4, section 7, clause 26 (d).
The Department legal team had more than 20 statutory exemptions to choose from, and this is the one they picked. It is a curious choice. After all, whether a belief is religious as opposed to philosophical is surely a matter of religion and philosophy, not of policy.
If government officials honestly think that religion is a policy matter, we all need to step back and take a breath.
Why this matters
Deciding whether our beliefs are religious is not something that government should do. The phrase “wall of separation between Church and State” appears nowhere in the free-exercise and establishment clauses of First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, but it helps remind us of the reason for those clauses. We do not want government officials regulating our religious beliefs and practices.
By way of contrast, in ancient Rome there was a public official whose very job was to regulate religious beliefs and practices, and his title was Pontifex Maximus. After the decline of the republic, the emperors adopted the title and the role. The emperors became the arbiters of religion, deciding which religious beliefs and practices were legal and which were not.
The French dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, rather envied the powers of the caesars. At his coronation, he wore a laurel wreath like the Roman emperors used to wear and he tended to emulate their approach to governing and propagandizing, commissioning paintings and sculptures of himself in classical Roman outfits and poses. To illustrate, here’s a statue of him playing dress-up.
Photo by author
The caesars and Napoleon Bonaparte were dictators. It is a sign of the times that I feel compelled to point out that they are not good role models for our public employees. This should go without saying. But nowadays in the American republic, governors and human resource managers are unabashedly assuming the role of Pontifex Maximus, arrogating to themselves powers that they should not wield, the power to decide what is, and what is not, a religious belief.
And they seem to have no shame in describing what they are doing as “developing policy positions.”
Conclusion
The Supervisor of Records is reviewing my appeal. If and when I obtain the public records that show how the Department of Correction was able to take human beliefs about the nature of existence and the meaning of life, and pour them into two distinct buckets, one labeled Religious and the other Philosophical, you will be able to see those documents here.
P.S.
October 24, 2022:- Today the Supervisor of Records issued an order:
[T]he Department is ordered to provide this office with an un-redacted copy of a representative sample of the responsive records for in camera inspection without delay.
After inspecting the sample, the Supervisor will issue an opinion as to whether the records are (a) public, or (b) exempt.
Of course, this all depends on the documents actually existing.
September 27, 2022:- It’s amazing what you can not find out when you don’t try. And the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is definitely not trying to find out something that most of us would find quite helpful, especially if we wanted to learn how to protect people against COVID-19.
Today I learned that the Commonwealth’s public health agency no longer tracks the number of people who are “fully vaccinated” against COVID-19 who have gone on to catch COVID-19 anyway (the disease that the vaccines were supposed to stop them catching).
A good leaving alone
Today I learned that instead of tracking those numbers, the Commonwealth is giving them a good leaving alone, as Howie Carr would say.
What does this lack of curiosity on the part of State government have to do with the practice of law? I will tell you.
Readers may know that I represent a number of people who worked for agencies of the Commonwealth until the Governor ordered them to be injected with products advertised as “COVID-19 vaccines.” For religious reasons, my clients were not able to comply, so they requested exemption from the mandate on religious grounds. The State denied their requests. And then the State discharged them.
In defending itself against charges of religious discrimination, the State says that letting workers carry on working without being injected would have caused undue hardship because these un-injected workers posed a threat. Of course, that defense rests entirely on the premise that the injections would have stopped the workers from catching and spreading the disease. It falls rather flat if it turns out that the injections do not really do that.
August 6: The day the calculator stood still
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) used to publish regular reports that showed the growing number of “fully vaccinated” people who have caught COVID-19 (the disease that the vaccines were supposed to stop them catching). Public health officials refer to these as “breakthrough cases.”
Those regular reports stopped in early July when the number of breakthrough cases reached 617,337, i.e. 11.4% of all the fully vaccinated people in Massachusetts. As I mentioned in a previous post, that figure only includes the cases that people report to their healthcare providers.
For most people who display some symptoms, those symptoms are mild (e.g. sore throat, slight cough, and runny nose) and do not require a visit to a healthcare provider. If a person with COVID-19 does not report the infection to a healthcare provider, nobody enters the case into a healthcare provider’s database, and it does not appear in the department’s figures.
