PORTLAND, Ore. (Legal Newsline) - Amid calls for COVID amnesty, Nike was sued by three former senior employees who allege the athletic shoe company improperly required them to submit to the COVID-19 vaccine.
“Nike has never required that individuals get a vaccine (prior to COVID-19)," wrote attorney Emerson Lenon in the 8-page complaint. "It never even inquired about such private medical information before the COVID-19 pandemic, recognizing that state and federal laws prohibit employers from conditioning employment on medical conformity."
The lawsuit was filed on Nov. 15, after Brown University professor Emily Oster called for amnesty around pandemic restriction failings in an article published in Atlantic Magazine last month.
“They can claim that all they want but genuine financial, physical, and spiritual injury happened as a result of Nike's actions and they are being held accountable for those," said Leslie Manookian, president of Health Freedom Defense Fund, which is helping the plaintiffs with the litigation.
"This whole amnesty movement is an acknowledgement that the people who pushed lockdowns, masks, testing and vaccine mandates were wrong and that these were destructive to society, they were unethical, and they were not based on science.”
Doug Kerkering, Wanda Rozwadowska, and Hannah Thibodo filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon alleging battery and violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
All three worked at Nike’s Beaverton corporate headquarters, did not have a record of discipline while earning six-figure incomes.
Rozwadowska, who was a Nike employee for 12 years, developed an autoimmune reaction after submitting to the vaccine mandate.
"No one said that the government could plunge a needle into your arm and no one said that you could be forced to undergo a medical intervention that could kill you for something as benign as Covid is for most people," Manookian told Legal Newsline.
Nike continued to impose the mandate even though the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down OSHA's vaccine mandate for large employers.
“It denied most requests for medical and religious accommodations and it has fired numerous employees, including plaintiffs, for failing to comply with the policy," Lenon further stated in the complaint.
Plaintiffs Kerkering and Thibodo allege that Nike acted with malice and reckless indifference to their civil rights in perceiving their unvaccinated status as being a physical disability.
Kerkering was a 31-year employee and Thibodo had worked in the Beaverton office for seven years.
"They're treating their employees as though they're disposable," Manookian added. "Clearly, Nike doesn't care about their tenure. They don't care about their reputation and track record. They don't care about the contributions that these people have made."