John Matland went from hero to villain in the public eye. He tells NR the state is ‘punishing us.’
Some days, early in the coronavirus pandemic, John Matland would break down in tears during his drive to work at Staten Island University Hospital in New York.
New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic, and the days of frontline hospital workers like Matland were filled with sick and dying patients. No one knew how deadly COVID-19 really was, or how many asymptomatic people were unknowingly contributing to its spread.
Matland, a longtime CAT scan technologist, had a single N95 mask he was forced to reuse. Still, he showed up every day, entering vent room after vent room of the sick and contagious.
Every night at 7 p.m., people would honk their car horns, and bang pots and pans – a showing of thanks and support for the medical heroes working inside the hospital.
A year-and-a-half later, Matland is no longer even allowed in the building.
Matland, 36, is one of the tens of thousands of New York health-care workers whose careers are threatened because they refuse to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Monday was the deadline for the state’s roughly 600,000 health-care workers to receive at least one vaccine dose. While there was a last-minute rush of workers getting the shot, according to the New York Times, thousands are still refusing. Some have been fired, some have been suspended, and others are in a weird kind of limbo, still waiting to learn their professional fate. Some New York hospitals, particularly those in rural, upstate counties, are considering suspending elective procedures to cope with the sudden drop-off in workers.
National medical leaders insist the vaccines are safe and effective – the best prophylactic against the worst effects of the virus, and the country’s best hope for a return to normality. But to Matland and many others, there still are too many questions. He fears the benefits of the vaccines are being oversold, and the potential dangers are being swept under the rug.
“I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’ve had the flu shot,” Matland said. “For me, it’s specifically the darkness and the silence around the information that’s emerging about these vaccines, and the way that it’s not discussed – not discussed in the media, not discussed by some doctors.”
Matland has not worked at the hospital in over a month, in part because of his refusal to get vaccinated, but also because of his public agitation against the vaccine mandate. That agitation started in July, when the hospital put together a focus group of unvaccinated staffers to discuss strategies that may be effective in encouraging other employees to get the shot. Matland was one of only a few staffers who participated, he said. Most unvaccinated workers seemed to be hoping that maybe if they stayed quiet it would all go away, Matland said.
“I know that if you stay quiet, people advance their positions,” he said.
On the call, they talked about restricting eligibility to a wellbeing credit program, a fitness tracker, and staff barbecues. But Matland said he was particularly irked when the discussion turned to mandatory testing only for the unvaccinated. Vaccinated people also can contract, carry, and spread the virus, Matland noted, though data show they are far less likely to do so.
To Matland, the message was clear. Hospital leaders, he said, were “trying to punish us” by “creating a physical stimuli that is not comfortable to coerce us to get vaccinated, so it stops.”
‘We Will Not Comply’
Matland said that after that meeting, other unvaccinated hospital workers – radiology techs, nurses, pharmacists – began approaching him, expressing appreciation for taking a stand. He started a Whatsapp chat (later moved to Telegram) for health-care workers across the country to discuss vaccine mandates in their workplaces. He said he has over 1,100 people in the chat.
In early August, Matland sent an email to the CEO of Northwell Health detailing his concerns about the vaccine, and urging hospital-system leaders not to mandate the vaccine, or single out unvaccinated employees for regular testing. Many of his colleagues, he wrote, “feel harassed and threatened that they will lose their jobs during this portion of an already overwhelmingly stressful and taxing pandemic, and it doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.”
He copied about 20 members of the media, figuring the only way he’d get a response from the hospital system’s leadership would be by getting a response from the media first. It worked. In early August, he ended up doing an interview with a local New York television station. The next day, he said, he received a call from human resources asking if he wanted to meet with the hospital system’s chief medical officer.
“I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I got what I signed up for. I have to be the face of this,” Matland said.
The meeting was scheduled for late August. In the meantime, he said, Staten Island University Hospital colleagues in the chat were busy organizing protests over the hospital system’s newly established vaccine mandate. Matland said there was a protest at his hospital a day before the planned meeting, but he insists he didn’t plan it.