So the official figure does not does not include people who are fully vaccinated and then contract COVID-19 but do not report the fact to a healthcare provider. This means that the number 617,337 (11.4% of the fully vaccinated population) is an undercount.
The last report was dated July 5, 2022. Because I am curious (which, in and of itself, probably disqualifies me from a job in the upper reaches of State government) I asked DPH for records showing the number of COVID-19 breakthrough cases from July 6 to the date of the response.
Today the Department responded. According to State Epidemiologist Catherine Brown, the number of breakthrough cases reported in the period June 26-August 6, 2022 (41 days) was 38,015.
That’s a lot of new infections in just 41 days. But what about after August 6?
The Department does not have a responsive record for data after August 6, 2022, as the analysis is not performed routinely, and no analysis has been performed beyond that date.
Why? Why has the Department not analyzed data beyond that date? The letter does not say. And that is why I just submitted another public records request.
A simple question
In my new public records request, I am asking for records that embody or reflect the reason why, after August 6, 2022, the Department stopped analyzing COVID-19 breakthrough cases. Why seems like such a simple question.
August 11, 2022:- Here is an update to my previous post about the lack of new data on so-called breakthrough infections in Massachusetts.
When the State stopped publishing the number of “fully vaccinated” people who are on record as having caught COVID-19 (the stoppage occurred when the number reached 617,337, i.e. 11.4% of the fully vaccinated population), I was curious. So I submitted a public records request. Today I received the response from Monica Mitteness, Epidemiologist at the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences. Or rather, I received a response telling me that an actual response will cost me $175..
Letter from Monica Mitteness, Epidemiologist at the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences
Apparently there are 440 responsive records, and reviewing them will take 11 hours.
“At a rate of $25.00 per hour, the total estimated fee for reviewing, redacting, and electronically producing records in response to your request is $175 ((11 hrs. – 4 hrs.) x $25 = $175).”
How long does it take to perform 11 hours’ work?
OK, once they get the check will I get the documents right away? No. The letter states:
“Upon payment of the fee, DPH will require an extension of time to respond to this request given the volume of records.”
I wonder how much time they will need to perform 11 hours of work. If there are any mathematicians out there reading this, perhaps you could chime in with an estimate.
Anyway, should I cough up the sum of $175 to see at least some of the 400+ documents in which public employees discuss why their employer (the public) should no longer be privy to this information about the efficacy of medical products advertised as “vaccines”? Money well spent, in my opinion.
Footnote 1
By the way, take a look at the footnote in the excerpt of the letter posted above:
“Please note that dates may be extended one day in either direction to account for time zone conversions.”
Needing to take account of time zone conversions suggests that the decision involved correspondence with people in other time zones. Massachusetts, the other New England States, and Washington, DC, are all in the same time zone. Officials in what other States (or countries) could have had a say in the decision to withhold this data from the residents of Massachusetts? I look forward to finding out.
May 20, 2022:- In a development that will be of interest to people discharged because of the No Jab, No Job policy (e.g. 1,000 or so State employees in Massachusetts) a congressional report has revealed that approximately 400 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had to be destroyed for “quality control reasons.”
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis just issued a report titled The Coronavirus Vaccine Manufacturing Failures of Emergent Biolsolutions. It describes cross-contamination in Emergent’s production of Johnson& Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines. For the report click here; for the subcommittee, click here.
If you were one of those State employees who thought you had the right to consider this sort of information (contamination at the vaxx plant) before deciding to receive or decline a COVID-19 shot, you quickly learned that your boss had other ideas.
In Executive Order 595, which mandated vaccines for executive-branch employees, Governor Baker wrote:
WHEREAS, COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, as evidenced by the fact that COVID-19 vaccines have satisfied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality needed to permit widespread use and distribution, and to date, more than 357 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been safely administered in the United States, with more than 9 million safely administered in the Commonwealth, and negative side effects have proven exceedingly rare…
You didn’t get to decide whether to receive the jab. Governor Baker made that decision for you when he issued Executive Order 595 on August 19, 2021. Meanwhile, according to the congressional report:
Due to poor quality control approximately 240 million vaccine doses had to be destroyed in late 2020 and early 2021— significantly more than revealed previously. Following the discovery that Emergent had cross-contaminated vaccine doses in March 2021, the Biden Administration halted Emergent’s manufacturing from April to July 2021.
