Six workers suing Oregon governor say they have ‘natural immunity’ against COVID
Six workers have sued Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and the state’s health authority, saying that a COVID-19 vaccine mandate violates their civil rights — and because they have “natural immunity” since they’ve already had the virus.
The lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. district court in Eugene says that the mandate deprives the workers “of their ability to refuse unwanted medical care in violation of their constitutional right to privacy, bodily autonomy and personal liberty.” The suit also names Patrick Allen, director of the Oregon Health Authority, as a defendant.
“The State has no compelling interest in coercing plaintiffs into taking a COVID-19 vaccine, because Oregon has no compelling interest in treating employees with natural immunity any differently from employees who obtained immunity from a vaccine, nor is mandatory vaccination an appropriate least-restrictive means for the State to achieve any compelling interest,” the lawsuit states.
Brown issued an executive order in August requiring certain state employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Oct. 18. Also in August, the Oregon Health Authority issued a temporary order requiring health care workers and school employees to be vaccinated for COVID-19, also by Oct. 18.
Brown and Allen are being sued by six employees, including two correctional officers, a bus driver, an office manager, an EMT and a special agent at the Oregon Department of Justice. All six workers got sick with COVID-19, recovered and “have natural immunity to the virus at least as robust, durable and long-lasting as that artificially achieved through vaccination.” the lawsuit states.
McClatchy News didn’t immediately receive a response to a request for comment from Brown or the health authority.
Brown’s office gave KATU a statement regarding whether workers would lose their jobs if they don’t get shots:
“The Governor’s goal is to keep our schools, businesses, and communities open. Our hospitals are full, and our doctors, nurses, and health care workers are being stretched beyond their limits. Hospitalizations have increased nearly 1000% since July 9. The vast majority of Oregonians hospitalized for COVID-19 are unvaccinated. People are dying right now when we have safe, effective, and free vaccines readily available. The Governor is responding to a public health crisis.”
A June 2021 study found that being reinfected with COVID-19 is rare but there are higher risks for some, McClatchy News reported.
A study of more than 9,000 medical records of people who had severe COVID-19 found that 63 people — or less than 1% — got the disease again in an average of 3.5 months after testing positive for the first time.
Another recent study out of Kentucky showed patients with prior COVID-19 infections who remained unvaccinated were more than twice as likely to get reinfected than fully vaccinated ones, McClatchy News reported earlier this month.
While more research needs to be done to compare the level of protection afforded by infection compared to vaccination, experts still recommend getting a shot even after you’ve been infected.
“There’s nothing deleterious about getting a boost to an immune response that you’ve had before,” Dr. Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, told The New York Times. “You could get an actually even better immune response by boosting whatever immunity you had from the first infection by a vaccine.”
More than 208 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, accounting for 62.9% of the population, as of Sept. 10, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 177 million eligible people are fully vaccinated.
This story was originally published September 10, 2021 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Six workers suing Oregon governor say they have ‘natural immunity’ against COVID."