A hearing was scheduled Thursday in a New Mexico court as part of a lawsuit in which 34 identified employees have asked a state judge to block Los Alamos National Laboratory’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate a day before they could be fired for not complying with it.
The hearing was on the slate for 8:00 a.m. local time at the Rio Arriba County Courthouse — the day before Triad National Security, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s management and operations contractor for Los Alamos National Laboratory, has said it will begin firing most employees who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
Triad, Lab Director Thomas Mason and Sara Pasqualoni, the lab’s medical director, are all named as defendants in the suit, filed Sept. 27 in the First Judicial District Court of New Mexico. Attorneys Jonathan Diener and Vanessa Deniro are representing all 34 identified plaintiffs, who according to their complaint seek a preliminary injunction against Triad and the two senior lab officials.
There are also 80 anonymous plaintiffs who did not reveal their identities because “the unvaccinated run the risk of ostracization, threats of harm, immediate firing and other retaliatory consequences,” the complaint reads.
The injunction the plaintiffs seek would bar the lab from enforcing its vaccine mandate, and the periodic COVID tests and mask-wearing required at the lab. The aggrieved workers also sought a restraining order that would have done the same thing, but Judge Jason Lidyard denied that request on Oct. 5.
Triad, meanwhile, has asked to dismiss the case and compel the 26 of the defendants to enter into arbitration with the lab, as required by employment agreements they signed as a condition of working at Los Alamos, according to court documents.
Six of the remaining plaintiffs are union workers, who nevertheless are bound by Triad’s mandate, the contractor argued in its response to the complaint, four are Triad subcontractors — subcontractors get to decide whether to give their employees exemptions to the vaccine mandate, not the prime, Triad wrote in the filing — and one of the plaintiffs works under “a contract with the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management” and isn’t covered by the Triad mandate.
Among the plaintiffs are administrative personnel, staff scientists, a safety basis analyst, a construction superintendent and an employee relations specialist, a security police officer and engineers, among others, according to the complaint.
Triad was the first nuclear-weapons contractor to publicly require its employees to either get vaccinated against COVID-19, secure a medical or religious exemption, or find a new job. The lab handed down the mandate in August, a day after the Food and Drug Administration gave full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and weeks before President Joe Biden ordered all federal employees and contractors to get vaccinated.
Triad has been strict about exemptions, handing out only a small number of medical exemptions and allowing those granted religious exemptions only one accommodation: leave without pay until they either quit or furnish proof of vaccination.
There had been more than 44.5 million cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the U.S. at deadline and more than 718,000 deaths, according to a tracker maintained by the Johns Hopkins University. More than 55% of eligible people in the U.S. were fully vaccinated at deadline, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