The discovery about the contamination was in March 2021. So that was before August 19, 2021. The report continues:
After Emergent was permitted to resume manufacturing in July 2021, an additional 90 million newly manufactured coronavirus vaccine doses had to be destroyed for quality control reasons, and 135 million remain sequestered pending further testing.
Was the trouble with the vaccines top secret? Not at all. Here’s a quote from an article published in April 2021 (four months before Governor Baker issued E.O. 595):
An FDA report cites multiple failures in an Emergent BioSolutions plant tapped to produce vaccines for Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. The vaccine plant had been forced to discard up to 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine in a single manufacturing batch.
Here’s a quote from another article published in April 2021:
An FDA report has illuminated problems at Emergent BioSolution’s Baltimore manufacturing site, where the CDMO recently had to scrap up to 15 million Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine doses over a production error.
Thing is, the FDA flagged Emergent for very similar issues almost a year ago to the day. During an April 2020 inspection of the CDMO’s contract testing laboratory, the FDA said Emergent failed to adequately prevent data tampering or deletion, neglected to follow its quality control procedures or put them in writing and, notably, didn’t do enough to stop contamination or mix-ups.
I mention all this because the State, whether acting as government or as employer, should allow people to make their own decisions about medical interventions. Is this my quirky personal predilection? No, it’s a principle that the United States endorsed as part of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics & Human Rights, article 6 of which provides:
Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.
Consent is not “free” when your lack of consent leads to lack of your job. And I think loss of one’s job counts as a “disadvantage or prejudice.” Is the consent “informed” when your Governor issues an official order proclaiming the product’s safety? Answers on a postcard, please.
If you or someone you know lost a State job because of Executive Order 595, please feel free to contact my office for a free consult.
By the way, for the latest figures on COVID-19 hospitalizations in Massachusetts, click here. Spoiler alert: the percentage of COVID-19 patients who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 is 65%.
May 2, 2022:- Two new decisions arrived today, one from a unanimous Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) against the City of Boston’s refusal to let an applicant fly a Christian flag from a municipal flagpole, and the other from the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) of Massachusetts regarding the City of Lynn’s insistence that a busines owner conduct her business be-masked.
For Shurtleff v. City of Boston click here, and for City of Lynn v. Murrell click here.
Shurtleff v. City of Boston
SCOTUS held that the City of Boston’s refusal to approve Harold Shurtleff’s request to raise a Christian flag on a City flagpole abridged his right to freedom of speech. The City had allowed people to use the City flagpole to fly the flags of other countries, e.g. Venezuela, and various secular organizations, e.g. Metro Credit Union, but claimed that flying this particular flag could constitute “government speech.” Justice Alito’s concurrence addresses this succinctly:
The flags flown reflected a dizzying and contradictory array of perspectives that cannot be understood to express the message of a single speaker. For example, the City allowed parties to fly the gay pride flag, but it allowed others to fly the flag of Ethiopia… a country in which “homosexual act[s]” are punishable by “imprisonment for not less than one year.”
The prize for the pithiest observation, however, goes to Justices Thomas and Gorsuch in their concurrence. To see what I mean, scroll down to page 40.
City of Lynn v. Murrell
In this case, the City of Lynn fined business owner Ariana Murrell for her no-mask policy, which defied the Commonwealth mask mandate. How did the City find out? Here are the words in the decision that made my heart sink:
The Lynn police department received multiple complaints about Murrell’s no-mask policy. The Lynn police investigated and corroborated these complaints with their own independent and documented observations of Murrell’s practices at Liberty Tax. Members of the public also contacted the city’s board of health (board) to notify it of Murrell’s no-mask policy.
