A group of former United Airlines workers have filed suit against their former employer, claiming they were wrongly fired for refusing to take a Covid vaccine, and want their jobs back, plus $30 million, after they say it has been shown that the vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission of the coronavirus.
United is a major commercial airline based in Chicago that operates domestic and international flights. It currently operates a fleet of approximately 834 aircraft and employs approximately 67,000 people.
On January 19, multiple named plaintiffs and others filed a new class action lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against United Airlines, Inc. and related defendants. The lawsuit claims that the named plaintiffs and others were subjected to violations of the Genetic Information Non-Disclosure Act (GINA) as a result of their objection to and request for religious accommodations in response to United’s coronavirus vaccine mandate.
Workers were either fired or threatened with termination, according to the complaint, after the airline refused to recognize their allegedly genuine religious objections to the company’s order for a Covid-19 vaccine. According to the complaint, this is a violation of Title VII, which protects religious freedoms.
If they were not fired, the lawsuit claims they were placed on indefinite unpaid furlough and lived in constant fear of being fired. United considered this a reasonable accommodation, according to the complaint.
According to the complaint, after granting religious accommodations, United went a step further, requiring those workers to wear “individually identifiable symbols,” which the plaintiffs claim violates GINA by visually segregating and identifying them from their peers as conscientious objectors, even making public disclosure of their private health matters.
According to the plaintiffs, this resulted in a hostile and toxic work environment in which employees were allegedly subjected to isolation, open discrimination, and harassment by their peers and even the general public.
The Covid vaccines offered to United employees are considered “misnomers” by definition, according to the complaint, because they are not traditional vaccines as understood by the general public and the medical community.
Traditional vaccines, according to the complaint, are developed to allow one’s cells to “learn” how to fight off a virus and produce immunity by injecting a recipient with whole or part of a harmless bacteria or virus.
In contrast, the Coronovirus virus “vaccine” uses various genetic material, allegedly untested on humans, designed to trigger an immune response that, in theory, would reduce or prevent the virus from being contracted.
The plaintiffs claim that the vaccines required of United’s employees are still unproven. They claim there is still no real-world evidence that the vaccines have had any effect on reducing the spread of the virus or the rate at which people become infected.
The vaccines were also given an Emergency Use Authorization (EAU) after the World Health Organization declared the Covid outbreak a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” in late January 2020, according to the complaint.
Plaintiffs contend that United’s vaccine mandate violated their religious rights by forcing them to choose between keeping their jobs and violating their religious objections to an injection that they claim amounts to “gene therapy” and was developed using genetic material obtained in part from aborted human fetuses.
This, they claim, distinguishes Covid vaccines from traditional vaccines against diseases such as chicken pox or measles.
Other companies have been forced to defend their vaccine mandates in court.
Employees at NorthShore University Health System, for example, received a $10 million settlement from their employer to end their lawsuit against the north suburban hospital system over claims that the company attempted to “purge” its ranks of religious employees using the mandate.
The plaintiffs in the United case are asking the court to award them $30 million in damages and to reinstate employees who were fired, retired, or separated from the company as a result of the vaccine mandate.