University of California COVID Vaccine Lawsuit Moves Forward, Despite Setback

by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

Originally published by The Defender

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A class action lawsuit against the University of California (UC) on behalf of employees affected by the university’s system-wide COVID-19 vaccine mandate will move forward, despite a decision this week by the California Supreme Court that favored the defendant.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the plaintiffs’ request to compel a lower court to revisit its dismissal of one of their key legal claims — that when the university mandated COVID-19 vaccines it violated the Nuremberg Code and California law.

The Nuremberg Code, which is also codified in California law, prohibits experimenting on humans without their full and free informed consent.

The court’s decision applies only to that one claim, which is part of the larger class action lawsuit filed by a diverse group of employees who allege that UC’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate violated their rights to privacy and bodily autonomy — including their rights to make an informed decision to decline the shot.

According to the complaint, the university compounded those violations by withholding information the university had about the COVID-19 vaccines’ true risks and minimal benefits. The complaint noted that the UC system includes the largest hospital system in California and a massive research apparatus, where COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy studies took place.

“One of the interesting things about the case is that it addresses two sides of informed consent,” plaintiffs’ attorney Jeremy Friedman told The Defender.

It questions whether “consent” can be fully granted if someone’s job is under threat. But it also raises the question about what it means to be informed — because UC had access to a “treasure trove” of COVID-19 vaccine data that it never shared with students and faculty.

Some employees involved in the suit declined to take the shots and were terminated, denied hospital privileges or forcibly removed from campus. Others took the shots, unaware of the harm they could cause, and suffered serious vaccine injuries. Others took shots they didn’t want in order to keep their jobs.

All of them allege, on behalf of themselves and the class, that the mandate violated their rights. Those rights include the “jus cogens,” or compelling law claims based in international law, and also the constitutional- and state-guaranteed right to information and privacy in their medical decisions.

They also allege the university violated their state rights under the Fair Employment and Housing Act by making unnecessary medical inquiries about their vaccine status and by unlawfully retaliating against the employees who were terminated for refusing the shots.

The case began when one of the plaintiffs, Dr. Christopher Rake, was escorted out of a UCLA Health medical center in 2021 after attempting to go to work without taking the shot.

In an X video of his expulsion that went viral, Rake explained what was happening and said he was willing to lose everything to stand up for the cause — to protect his and everyone’s rights to be fully informed of proposed medical interventions and to make their own decisions about whether to undergo treatment, according to the complaint.

Rake declined to seek a religious exemption — although he would have been eligible — and declined to take the shot in order to argue for his human rights.

Other plaintiffs included Jan Maisel, M.D., Ph.D., who was injured by her first Moderna injection. When she refused to take a second shot, Marin Health suspended her privileges to practice. Even after her privileges were restored through a medical exemption, Maisel’s injuries made her unable to practice.

Another plaintiff, William Robinson, Ph.D., opposed the mandatory vaccination policy but took the shots to keep his job. He and others feared retaliation by the university and were threatened with termination if they did not comply, the complaint said.

The employees are representative of a group of potentially 200,000 class members, plaintiffs’ attorney Warner Mendenhall told The Defender.

“This case is one of the largest, maybe the largest filed over the COVID mandates,” Mendenhall said. “Many members of the class may not yet even be aware of the lawsuit.”

Friedman said the central remaining claim in the case is the right to privacy. “The California Constitution has an express provision protecting the inalienable right to privacy, and courts have recognized the right to autonomy privacy, and the right to informational privacy.”

He noted that there are now many scientific studies showing the harm caused and the lack of benefit from COVID-19 vaccines and that UC holds a lot of data about the vaccines that it didn’t make public. Through discovery, “Plaintiffs intend to expose the university’s long history of involvement with the failed genetic modified technology.”

Superior Court Judge Michael Markman in June dismissed plaintiffs’ specific claims under international law and the California Health and Safety Code relating to minimum protections granted to human subjects in medical experiments.

The plaintiffs then petitioned an appellate court to reverse that decision. In September, the appellate court declined to do so and plaintiffs appealed to the state Supreme Court.

They asked the court to decide on what they called “one of the most important questions of human rights in the modern era” — whether the university could be held accountable for the damage caused by mandating experimental biologics and withholding treatment from vaccine-injured people.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and Vera Sharav, holocaust survivor and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, submitted an amicus brief to the court on behalf of the plaintiffs.

CHD and Sharav said the case gave the court the chance to:

“Restore faith in our legal and academic institutions, after a time when Californians and others worldwide observed in horror as fundamental rights of informed consent, bodily autonomy, and basic human dignity were disregarded by institutions such as the University of California, the real party in interest here, in favor of money from the pharmaceutical industry and government during the Pandemic.

“The University showed its allegiance not to core human rights principles but instead to lining its coffers and obeying authority, resulting in significant harm to its employees and students. The University engaged in further unethical conduct by denying medical care to those harmed by its mandate.”

It is indisputable that the COVID-19 injections were experimental, CHD and Sharav wrote. By compelling employees and students to take the shots, the university violated the Nuremberg Code and California law.

“This Court now has an opportunity to check future misuse of public health policies that violate informed consent principles, California law, and the Nuremberg Code,” they wrote.

Friedman told The Defender that although it was disappointing the Supreme Court had declined to hear their request, the case was continuing on all of the other legal claims.

The defendants had asked the Superior Court to dismiss all of those claims — there were six— but the court allowed all but one to move forward. Friedman also noted that even the international rights claims could eventually be heard, once the rest of the case was decided.

“The court of appeals noted that plaintiffs will be able to appeal the dismissal of the jus cogens claim after judgment is entered on the remaining claims,” he said. “That means plaintiffs will still be able to raise the issues addressed in the amicus letter, just at a later date.”

CHD General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg told The Defender the organization was happy to file the amicus brief.

“While it is disappointing that the Court did not take the case, we are hopeful that these issues will be addressed later,” she said. “This case is a putative class action with the potential to impact hundreds of thousands in the University of California system and the case remains active in the lower court. We will be following this important case closely as plaintiffs are seeking crucial discovery from UC.”

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Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's from the University of Texas at Austin.