This practice (ratting, snitching, informing, whatever you want to call it) was the sort of thing that the bien pensant still seemed to care about as late as 2019, judging by this article in the Atlantic. But no longer.
The habit of informing on one another is now suitably engrained, but the mask mandates themselves have gone, at least for now.
And because the mandates are no more, the SJC decided that the issues were moot. But, in a somewhat encouraging response to Ms. Murrell’s argument that the issues remain alive because the State can reimpose a mask mandate whenever it feels like, the SJC implied (albeit ambiguously) that the widespread availability of treatments makes new mask mandates less likely. In addition, the court cited the SCOTUS decision on the OSHA vaccine-or-mask mandate, stating with sub-optimal clarity:
In light of this decision, we cannot say with any degree of certainty that our understanding of OSHA’s authority to issue general COVID-19 regulations, and the interrelated issue of preemption, would be the same if the Governor were to issue another Statewide mandate.
In a glass half-full frame of mind, I think that the SJC was signaling that in reviewing any new mask mandates, it would take into account the changed jurisprudential landscape and would determine whether the facts (remember those?) really justify the mandates. Or perhaps I am getting carried away with hope.
March 1, 2022:- Today Attorney Patrick Daubert talked with me about the case of Captain Albert Brox v. Wood’s Hole, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket Steamship Authority, which concerns religious liberty and medical-product mandates. Attorney Daubert represents employees of a State agency who are seeking religious exemptions from the mandate that their employer imposed at the beginning of the year. After the State court judge enjoined the authority from enforcing its mandate, the authority removed the case to federal court.
To watch and listen to the conversation, click here.
If you are a State or municipal employee facing religious discrimination, I would like to hear from you.
For example, if your employer requires you to receive a product known as a “COVID-19 vaccine” as a condition of your employment (the No Jab, No Job rule) and refuses your request for a religious exemption, you may have legal recourse. To set up a free 20-minute consult, use the contact form below.
Religious Freedom
As you may know, Massachusetts law (M.G.L. c. 151B) prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. If your employer denied your request for a religious exemption from the No Jab, No Job rule, you may have a claim under that law. The place to file your claim is the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) and the filing deadline is 300 days after the discriminatory act.
This is a complicated and shifting area of law, so it is worth reading up on the subject even before talking to a lawyer. The New Civil Liberties Alliance has articles and press releases about its courtroom efforts against mandates, the Pacific Justice Institute provides free resources on protecting religious rights in the workplace, and the Christian Legal Aid Society offers a Religious Freedom Toolkit. You may also want to check out Attorney Aaron Siri’s site, Injecting Freedom.
Genetic Discrimination
In addition to the law against religious discrimination, Massachusetts also forbids discrimination on the basis of genetic information. Similarly, a federal statute called the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA, Title II) makes it unlawful for an employer
to limit, segregate, or classify the employees of the employer in any way that would deprive or tend to deprive any employee of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect the status of the employee as an employee, because of genetic information with respect to the employee.
This information page and Q&A show where the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) stands on GINA and vaccines. Bear in mind, these EEOC documents are not law (they are not statutes, regulations, or judicial decisions) but courts usually defer to the EEOC when the agency is interpreting the statutes in its purview. The EEOC documents are helpful insights for employees who wish to use GINA to challenge the No Jab, No Job rule.
Bioethics
Another helpful resource for employees is Article 6 of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, which the General Conference of UNESCO adopted in 2005.
The relevant paragraph of Article 6 provides that:
Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.
Although it does not have the force of law, the Declaration is something that judges may choose to take note of in some cases, e.g. the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Abdullahi v. Pfizer, a case about Pfizer’s drug trials in Nigeria.
The principle of prior, free, informed consent should guide courts and adjudicatory bodies like the MCAD when considering No Jab, No Job cases.
February 18, 2022:- Yesterday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sent a vaccine-mandate case back down to the District Court for the judge to re-consider the employees’ request for a preliminary injunction. The case is Sambrano, et al, v. United Airlines, Inc., United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas USDC 4:21-CV-1074.
