Saint Vincent settles federal lawsuit filed by workers who claimed religious discrimination
By David Bruce david.bruce@timesnews.com
Saint Vincent Hospital has agreed to rehire six former employees it fired after they refused to get flu shots in late 2013 and early 2014 due to their religious beliefs.
The Erie hospital also will provide about $300,000 in back pay and compensatory damages to the employees as part of an agreement to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of the workers by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in September. A consent decree that ended the case and detailed the settlement terms was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Erie.
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VLA Comment:
“CDC does not issue any requirements or mandates for state agencies, health systems, or health care workers regarding infection control practices, including influenza vaccination. There are no legally mandated vaccinations for adults, except for persons entering military service. CDC does recommend certain immunizations for adults, depending on age, occupation, and other circumstances, but these immunizations are not required by law.”
However, CDC Catch 22: The federal government has created and co-created a variety of organizations who are supposed to help determine how to “improve the quality of care”. If a hospital reports (to the CDC) high rates of immunizing their employees, thus demonstrating “quality improvements”
(Meryl Nass MD.)Medicare is used as a cudgel (while the federal government hides behind the “quality improvement” skirts of organizations it created) to forcibly impose some cherry-picked quality measures on medical institutions, by threatening to lower reimbursement rates to institutions that do not comply with the few “quality improvement” measures Medicare selected from the large palette of measures suggested by these intermediary organizations.
“I don’t understand why this issue has not been resolved in a “federal court”, and why cases are going through EEOC, where employees may win but their wins do not stop the nationwide HCW mandates for a vaccine that does not protect patients, according to metaanalyses by Cochrane”: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27251461 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23881655, the WHO http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/irv.12087/full