The Los Angeles City Council is highly politically motivated in requiring that firefighters be vaccinated or terminated, according to an attorney who has sued the city.
“It feels like our country is changing,” said Los Angeles attorney Kevin McBride. “It feels like individual rights are no longer being honored and it feels like this is a very major effort to reinforce that your individual rights do not matter anymore and that's why I think they're doing it. You don't see this in Republican states like Texas or Florida. You see this in California, New York and Oregon.”
McBride sued the City of Los Angeles on Sept. 17 in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of the nonprofit Firefighters4Freedom Foundation and 529 individual Los Angeles city firefighters, challenging an order by the city council that requires city employees to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 15.
“There is mounting evidence that the vaccine does not prevent the virus from spreading and may only provide protection against serious illness, a benefit that does little, if anything, for firefighters,” McBride wrote in the 28-page lawsuit. “Thus, the vaccine mandate is both unnecessary and ineffective in protecting the public.”
There have been 477,447 adverse reactions to the coronavirus vaccine reported to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), including 6,112 deaths, 7,829 life-threatening illnesses, and 28,035 hospitalizations.
“We do have people who took the first vaccine who are now being told to take a booster shot,” McBride told the Southern California Record. “That's a whole different class of people because they took the first shot thinking it was done and gone like a smallpox vaccine. It’s not. Among the people who did the first vaccine, a lot of them are having serious second thoughts about doing the booster not to mention the fact that the FDA has not approved the booster.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the booster for individuals over 65 years of age last week, according to media reports.
“The people of Los Angeles cannot afford to put their firefighters at additional health risk when the force is already depleted and inadequately staffed,” McBride said in an interview.
Of 3,300 firefighters in the City of Los Angeles, 58% are vaccinated and about 571 firefighters have signed onto the lawsuit, according to McBride.
“What we asked for is to sit down and to talk about this because if the goal is to keep the public safe, there are ways to do that,” he said. “Firefighters already wear protective gear. So, there are ways to keep the public safe short of requiring the vaccine or a booster shot. We're really trying to get the city to negotiate over this first before doing anything.”
Causes of action include violations of constitutionally protected autonomous privacy rights.
“There is no option except to get vaccinated,” McBride said. “That's the only option and that’s contrary to California constitutional rights, which they apparently don’t care about.”