(LifeSiteNews) – Legal challenges to COVID-19 vaccine mandates have begun in the U.S., with the first lawsuit against compulsory coronavirus vaccination filed late last month in New Mexico.
Corrections officer Isaac Legaretta sued his supervisors and local officials on February 28, after New Mexico’s Doña Ana County mandated COVID-19 vaccine injections for all first responders.
In his complaint, Legaretta said he had been threatened with termination and written up at work multiple times for refusing to accept experimental COVID-19 vaccination. The county gave Legaretta just five days to provide proof of vaccination, according to a memo from February that he provided. Legaretta is seeking an injunction to block his termination or to reinstate him in the event that he loses his job.
Doña Ana initially announced in January that all first responders in the county, including police officers and detention center employees, must receive COVID-19 shots as a condition for continued employment.
“It is required that, if you have not already started your vaccinations, that you be vaccinated with your first dose on one of those days, or contact Human Resources for accommodation,” a January 29 notice from County Manager Fernando Macias read. “Being vaccinated is a requirement and a condition of on-going employment with the County due to the significant health and safety risks posed by contracting or spreading COVID-19.”
The COVID-19 vaccines, being rolled out in the U.S. have been approved only with emergency use authorization (EUA) by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Federal law indicates that products granted EUA cannot be mandated, as Legaretta’s complaint argues. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in August also stated that COVID-19 vaccines “are not allowed to be mandatory.”
There is no New Mexico law providing for compulsory vaccination during a public health emergency, and the state health department has said that it will not try to require people to take the shots.
“This is a case where the supervisor is just dead wrong. They absolutely don’t have the right to force anyone to take an experimental medical product,” said Ana Garner, Legaretta’s attorney, adding that people have “an absolute right to refuse” COVID-19 vaccines.
“The stakes are extremely high,” Garner told the Activist Post in a recent interview. “We want to go to the Supreme Court with this,” she said. “Our ultimate outcome is to get a declaratory judgment… saying that the federal law concerning emergency use authorization is superior to any mandate that could be passed in the state.”
“But what’s at stake here are our medical freedoms, our liberties, bodily integrity, our right to choose any sort of medical intervention. This is a critical issue. We are not human guinea pigs, nor should we be treated that way,” she said.
COVID-19 vaccine mandates are a form of “experimenting on humans” and thereby violate the post-World War II Nuremberg Code, says Garner, calling them “a crime against humanity.” “This is a crime against humanity for these organizations and counties, and now the Department of Defense, trying to get all of our military vaccinated,” said Garner.
New Mexico Stands Up!, the public interest group that Garner works with, has filed another lawsuit challenging New Mexico’s “public health emergency” declaration for COVID-19. “We have uncovered enough info, enough evidence to show that the death count has been grossly inflated, that the PCR tests are meaningless, and that … the myth of asymptomatic transmission is completely untrue,” said Garner.
Late last year, Minnesota lawmakers reported that death certificate data showed that the state’s official COVID-19 death count was inflated by around 40 percent. The legislators pointed to perverse financial incentives for hospitals to misdiagnose patients with coronavirus.
Several studies have found that top COVID-19 testing methods have serious accuracy issues, and have busted the theory that the virus spreads through asymptomatic carriers, throwing doubt on claims that COVID-19 is a continuing “health emergency.”
“The nice thing about this lawsuit is that if we show that there’s no public health emergency, that also will feed into being able to challenge the emergency use authorization, because the emergency has to exist, and as long as the emergency exists, the emergency use authorization is valid,” said Garner. “Once the emergency is no longer there, then also [COVID-19 vaccines] lose their emergency use authorization status, so we’re looking at that at a national level.”
“We have the right to choose what goes into our body,” Garner added. “And so, I say to people, even the COVID disease, yes it does kill people, but it’s not as bad as what we’re seeing with the reactions. And I think that there are going to be far more adverse effects that show up years later, in the form of autoimmune disorders, in the form of increased inflammation types of related diseases,” said Garner.
“We have to stand our ground. And this is why it’s gotten into this position. We’ve had too many people capitulate to authority. This is an unbridled, tyrannical expression of authority that I have never seen in my lifetime,” said Garner.
-Raymond Wolff
Raymond Wolff writes for LifeSite.com. This article was originally published on LifeSite.com on March 26. Reprinted with permission.