The employees are suing the employer because the employer requires them to receive a COVID-19 vaccination. The District Court had denied the employees’ request for a preliminary injunction on the grounds that the employees could not show “irreparable injury,” but the Court of Appeals disagreed:
Plaintiffs allege a harm that is ongoing and cannot be remedied later: they are actively being coerced to violate their religious convictions. Because that harm is irreparable, we reverse the district court.
January 14, 2022:- Last year, President Biden issued a vaccine mandate through the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA). The regulation that OSHA issued would have required employers with 100+ employees to ensure that their employees either received vaccination against COVID-19 or to wear masks and undergo weekly testing. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a stay of OSHA’s regulation, effectively putting an end to it.
The court pointed out that COVID-19 is a life hazard, not an occupational one:
Although COVID–19 is a risk that occurs in many workplaces, it is not an occupational hazard in most. COVID–19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather. That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases.
Congress gave OSHA the limited task of regulating workplace safety, not the unlimited task of regulating the safety of society as a whole:
Permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life—simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock—would significantly expand OSHA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization.
The court pointed out the difference between job-specific risks and the general, everyday risks that we all face both at work and elsewher:
That is not to say OSHA lacks authority to regulate occupation-specific risks related to COVID–19. Where the virus poses a special danger because of the particular features of an employee’s job or workplace, targeted regulations are plainly permissible… But the danger present in such workplaces differs in both degree and kind from the everyday risk of contracting COVID–19 that all face.
Again, the statutes that Congress has enacted that give OSHA the legal authority to issue regulations confine that authority to occupational safety, not to safety in general. If Congress wishes to give OSHA the authority to regulate the safety of everyone, everywhere, all the time, then Congress needs to do so via statute. OSHA cannot just give itself that power, even at the direction of the President. The court’s decision recognizes this basic principle of the separation of powers.
By the way, here in Massachusetts, according to the Department of Health dashboard, the number of people currently in hospital with COVID-19 is 3,180. Of that number, 1,505 (approximately half) are fully vaccinated.
January 10, 2022:- An op-ed in today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal titled “Omicron makes Biden’s vaccine mandates obsolete” will prove important, I think. It states that the vaccinations that are supposed to protect us against COVID-19 may make us more susceptible to catching the latest version of the disease known as the Omicron variant:
One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection. Confirming this negative efficacy finding, data from Denmark and the Canadian province of Ontario indicate that vaccinated people have higher rates of Omicron infection than unvaccinated people.
One of the two co-authors is Jed Rubenfeld, a professor at Yale Law School. The other is Dr. Luc Montagnier, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. But be advised, Wikipedia warns us about Dr. Montagnier:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier was criticised for using his Nobel prize status to “spread dangerous health messages outside his field of knowledge”[6] for promoting the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created in a laboratory. Such a claim has been refuted by other virologists
Of course, Wikipedia also states that the total number of deaths from COVID-19 in China (pop. 1.4 billion) is about 5,000, which is roughly the same as the death toll in Ireland (pop. 5 million). According to Wikipedia:
Around March 2020, there was speculation that China’s COVID numbers were deliberately inaccurate, but now China’s COVID elimination strategy is considered to have been successful and its statistics are considered to be accurate
When weighing the credibility of Wikipedia on the subject of Dr. Montagnier, it’s worth considering the credibility of Wikipedia on the subject of the Chinese government’s COVID-19 statistics. To be a little more blunt, if you believe that the number of COVID-19 fatalities in China is the same as the number in Ireland, perhaps I could interest you in the purchase of a certain bridge.
So with that word of caution about Dr. Montagnier from Wikipedia, and my own word of caution about Wikipedia’s word of caution, let me move on to the legal implications.
If the vaccinations make people more susceptible to COVID-19, what are the implications for those employers who imposed a vaccine mandate on their employees? I have in mind the companies that gave their workers a simple choice: Either (A) get vaccinated; or (B) you’re terminated.
And what if the workers who chose option A (i.e. they got vaccinated) then caught COVID-19 — not in spite of but because of the vaccine — and became sick? Do they have any legal recourse, and if so against whom?
On November 12, 2021, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed its decision to stay (pause) the COVID-19 vaccine mandate that President Biden issued via the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA). You can read the decision here.
