A federal judge in Washington state tossed a revised lawsuit brought by 300-plus employees at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, many of them security guards, over the COVID-19 vaccination rule, saying the plaintiffs never fixed major legal issues with the case they filed in the fall.
“We haven’t decided the next step at this moment, although we are considering an appeal,” Pete Serrano, director/general counsel of the Silent Majority Foundation, which is working with the Hanford plaintiffs, said via email Tuesday. Meetings will be held with the plaintiffs soon on possible legal options, he added via email.
“Here, Plaintiffs have now amended their Complaint twice,” since the first version was filed in November 2021,” U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice said in Thursday’s ruling. “Neither Amended Complaint adequately addressed all of the factual and procedural deficiencies outlined in the Court’s Order and Defendants’ motions.”
As a result, Rice dismissed the second amended complaint by David Donovan and other plaintiffs, filed March 4, for failure to state a claim. The judge rejected the complaint “with prejudice,” meaning it is a final order.
The plaintiffs might elect to pursue their case to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. While the Eleven U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in April on a Georgia federal judge’s nationwide restraining order against the contractor vaccination order, the Ninth Circuit is not governed by the 11th Circuit decision, Rice said in the decision.
Throughout the litigation, the claims by the plaintiffs are often “only broad recitations of various constitutional principles muddled with repetitive allegations that the Executive Orders were promulgated in excess of President Biden’s authority,” Rice said.
For example, the complaint filed by the employees continues to list Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and DOE Hanford Site Manager Brian Vance as individual defendants. The document does not, however, “allege any facts indicating how either of these individuals could be held liable for the Executive Orders” in September by President Joe Biden that required vaccination for most federal and contractor workers, according to the order.
The vast majority of the 314 plaintiffs in the case fail to establish standing by spelling out clear harms or damages they have suffered as a result of the vaccination orders growing out of the executive orders. The vaccine policy does provide for certain medical and religious exemptions, the judge said.
