More than a hundred healthcare workers have filed a lawsuit against a hospital network in Houston, Texas, arguing that they don’t want to be forced to take an “experimental” Covid-19 vaccine out of fear of getting fired.
Marc Boom, the CEO of Houston Methodist, a firm that runs eight hospitals with more than 26,000 employees, gave personnel a June 7 deadline to get vaccinated. The consequences of not getting the shot include “suspension and eventually termination,” he wrote in an April letter to doctors and nurses, which was cited in the lawsuit filed on Friday.
A total of 117 plaintiffs are insisting that the hospital is “illegally requiring its employees to be injected with an experimental vaccine.” The hospital is forcing the staff to be “human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment,” the lawsuit says.
“It is a severe and blatant violation of the Nuremberg Code and the public policy of the state of Texas,” attorney Jared Woodfill, who filed the lawsuit in Montgomery County, told ABC News. Written shortly after WWII, the Nuremberg Code lays out the basic ethical principles of medical experimentation on humans.
A group of medical workers held a protest against the vaccination mandate outside Houston Methodist this month. “This is my body, this is my choice, and I don’t think employers, or anyone should mandate what goes into my body,” Kim Mikeska, a registered nurse, told the Houston Chronicle.