The court had several reasons for finding the mandate unlawful, including the following:
[T]he Mandate’s strained prescriptions combine to make it the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a “grave danger” in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat). The Mandate’s stated impetus—a purported “emergency” that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to—is unavailing as well.
With regard to the supposed “emergency” that could justify the OHSA rule, the court added:
And, of course, this all assumes that COVID-19 poses any significant danger to workers to begin with; for the more than seventy-eight percent of Americans aged 12 and older either fully or partially inoculated against it, the virus poses—the Administration assures us—little risk at all.
As with the President Biden’s use of the CDC to ban evictions for non-payment of rent, this latest attempt to usurp the legislative function has failed, for the time being anyway.
President Joe Biden
Adam Schultz, photographer
Official portrait of President Joe Biden, taken in the Library room at the White House
August 25, 2021:-Attorney Wayne Detring of Franklin, Tennessee, is not someone I had heard of before yesterday but, as a result of his letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, he is going on my Christmas card list.
Attorney Detring pointed out that after President Biden repeatedly said that there was no legal basis for extending his predecessor’s eviction moratorium (and then went ahead and did it anyway) the administration’s lawyer put his name to a court document arguing that, contrary to his client’s repeated and accurate public statements, the moratorium is lawful. That sort of conduct verges on the unethical, wrote Attorney Detring (see below).
Here is the President saying that the courts had ruled that the previous CDC eviction moratorium was unconstitutional and that although most constitutional scholars think that a new one would be “unlikely to pass constitutional muster” a few think it might and by the time a challenge gets through the courts the order will have served its purpose.
Clearly unconstitutional
The court decision President Biden was referring to was the one that Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued back in June. “The question for the Court is a narrow one,” wrote Judge Friedrich.
“Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium? It does not.”
The reason has nothing to do with the wording or extent of the CDC’s eviction moratorium. The reason is simpler than that. As an executive branch agency, the CDC may only act within the parameters that Congress has set for it, and Congress has never granted the CDC the authority to ban people who own rental property from going to court when tenants do not pay rent. The CDC does not have, and never has had, that authority.
At the end of June, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh stated that a moratorium extension would need clear and specific congressional authorization via new legislation.
Nevertheless, when Congress did not enact any such clear and specific authorization, President Biden issued another eviction moratorium through the CDC.
New order
The Alabama Association of Realtors quickly challenged the new moratorium.
In response, the Solicitor General filed a reply in which he argued that Congress had given the CDC authority via 42 USC 264(a), enacted in 1944, which provides that:
“The Surgeon General, with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.”
According to the Acting Solicitor General of the United Stats, Brian H. Fletcher, by way of this provision in the 1944 statute Congress gave the head of the CDC discretion to “prevent the movement of persons to prevent the spread of communicable disease.” To be fair, he was quoting the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia when it rejected the request from the Alabama Association of Realtors to vacate the stay of Judge Friedrich’s previous order. But at the time the Solicitor General filed the reply it was already clear that five justices of the Supreme Court of the United States share the opinion of Judge Friedrich that the 1944 statute, which (prior to President Trump) had never been used in this way, does not confer the necessary authority.
Professional Conduct
If you think there ought to be a rule against this sort of thing, there is, as Attorney Detring points out:
“Rule 3.1 of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct prohibits lawyers from bringing or defending a proceeding unless there is a basis in law or fact for doing so. Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure states that by signing or submitting a pleading, an attorney certifies that it is not presented for any improper purpose, such as to ‘cause unnecessary delay.’ Rule 11 also provides a process for sanctioning violators… Ordinary practicing attorneys would be in grave danger of sanctions for filing a pleading knowingly unsupported by law or fact, and by admittedly filing the pleading for the purpose of delay.”
Good point, I think.
Discussion
President Biden’s conscious decision to issue an unlawful order will be one of topics up for discussion at an event MassLandlords has scheduled for September 8 titled “Are Eviction Moratoriums the New Normal?” The other points up for discussion:
Courtroom challenges to the CDC moratorium;
The “state moratorium 2.0” currently pending the Massachusetts Legislature; and
What litigation might be brought to bear against a new Massachusetts eviction moratorium.
