Entities with COVID-19 vaccine mandates that don’t pay heed to the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance will face lawsuits, a civil liberties lawyer says.
“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,” Mark Chenoweth, president and general counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, told The Epoch Times.
The response to the updated guidance should be, at a minimum, a lifting of mandates for people who have recovered from COVID-19, he added.
Such people have a high level of protection against severe illness and death, according to a number of studies. Many studies indicate the protection is higher than that of the COVID-19 vaccines—including one study funded by the CDC.
The CDC issued updated guidance on Aug. 11, stating in part that 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.”
The public health agency rolled back quarantine recommendations for people, regardless of vaccination status, citing the high amount of immunity in the U.S. population from vaccination, prior infection, or both.
Since virtually all entities that have imposed mandates have cited CDC guidance, the entities won’t be able to argue they aren’t aware of the updated guidance, according to Chenoweth.
That means any institution that doesn’t alter or rescind its mandate in light of the update “is ripe for a lawsuit,” he said.
“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.”
By Zachary Stieber
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