More COVID-19 vaccine refusers have joined a lawsuit against Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the management and operations contractor at the Savannah River Site, and have amended their lawsuit to list fear of death from vaccines as a reason a federal judge should block the contractor’s vaccine mandate.
The amended complaint filed this week fine-tuned the plaintiffs’ legal arguments in an effort to keep the suit alive in the federal court, to which it was elevated from a South Carolina state court last month.
The amended complaint also adds about 20 pages and exactly 11 plaintiffs to the case, bringing the total of vaccine holdouts represented to 90 plaintiffs from the 79 listed on the initial complaint filed Oct. 14.
Among the pages added to the amended complaint is an argument that “if the plaintiffs accept by coercion the Vaccine because their only alternative is to lose their jobs, it is quite possible that at least one of them would be injured or perhaps lose their lives because of the Vaccine. The injury would be irreparable.”
That language follows a federal judge’s refusal this week to block the Oak Ridge National Laboratory from enforcing its vaccine mandate in Tennessee, which like mandates at other DOE sites offers only unpaid leave for people who receive religious exemptions.
In the Oak Ridge case, the judge ruled that just because religious vaccine refusers may lose their jobs does not mean that they were prevented from exercising their religious beliefs or that they will suffer irreparable harm: a legal threshold that could have triggered a restraining order or injunction against lab manager UT-Battelle.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, confirmed deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 vaccines are extremely rare, with around 9,300 deaths resulting from more than 423 million doses, or a death rate of about 0.0022% from Dec. 14, 2020 through Nov. 1, 2021. On the other hand, there was an average of more than 1,100 COVID-19-related deaths in the U.S. in the last week alone, according to the CDC.
The Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions has said at least 95% of its 5,500 workers at the federal complex near the Georgia line have been vaccinated against the illness. The contractor has said it is implementing a reasonable policy to carry out President Joe Biden’s September orders calling for federal employee and contractor vaccinations. The management and operations contractor said its approach will protect its workforce against the potentially deadline virus during the pandemic.
Overall in the U.S., just under 60% of eligible adults were fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
The Savannah River vaccine holdouts filed their case in the U.S. District Court in South Carolina a day before they were scheduled to turn in their access badges on Oct. 15 in anticipation of being terminated on Nov. 30. Most DOE nuclear management and operations contractors were given until Dec. 8 to get their employees vaccinated or exempted from the federal mandate.