I will be one of the three speakers, together with Attorney Jordana Roubicek Greenman and Attorney Richard Vetstein. For the event link, click here.
May 19, 2021:- The Florida Association of Realtors® and R.W. Caldwell, Inc., have filed a complaint in the United States District Court in the Middle District of Florida, Tampa Division, asking the court to set aside the partial eviction moratorium that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) imposed, first at the direction of President Trump and then at the direction of President Biden.
One judge did just that quite recently. In early May Judge Dabney Friedrich set aside the partial eviction moratorium but stayed the order, i.e. put it on hold, while the Biden administration appeals the case. This means that the CDC partial eviction moratorium remains in effect for the time being.
This new complaint asks for the same kind of relief that Judge Dabney ordered earlier in the month. I quote two paragraphs of the complaint that get to the heart of the matter.
Paragraph 40 of the complaint states:
“The Eviction Moratorium contains no findings and relies on no evidence to support its stated assertion that Covid-19 will spread between states or United States territories if landlords are permitted to exercise their contractual rights to evict tenants who fail to make rent payments as required by their leases.”
That is why I call it a partial eviction moratorium, by the way. It only covers some evictions, i.e. nonpayment cases. Why the tenants in that kind of case are more likely than tenants in other sorts of cases (e.g. those being evicted for, say, criminal activity) to contract and transmit COVID-19 is not clear, at least not to me.
And the CDC certainly did not issue a moratorium on moving house. House sales have done very well during the emergency, I believe. Lots of people are buying and selling, moving from place to place. The CDC did not try to ban residential real estate transactions.
Getting to the constitutional argument, paragraph 5 of the complaint states:
“The CDC predicates this unprecedented action on its statutory authority to prevent the interstate spread of disease, but that authority does not make the CDC the nation’s landlord-in-chief any more than it places the CDC in charge of citizens’ social media or the national minimum wage. Were it otherwise, then Congress would have impermissibly turned over its lawmaking authority to an unelected administrative agency. The United States Constitution and its nondelegation doctrine prevent Congress from doing so. Indeed, the Constitution does not authorize Congress or the CDC to interfere with the purely local matter of tenants’ occupancy of individual rental properties.”
What’s the problem with an unelected administrative agency exercising the lawmaking authority that the Constitution grants exclusively to the Congress? Why is it unconstitutional for unelected government employees to legislate?
The reason has to do with democratic accountability, an essential requirement for a self-governing republic of free people, and stripped of legal jargon it is this: We can’t throw out those rascals. The only rascals We the People can throw out are the rascals we elected in the first place. Unelected rascals are beyond our reach.
What will happen to the CDC’s partial eviction moratorium? Stay tuned.
March 29, 2021:- Today the Biden administration announced that it will extend the Centers for Disease Control partial eviction moratorium to June 30, 2021.
In the meantime, here in Massachusetts housing providers who go to Housing Court to try to obtain unpaid rent and to eventually regain possession of their property are up against taxpayer-funded lawyers. Tenants obtain counsel at no charge; housing providers must pay, unless they can find a lawyer who will work for free. To misquote Animal Farm, some equal protection is more equal than others.
To read my latest article on the subject for MassLandlords, click here.
August 26, 2020:- Today Suffolk Superior Court Judge Paul D. Wilson declined to issue a preliminary injunction against the Massachusetts eviction moratorium. Ruling that the moratorium does not amount to an uncompensated taking because “it does not deprive Plaintiffs of all economically viable use of their land” the judge also pointed out something that housing providers may find helpful:
[T]he economic effect on landlords is mitigated not only by their ability to sue non-paying tenants for breach of contract, but by the temporary nature of the moratorium.
For the purposes of seeking a remedy in the here and now, it is the first part of the sentence that merits attention. Picking up on a point that representatives of the tenants’ bar raised in oral argument, Judge Wilson statement suggests that even though they cannot start summary-process actions, landlords can still sue non-paying tenants for breach of contract.
Peter Vickery, Esq., 