FINALLY!! Judge tosses NYC C19vaxx mandate, orders fired city workers’ back pay
‘Mandate was about compliance, not public health’…
Judge tosses NYC COVID vaccine mandate, orders fired city workers’ back pay New York Post By Bernadette Hogan and Bruce Golding October 25, 2022
New York City’s controversial COVID-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers was enacted illegally and all employees who were fired for refusing to comply must be immediately reinstated with back pay, a state judge has ruled.
“It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just,” Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio wrote in a decision made public Tuesday.
More than 1,750 city workers were fired for refusing to get vaccinated, including 36 members of the NYPD and more than 950 Department of Education employees.
In his 13-page ruling, Porzio said then-city Health Commissioner David Chokshi’s Oct. 20, 2021, order “violates the separation of powers doctrine” enshrined in the state constitution.
Chokshi also violated the workers’ “substantive and procedural due process rights” and didn’t have “the power and authority to permanently exclude [them] from their workplace,” Porzio said.
And Chokshi’s order, another that extended the mandate to private employers and a related executive order issued by Mayor Eric Adams were “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of state law, the judge said.Adams’ March 24 executive order exempted athletes and performing artists from the vaccine mandate.
“The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health; it was about compliance,” Porzio wrote.
“If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for all residents.”
Porzio also noted the Big Apple’s “nearly 80% vaccination rate” before saying that “we shouldn’t be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down.”
His ruling came in response to a suit filed earlier this year by 16 former Sanitation Department workers who were fired in February for refusing to get vaccinated.
They “all claim, and provided laboratory documentation, that they have natural immunity to Covid-19 from prior infection(s),” he wrote.
Porzio said experience from the pandemic has shown that the protections provided by vaccinations are “not absolute,” with breakthrough infections occurring “even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted.”
But he added that his ruling “is not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders, the ones who worked day-to-day through the height of the pandemic.”
“They worked without protective gear. They were infected with Covid-19, creating natural immunity,” he wrote.
“They continued working full duty while their exemption requests were pending. They were terminated and are willing to come back to work for the City that cast them aside.”
In his decision, Porzio also cited President Biden’s recent assertion that the pandemic was “over” and Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Sept. 12 announcement that she wouldn’t extend New York’s pandemic-related state of emergency.
Under terms of the ruling, dated Monday, the fired workers were to be “reinstated to their full employment status” as of 6 a.m. Tuesday.
They’re also “entitled to back pay in salary from the date of termination,” with the plaintiffs in the case to submit a proposed judgment on that issue by Nov. 10.
City Hall didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
While Laveglia was representing members of the Dept. of Sanitation in New York (DSNY), this ruling will impact the FDNY, NYPD, Dept. of Corrections and all other city employees who were shut down and forced to resign for refusing to cave in to an experimental emergency use vaccine. The Gateway Pundit has previously reported on closures of firehouses in New York City that couldn’t remain open due to personnel shortages. The Gateway Pundit also reported on a mass exodus of NYPD officers, although this was not exclusively related to the vaccine, it does pose a serious problem when the department’s numbers were already impacted greatly by the forced resignations earlier on.
The defendants, of course, filed a Notice of Appeal. In New York, there are 62 courts, one for each county, representing the Supreme Court. Despite the name, the Supreme Court in New York is not the highest court. That position reigns with the New York Court of Appeals. It appears as though there is still the possibility of one last battle for the DSNY employees and Mr. Laveglia.
The City of New York is represented by the New York City Law Department. This means that the tax-payers of New York City are funding the fight to take away their own rights to work despite their personal decisions not to take an experimental vaccine that has numerous documented health implications in comparison to all other vaccines since the VAERS system began tracking adverse events.
