New York City Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch is threatening to sue if the city requires officers to get one of the COVID-19 vaccines. “We will take legal action to defend our members’ right to make such personal medical decisions,” Lynch said on Wednesday. Mayor Bill de Blasio, and any public official in the same position, should confidently call the bluff. Recent decisions by federal judges (not to mention more than a century of settled precedent) make clear that Lynch’s legal position is extremely weak. And the legal argument has little chance of success for very good reason: Vaccine mandates have long been a common part of American society, and claims that deciding whether or not to get vaccinated is merely a “personal medical decision” are transparently nonsensical.
As the conservative media-industrial complex sows skepticism about safe and effective vaccines while encouraging their viewers to take useless (or worse) horse deworming medicine, lawsuits challenging vaccine mandates were inevitable. Indeed, eight students at Indiana University were able to get prominent conservative litigator James Bopp Jr. to take their case challenging the university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The students drew a favorable panel from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, as the case was assigned to the longtime conservative stalwart Frank Easterbrook and two judges nominated by Donald Trump. If any judicial audience could be expected to be sympathetic to claims that COVID-19 vaccine mandates were unconstitutional, this would be it. Which makes the panel’s unanimous and nearly contemptuous dismissal of their claims all the more striking.
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