As two more nuclear-weapon sites prepared to mandate COVID-19 vaccines, small groups of vaccine refusers at sites in New Mexico and South Carolina sued in state courts to prevent their expected firings on Friday.
In emails, spokespersons for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico said vaccines would be mandatory by Dec. 8, pending updates to the labs’ prime contracts with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Lawrence Livermore National Security, a Bechtel National-University of California team, manages Livermore for NNSA. Honeywell subsidiary National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia manages the Albuquerque, N.M.-based labs network. Vaccines have been mandatory for new Sandia hires since Sept. 13, a labs spokesperson said.
Last week, the Department of Energy and the NNSA issued their long-awaited guidance for implementing the Joe Biden administration’s September executive order that federal contractors get COVID-19 vaccinations or find new jobs.
Meanwhile, vaccine-refusing employees at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina were fighting at deadline to stop those sites from firing them for not complying with vaccine mandates handed down before Biden’s blanket order.
In a lawsuit filed with the First Judicial District Court of New Mexico, counsel for 34 identified and 80 anonymous lab employees were scheduled to appear in hearings on Friday and Thursday to ask a state judge to block Los Alamos National Laboratory’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate. The group filed suit Sept. 27. The judge in the case had issued no order at deadline.
Los Alamos has said it will start terminating employees who hadn’t either started a COVID-19 vaccine regimen by Oct. 1, or applied for a medical or religious exemption to the mandate. The Associated Press reported Thursday that Los Alamos said 96% of its employees had received at least one COVID-19 shot.
Across the country, more than 75 employees or contractors of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the management and operations contractor for the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., sued their employer over its own COVID-19 vaccine mandate on Thursday in the Court of Common Pleas for the Second Judicial Circuit in Aiken County.
Savannah River employees who hadn’t complied with the mandate by Friday were scheduled to be fired, the Fluor-led contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, has said, though refusers were offered a return to work if they get fully vaccinated by Nov. 16.
In their complaint, the plaintiffs argue that site-operator’s mandate violates South Carolina law “and should be stricken and declared unenforceable.” No hearings had been scheduled in the case, at deadline.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management owns the Savannah River Site management and operations contract, but the NNSA passes money through the pact to harvest tritium and construct a new plutonium pit factory.
In the suit against Triad, the entire company, managed by Battelle, the University of California and Texas A&M University, was named as a defendant, as were lab Director Thomas Mason and Sara Pasqualoni, the lab’s medical director.
The identified plaintiffs and their 80 anonymous colleagues — who their attorneys said did not reveal their identities because “the unvaccinated run the risk of ostracization, threats of harm, immediate firing and other retaliatory consequences” — seek a preliminary injunction that would bar the lab from enforcing its vaccine mandate, and the periodic COVID tests and mask-wearing required at the lab.
Triad has asked the court to dismiss the case and compel the 26 of the defendants to enter into arbitration with the lab, as required by employment agreements they signed as a condition of working at Los Alamos, according to court documents.
Six of the remaining plaintiffs are union workers, who nevertheless are bound by Triad’s mandate, the contractor argued in its response to the complaint, four are Triad subcontractors — subcontractors get to decide whether to give their employees exemptions to the vaccine mandate, not the prime, Triad wrote in the filing — and one of the plaintiffs works under “a contract with the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management” and isn’t covered by the Triad mandate.
Among the plaintiffs are administrative personnel, staff scientists, a safety basis analyst, a construction superintendent and an employee relations specialist, a security police officer and engineers, among others, according to the complaint.
Triad has been strict about exemptions to its mandate, handing out only a small number of medical exemptions and allowing those granted religious exemptions only one accommodation: leave without pay until they either quit or furnish proof of vaccination.
There had been more than 44.5 million cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the U.S. at deadline and more than 718,000 deaths, according to a tracker maintained by the Johns Hopkins University. More than 55% of eligible people in the U.S. were fully vaccinated at deadline, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
