A law firm representing U.S. Freedom Flyers (USFF) has filed a lawsuit on behalf of more than a hundred Atlas Air employees against the airline. The lawsuit claims that the vaccine mandates imposed on the airlines’ workers violated their religious, constitutional, and medical liberties.
John Pierce Law filed the lawsuit against Atlas Air in the Southern District of Florida. The law firm is also planning to file similar lawsuits against 18 major airlines as well as the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
“Fundamentally, this case is about whether Americans should be required to choose between their livelihoods and being coerced into taking an experimental, dangerous medical treatment,” reads the lawsuit.
Unvaccinated pilots, flight attendants, and other Atlas employees make up the bulk of the plaintiffs.
“It is also about the safety of America’s airline industry. Should pilots—under federal regulation required to be among the healthiest workers in the United States—who have taken an experimental ‘vaccine’ that is now shown to have potentially deadly, long-term side effects, be allowed to fly massive aircraft in our skies? While those who have (smartly) refrained from such a course be forced out of their jobs?” it reads.
Attorney Pierce told The Epoch Times that it plans to file a similar lawsuit against United Airlines this week.
“So the complaint has been filed. We’re in the process of serving everyone. And then, we’ll likely be looking for some kind of injunctive relief here soon to make sure that all the COVID-related mandates stop immediately. And then we’ll proceed [with] litigation, motion, practice, and discovery and then onward to trial eventually,” Pierce said.
“We’ll be hitting basically all of them in sequence, and then we’ll be going after the FAA as well. We’re gonna get these vaccine mandate type of rules and COVID restrictions ruled unconstitutional. And we’re gonna get findings that there was discrimination under Title Seven. We’re gonna get punitive damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress and things like that,” added Pierce.
When airline pilots pushed back against vaccine mandates in October 2021, the chief medical advisor to the President, Anthony Fauci, told NPR that the vaccine’s safety had been proven.
“On the basis of literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of vaccinations that we’ve had, the safety of these vaccines have been clearly established,” said Fauci. “I’m sure there is a very, very, very, very rare exception, but the long-term effects are really essentially nonexistent.”
Josh Yoder, a major airline pilot and a spokesperson for Freedom Flyers, said that harassment, threats, intimidation, “vaccine injury,” and even “suicides that have come out of these mandates.”
“We’re not doing class action. We’re doing individual litigants. And the reason we’re doing it that way is because so many people have been harmed and people have experienced different levels of harm. We have the unvaccinated who have been harassed, threatened, and intimidated into getting vaccinated. Then we have many people as well who got vaccinated against their will, who were coerced and forced into doing it under threat of losing their employment,” Yoder said.
“And then, in addition, we have the vaccine-injured, and the numbers of vaccine-injured are growing by the day,” Yoder stated. “It’s just incredible what’s happening with pilots.”