AUSTIN, Texas — The days of seeing Texas health care workers in full protective equipment in drive-thru COVID testing lines are long gone. But conversations about the deadly disease and vaccination against it are not.
When COVID vaccines were made available, some companies required their employees to get a shot. The fact that some businesses still mandate this is not OK with one Republican state representative.
“COVID vaccine mandates are tyrannical. They are violative of medical freedom. They have no place in the great state of Texas. And we’ve got to work to abolish them here, too,” said Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian.
CVS Health requires certain employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID and get booster shots. Meta, the platform that operates Facebook and Instagram, also requires a shot to work in the office.
Ahead of the 88th legislative session, the governor said one of his priorities was to end COVID restrictions forever. Lawmakers almost achieved that by passing legislation that says government entities are prohibited from requiring COVID-related masks, vaccines or business shutdowns.
“That was a fine bill,” Rep. Harrison said. “I voted for it. It’s fine.”
But the law doesn’t touch the private sector, which means places like hospitals and schools can still have COVID vaccine mandates. Rep. Harrison wants the governor to call a special session to ban COVID mandates at businesses, but that’s unlikely to happen.
“Just as employees have the right to work where they want, employers have the right to hire who they want, as long as they’re not discriminating, right? So, people who are unvaccinated are not a protected class under federal law or state law,” said Carliss Chatman, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University. “I think a lot of politicians are trying to make it as if the unvaccinated are a protected class, but they’re not. It’s not the same as saying, ‘I’m not going to hire women, or I’m not going to hire people who are overweight, or I’m not going to hire people who don’t have straight hair.’”
Chatman adds if you don’t like the requirements of a job, you don’t have to take it.
“We all are adults, and we all have freedom of contract, and we all suffer the consequences or get the benefits of our economic decisions,” Chatman said. “And it’s not for the government to come in and mandate what a workplace should look like, beyond things that are patently discriminatory.”
Rep. Harrison calls himself a “small government guy” but says legislative action is needed to protect employees who may be let go if they refuse to get a COVID vaccination.
“I want government out of the affairs of business,” he said. “But the reason we have to do this is to correct a bad government action. It was the government that incentivized the private sector mandates by giving the employers liability protection if they mandated a vaccine on their employees. So we’ve got to pass a bill to protect medical freedom to undo the bad government distortions that created these mandates in the first place.”
The state legislature also passed a bill during the regular session that says businesses who do not require vaccination are not liable for “injury or death caused by the exposure of an individual to the pandemic disease through an employee or contractor of the business.”
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