By Christine Jordan Sexton
FloridaPolitics.com
November 9, 2021
Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida legislative leaders early Monday outlined four pieces of legislation lawmakers will tackle during a Special Session scheduled to start next week.
The bills are aimed at thwarting vaccine mandates imposed by public and private employers — and which are being pursued by the President Joe Biden‘s administration.
“We’re going to strike a blow for freedom,” DeSantis said.
It’s not clear whether bills will address workers compensation issues or penalize private businesses that push vaccine mandates by eliminating COVID-19 liability protections, as the Governor has previously hinted at.
At press time the exact wording in the legislative proposals had not been released to the public. But according to information released by legislative leaders, Sens. Danny Burgess and Reps. Ralph Massullo and Erin Grall are sponsoring SB2 and HB 1B, respectively.
The bills prohibit employers from having a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for employees without providing staff with five options to opt-out of the vaccine mandate, including exceptions for pregnancies or expected pregnancies; religious reasons; or immunity based on prior COVID-19 infection as determined by a lab test. The bills also allow staff who are willing to undergo periodic testing (at the employer’s cost) and staff who are willing to wear personal protective equipment to opt-out of vaccines.
Rogue employers that fire staff for refusing to get vaccinated could face fines of up to $50,000, or they could avoid the fines by reinstating the fired employees. The Florida Department of Health, meanwhile, is empowered to levy upward of $5,000 in fines against public employers who violate the law.
The bill also gives parents the right to sue to stop the mandate and can recover their attorney fees and court costs to help ensure the above provisions regarding their children are not violated.
The bills also amend a law the Legislature passed earlier this Session called the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” and would also amend statutes to prohibit municipalities from requiring COVID-19 vaccinations as a condition of employment. Moreover, the bills also amend the 2021 law to codify an emergency rule passed by the DeSantis administration that gives parents the right to decide whether their children wear masks at school.
Meanwhile SB 4B and HB 3B, sponsored by Burgess, Massullo and Grall, provides a public records exemption for workers’ medical information or information regarding an employee’s religious beliefs in case there is an investigation into whether an employer is violating the law.
Sen.Travis Hutson and Rep. Ardian Zika are sponsoring SB 6B and HB 5B, respectively, which lay the groundwork for the state to withdraw from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and assert state jurisdiction over occupational safety and health issues.
Lastly Sen. Aaron Bean and Rep. Alex Andrade are sponsoring SB 8B and HB 7B, respectively, which deletes a provision from Florida law that enables the state health officer to mandate vaccinations during a public health emergency.
An incredible abuse of power.
How so?
Deliberate and intentional state legislation designed to remove from federal oversight under the 14th and 15th Amendments state laws designed to disenfranchise and protect workers from abuse. And deliberate effort to penalize those that disagree with arbitrary state mandates – no matter how ill considered, illegal, or punitive. Florida remains a state of the union – and is not a sovereign nation.
You have held yourself out before as having been trained as a lawyer (even though you are apparently no longer eligible to practice law.) Did you miss class in law school on the day these amendments were discussed? Neither has any bearing on the proposed legislation in the above article. The 14th essentially provides for equal protection and due process. The 15th prohibits racial discrimination in voting rights. You have inappropriately cited these amendments before. You need to stop. You are embarrassing yourself.
Stephen – You may check my profile and my good standing with both the Florida and Virginia Bars. At 75, I am not in active practice – but graduating with a BA from the University of Virginia and JD from William and Mary, I actually understand what’s going on in Florida. My comments seem to have made an impression. Good.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxv
Bob, in your dotage you confused what I posted. Of course they are Reconstruction Amendments. I never said otherwise. They DO NOT pertain to the proposed legislation referenced in the article. Pro tip: posting while addled is not a good look.
Have fun, Stephen. I did not confuse what you posted. We will see. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/politics/employer-vaccine-mandates.html
Pro tip: Research more, snark less. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/doj-moves-to-merge-challenges-to-bidens-vaccine-or-test-rule
Try harder Stephen. Both the 14th and 15th Amendments are post Civil War Reconstruction Amendments. We also have a Federal Supremacy Clause in the Constitution for good reason.
The abuse of power is coming from the Biden administration. Evidence is mounting that the vaccines are neither safe or effective and that their efficacy drops off dramatically after 6 months while natural immunity from having covid is far more effective than the vaccines themselves.
Sure, Barnes.
Mr. Moore, you are terribly misinformed.
Sorry Mark. I am far more informed than those like you. The abuse of power comes from forcing mandates, not by allowing people to make their own decisions. That there is a growing body of evidence that vaccine efficacy drops dramatically after 6 months is lost on liberals like you. That anywhere where Ivermecin has been widely used has seen dramatic reductions in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths is lost on you. Case in point is Uttar Pradesh, India – plus other states in India – with a population of over 200 million with 15% vax’d and a running 7 day average cases between 10-15. Total active cases as of November 8 was 83 with 11 new cases. Case counts dropped dramatically after an aggressive to distribute Ivermectin was undertaken in April with less than 5% of the population vaccinated. Case counts not only plummeted, they flatlined. Compare that to Germany with a population of over 80 million and 70% vaccinated. Their 7 day case count dropped to 578 as of July 1. On November 3, their case count skyrocketed to 34,498 with a running 7 day average of 19,907.
You and other liberals posting here make unfounded assertions that are simply detached from reality. I provide hard data to support my view. Once you start doing the same, maybe you can gain some level of credibility.
Anywhere where Ivermectin has not been widely used has also seen dramatic reductions in cases, hospitalization, and deaths. It’s the nature of Covid and other infectious diseases to ebb and flow.
