Medical Ethicist at UC Irvine on leave for challenging vaccine mandate

Re:Medical Ethicist at UC Irvine on leave for challenging va... by tfehring on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @10:43PM (#28781213)

Worth mentioning that "challenging" here means suing his employer in federal court! In any context, it seems pretty reasonable to place an employee on paid leave while that employee is in the process of suing you!

Separately, from the earlier linked Substack post, this seems to be the context of the lawsuit:

> Natural immunity following Covid infection is equal to (indeed, superior to) vaccine-mediated immunity. Thus, forcing those with natural immunity to be vaccinated introduces unnecessary risks without commensurate benefits—either to individuals or to the population as a whole—and violates their equal protection rights guaranteed under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

Are state-run university systems generally held to be subject to the 14th Amendment under the law? It seems like public K12 schools are [0] but I'm not a lawyer and a quick search didn't turn up anything that explicitly states one way or the other.

Also, the benefits of getting vaccinated are clearly significant even for people who've already had COVID. Whether the risks are "unnecessary" and whether the benefits are commensurate with those risks varies on a case by case basis. But even when they are, that certainly doesn't follow trivially from the fact that "natural immunity following Covid infection is equal to (indeed, superior to) vaccine-mediated immunity," as the author's usage of "thus" suggests.

[0] https://www.concordlawschool.edu/blog/constitutional-law/14t...

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Re:Medical Ethicist at UC Irvine on leave for challenging va... by torstenvl on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @11:08PM (#28781389)

> Are state-run university systems generally held to be subject to the 14th Amendment under the law?

Yes. See Bakke, Grutter, Gratz, etc.

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Re:Medical Ethicist at UC Irvine on leave for challenging va... by mc32 on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @10:49PM (#28781255)

Are you expecting people who sue companies for harassment, etc., to be put on reduced salary paid leave?

That seems like a nice tool to have to suppress suits.

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Re:Medical Ethicist at UC Irvine on leave for challenging va... by tfehring on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @10:59PM (#28781314)

No, they should get their full salary, as the author is. The overtime complicates things, I'd personally lean toward including the overtime pay they were projected to have earned to avoid creating the chilling effect you describe (either in perception or reality), but I can see the case for excluding it too.

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Re:Medical Ethicist at UC Irvine on leave for challenging va... by mc32 on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @11:26PM (#28781486)

It's more than overtime, see:

"since half of my income from the University comes from clinical revenues generated from seeing my patients, supervising resident clinics, and engaging in weekend and holiday on-call duties. So while on leave my salary is significantly cut. Furthermore, my contract stipulates that I am not able to conduct any patient care outside the University..."

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Re:Medical Ethicist at UC Irvine on leave for challenging va... by temp8964 on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @10:46PM (#28781234)

> In any context, it seems pretty reasonable to place an employee on paid leave while that employee is in the process of suing you!

It doesn't seem reasonable to me at all.

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Re:Medical Ethicist at UC Irvine on leave for challenging va... by shlant on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @11:04PM (#28781358)

from a business prospective it seems like a "reasonable" course of action, but of course not all business decisions are "reasonable" from an ethical perspective.

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