During the October 12, 2021 Leesburg Town Council meeting, Councilwoman Suzanne Fox made the following public statement denouncing vaccine mandates.
Suzanne Fox
Leesburg Town Council
Comments from Suzanne after the meeting:
Tonight my comments concerning the vaccine mandate Leesburg imposed on its employees were cut off because council decided my perspective was not important enough to hear me out. Here are my full comments. Half the comments were made before the vote, with the remainder delivered after the vote during council member comments.
Full Comment to the Board:
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I will not be supporting this measure. I believe the legality of this measure is questionable at best and that it is bad public policy.
I understand that the go-to narrative when the government intends to overreach and do something egregious is that its about “public safety.” But simply evoking the term “public safety” does not give us carte blanche to do whatever we want. When the government takes action that exceeds its normal authority, or infringes on fundamental rights, it must demonstrate the public safety need is extraordinary and pressing, and that the measures contemplated are absolutely necessary to abate the public safety hazard. (in legalese this is phrased as “the least restrictive means of accomplishing a compelling state interest”) No one has demonstrated any such thing here.
I can say with perfectly clarity that I agree that COVID is an extremely contagious disease. And there are certainly areas of the country right now that have a serious issue with a resurgence of Covid. Leaders in those areas will have to make policies to address the real dangers Covid poses for their constituents. Leesburg is NOT one of those places. Its not our job to concern ourselves with the health issues of Florida or Texas, and we certainly can’t use their ongoing health crisis to justify our own over-reach.
Several council members repeatedly stated that it is our responsibility to provide our employees with a safe work environment. I absolutely agree tha it is our job to ensure a safe workplace. However, what is the evidence that allowing our employees to make their own healthcare choices is compromising the safety of the work environment here in this building? Nobody has provided a scintilla of evidence that the town’s work environment is unsafe.
The fact is, Loudoun County and Leesburg are one of the safest places to be in the entire country. Loudoun County has one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, WITHOUT anyone forcing such measures on them. 75% of adults in Loudoun are already fully vaccinated. We have had a relatively low rate of new infections and a vanishingly small number of Covid fatalities in the last 6 months. LESS than the fatalities we would expect to see from influenza during a typical flu season. So where is the public health emergency? What makes anyone think that if we don’t insert ourselves into others’ personal healthcare and threaten them with their jobs… that our workplace will not be safe? Again, if staff or anyone on this dais has data to support this extraordinary claim, bring it forward. Because we certainly haven’t seen it yet. And without that evidence, frankly, I think it is extremely irresponsible to suggest to our employees that their workplace is currently unsafe, and will remain so unless the town adopts this measure.
The fact that there IS NO public health emergency in Loudoun distinguishes our situation from the scenario in “Jacobson v. Massachusetts” that our town attorney referenced as a legal precedent for the measure before us. At the time of that case, Massachusetts was dealing a major outbreak of smallpox, a disease that killed up to 1/5 of those infected. The fact that there was an active outbreak and the unique lethality of smallpox played a key role in the courts reasoning. However, even beyond the fact that the court in Jacobson was looking at a very different fact pattern than what we face today, its not even clear that this 120-year-old case (with very different circumstances) is still good law. Since that time cases like Griswald v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade have firmly established a fundamental right to privacy and bodily autonomy in our Constitutional jurisprudence that the Jacobson court did not account for. It is entirely unclear that a modern court, recognizing the now established rights of privacy and bodily autonomy would come down the same way on this issue…and would almost certainly find the infringement of those rights problematic when no evidence of a serious public health issue has been demonstrated.
Accordingly, there are multiple current lawsuits on this very issue causing some jurisdictions to avoid or roll back thier mandates. I believe it is irresponsible to jump into this decision prematurely when the legal issues and standards are still being worked out, as we are exposing ourselves to legal liability in a civil rights lawsuit.
Speaking of lawsuits… Some of us have been visited and contacted via other methods about how detrimental this action will be. We also have a huge contingent of employees afraid to come and speak out for fear of getting into trouble. They have been “spoken to” by their superiors, so in essence they have been silenced. There is local precedent against this…as recently as a few months ago a county employee was terminated for actually speaking his mind at a public meeting. His reinstatement was ordered…and now there are legal consequences for the jurisdiction.
But even if it would be technically legal to require employees to be vaccinated (which I contend is a dubious proposition), the federal mandate that serves as the impetus of this policy will almost certainly be challenged in the Supreme Court.
(Comments cutoff here by the board)
Tonight we voted for Bad Public Policy, based in Divisiveness and Fear, with the intention of being punitive.
Above and beyond the legal issues, I believe what we did evening is enacted bad policy. This action was invasive, divisive and unnecessary. It infantilizes our employees by suggesting that they cannot be trusted to make their own healthcare decisions. It is utterly condescending, and the very height of hubris to suggest that we need to make healthcare choices for our employees, all adults who have access to the same data, statistics and information that we do, because “we know what’s good for them”.
Because we voted for this, we have created a precedent that it is OK for the town, as an employer, to insert itself into the private healthcare decisions of our employees. Think about where that road could lead…do we really want to go there? And before anyone suggests that this is a one-time thing, justified because of the extraordinary circumstances, I’ve already noted that no one had demonstrated any such circumstances. If we can justify this kind of intrusion with such minimal evidence of any sort of emergency, we’ve essentially created the lowest possible bar for future intrusive actions.
We should have more respect for our employees. We should respect their liberty. We should respect their right to bodily autonomy. We should respect their privacy. And most of all we should trust them to make their own choices regarding how to protect themselves and their fellow employees.
I know some will try to spin it…but his is not a vote about whether or not you are pro-vaccination. You can be adamantly pro-vaccination and still understand that authoritarian measures which infringe on the autonomy, liberty and privacy of our employees is a bad idea. Given the fact that the aphorism “my body, my choice” has controlled the political and legal narrative on other issues for decades, it shouldn’t be a stretch for anyone one this dais to apply the same logic on the issue before us now.
I have heard the suggestion from various individuals, including some sitting at this dais, that those who oppose vaccine mandates do not care about people. This is stunningly audacious and complete nonsense. My position, and the position of those like-minded, is based on the fact that we trust people. I trust people. I trust people to make their own decisions. Our republic was founded on this trust; a commitment to the principle that our populace is capable of handling self-governance and liberty. If we are no longer of that mind, then we have a bigger problem than Covid.
I understand that some feel that we have no choice here, given the federal mandate. But it’s a little disingenuous to claim that we have to push full-steam-ahead with this new policy because of the questionable mandate coming from Washington. If the shoe were on the other foot, and a far-right-wing president issued a Constitutionally problematic mandate, say, that all employers must require all their employees to document that everyone on their insurance plan is in the country legally, no one on this dais would suggest that we should comply with such a mandate. Here we have a mandate that is every bit as constitutionally problematic and divisive…the only difference is that it’s coming from an administration the majority of this council broadly supports on an issue it broadly supports. However, as I’ve already suggested, this is bad public policy: divisive and of dubious legality. We should push back against such mandates regardless of political considerations.
In the end, though, the issue is simple. We just said to our employees that we do not trust them to make their own medical decisions and to take proper precautions (masks personal hygiene, distancing when appropriate) to keep themselves and their fellow employees safe, and instead enacted a one-size-fits-all, legally problematic policy that takes a personal and a very private choice out of the hands of our employees so we can all feel better about “Having Done Something.”
This is not going away…I won’t let it.
Police (and other employees) can also protest as a point of order…and I hope I don’t hear about anymore silencing of their voices.”
The Blue Oak Project 