Correlation does not imply causation. Your “hard data” doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.
Except there has been no ebb and flow where Ivermectin has been used and continues to be used. You need to read harder. You apparently missed the part re: Germany cases bottomed out in July, only to surge again in November. Meanwhile, in a state where only 15% of the population has been vaccinated has seen no such surge since late April. While Germany cases spiked to over 34,000 on November 3, UP total cases as of November 9 stood at a whopping 85 with total new cases at 8. Those are not the only examples. Mexico City saw a 74% drop in mortality after wide spread use. Similar results were found in Delhi, Karnataka, Goa, and Uttarakhand. Other states in India that elected not to use Ivermectin saw case counts surge – Tamil Nadu up 173%, Assam up 240%, Kerala used IVM on a limited bases in April then stopped altogether in August and case counts nearly trippled to just under 30,000.
In addition to Germany, other countries with a high percentage of the population vaccinated are seeing surges – Israel, Iceland, and Ireland are examples. You can also measure against any state in the US – Massachusetts with 70% vaccinated and a population of under 7 million still has a running 7 day average of over 1200, Maine’s running 7 day average of 703 is nearly double what it was on October 10 with a population of 1.3 million.
The FLCCC website and the BIRD website provide multiple testimonials from practicing doctors and patients who have been treated – you should spend some time looking at them.
And just a bit more for now, mounting evidence in the form of observational studies from Israel, the U.S., and the U.K. to now a national population study from Sweden suggests significant challenges in actual durability of COVID-19 vaccines. While the Swedish study has yet to be peer reviewed, it’s findings are troubling to say the least.
“Results showed that the COVID-19 vaccines used in Sweden wane in effectiveness over time, corresponding with other observational study results. For example, the one approved vaccine in America, Pfizer’s BNT162b2 (“Comirnaty) starts off at 92% effectiveness yet by month number four (4) wanes in effectiveness to 47% (95% CI, 39-55, P<0·001). After month 6 the authors detected no effectiveness (23%; 95% CI, -2-41, P=0·07) and this obviously is a key rationale for booster programs in wealthy nations such as America, the UK, and Israel.
Following other studies, Moderna’s vaccine has shown to be a bit more durable as its mRNA-1273 vaccine effectiveness wanes less than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine does. For example, the team reports that the overall effectiveness waned slightly slower at 59% (95% CI, 18-79) by day 181 onwards. The Swedish study results aligned with others that AstraZeneca’s ChAd0x1 nCoV-19 afforded less protection while effectively waned faster with no effectiveness by month four (66%; 95% CI, 41-80). Overall vaccine effectiveness declined with male and the elderly.
What about protection against severe COVID-19? The aggregate of all three vaccines in Sweden vaccine product performance waned from 89% (95% CI, 82-93, P<0·001) at day 15-30 to 42% ((95% CI, -35-75, P=0·21) from day 181 (month 4) and beyond. Again, sensitivity analysis demonstrated even worse performance with males, the elderly, and immunocompromised”.
Again you’re confusing correlation with causation. You’re asserting that low rates of infection are the result of ivermectin use. However, in every instance of widespread ivermectin use (see Latin America) there have been high rates of infection. Your claim (along with debunked sites like FLCCC) that ivermectin is responsible for current low rates of infection ignores the obvious, and that is the role of natural immunity in a population that suffered extremely high rates of infection. The problem of course is, you have to survive Covid first – a feat which over 5 million were unable to accomplish. The CDC is now tracking hospitalizations of vaccinated vs non-vaccinated. The data is “hard” as you like to say.
There is no confusion at all on my part, but clearly there is on yours. Your claim of wide-spread natural immunity in Latin America due to high infection rates is ridiculous. Let’s look at the data – which for you appears to be very hard to do. The total population in Latin America is over 662 million. Total infections in Latin America are 46.3 million – less than 10%. So, yes, that is a high rate, but no where near enough to claim natural immunity is wide spread. What we know is that anywhere Ivermectin has been widely used has seen dramatically improved results to anyone who cares to look. Furthermore, claiming that the FLCCC site has been debunked reveals you to be nothing more than a partisan hack. The FLCCC Alliance is a 501c3 non-profit made up of practicing doctors who actually treat patients, unlike Fauci who has not seen a patient since 1968. They have developed, and refined, treatment protocols and made them freely available on their website. One of the founding doctors is Paul Marik. He is the second most published critical care doctor in the history of medicine, with more than 500 peer reviewed papers and books, 43,000 scholarly citations of his work, and a research “H” rating higher than many Nobel Prize winners. I think I will take his advice over yours or Fauci’s. So, care to tell me who it is that debunked the FLCCC?
I get the Republican and conservative viewpoints, although generally they are quite misguided and misinformed. But aside from that, there is the troubling fact that conservatives have grown more antisocial, anti-community, and anti-democracy as the years have gone on. The fears they hold allow demagogues, such as Mr. Trump, to take over the narrative. It is not alarmist to say that their actions allow fascism to become the norm.
A look at Japan will show similar results with Ivermectin, Hundreds of Congress members and Aids have used Ivermectin.
( Dr. Pierre Kory) Mr. Moore is correct. Any treatment available destroys the need for EUA, Comarnity, the approved
vaccine will not be available until 2024. My stance is children need to be protected from a disease with a 99.99%
survival rate. Perhaps a better diet, more time outside and a vitamin daily and this would be a non issue.
Disclaimer: I avow no medical advise was given or intended to deceive.