“In that chat everybody has ideas. There was no leader,” he said.
Matland said he came out to the protest over his lunch break, gave a brief speech to the crowd, and spoke to local and national media. Around the time he was doing an interview with Newsmax, someone unfurled a two-story banner from the top of one of the hospital buildings that read, “We Will Not Comply.” Hospital leaders blamed Matland.
The next day – the day he expected to meet with the hospital system’s chief medical officer – Matland was suspended without pay. He was eventually fired for the banner incident, but he filed a grievance with the support of his union and he got his job back after he was able to prove that he was on the ground doing interviews when the banner was unfurled, he said.
But he remained suspended with no pay. He filed a request for a religious exemption from the vaccine mandate, but it was denied this week.
“They took my badge, which they still have,” Matland said. “I was like, this is literally an attempt to silence me.”
In an email to National Review, Christian Preston, a spokesman for the hospital, did not address Matland’s employment status. He also did not answer a question about if and how the hospital system was making accommodations for people with sincere religious objections to the vaccine. He said their workforce is almost all vaccinated.
“Northwell has taken a rapid, aggressive approach to move successfully toward full vaccination compliance while maintaining continuity of care and ensuring that our high standard of patient safety is not compromised in any way,” Preston wrote. “Regretfully, we have had to exit a few hundred employees, but we are pleased to report that most team members are opting to be vaccinated so as to avoid being terminated. Again, this process has had no impact on the quality of our patient care. Northwell believes that having a fully vaccinated workforce is an important measure in our duty to protect the health and safety of our staff, our patients and the communities we serve.”
‘It’s not right for me’
Matland said he is not fully against the vaccines. But he is concerned about the speed in which they were developed and made available to the public.
In his letter to the Northwell CEO, Matland wrote, “I personally know people that have had negative, life-altering reactions to this vaccine and my heart breaks for them.” He included a link to a YouTube video – posted by Mac’s Public House, a Staten Island bar that gained notoriety last winter for flouting New York City’s lockdown orders – of a hospital employee who said she suffered severe negative medical reactions after receiving the Moderna vaccine.
In an interview with National Review, Matland said he has real concerns about cases of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) and pericarditis (inflammation of the outer lining of the heart) developing in a small percentage of people who have been vaccinated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledges there have been cases of myocarditis reported after vaccinations, mostly in young men, but it says the risks of COVID-19 and its complications “far outweigh the potential risks of having a rare adverse reaction to vaccination, including the possible risk of myocarditis or pericarditis.”
Matland also expressed concerns about what is known as antibody-dependent enhancement, a condition where antibodies produced after an infection or a vaccination actually enhance a disease. But the scientists who developed the vaccines targeted specific proteins to avoid just that problem, and there’s been no evidence of the condition in the hundreds of millions of people who have been vaccinated worldwide, according to an August investigative report by the online medical news site MedPage Today and other sources.
Matland said there are other unknowns that won’t become clear until after years of research. What he knows for sure is that the virus is particularly lethal for older people and people with pre-existing conditions, and that’s not him.
“For me, at 36 with no health issues, COVID is not as dangerous if I was to acquire it,” he said.
He knows he could be wrong. In several years, once more research has been completed, he may conclude the vaccines were as safe and effective as medical leaders have said all along.
“I hope to God I’m the one that’s wrong,” he said, “because there’s a lot of people vaccinated.”
Matland also has cited his faith as a reason for not being vaccinated against COVID-19. Matland said he is a Lutheran. The conservative Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod has not taken a position on the vaccines, but encourages Christians to respect the consciences of one another. The more liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America recently released a statement encouraging the use of vaccines, and said “there is no evident basis for religious exemption.”
New York governor Kathy Hochul has pushed back against religious exemptions by using faith-based arguments, and claiming that the vaccines are divinely inspired. Speaking during a recent Sunday service in a Brooklyn church, Hochul said people who are rejecting the vaccines “aren’t listening to God and what God wants.” She called on the congregants to “be my apostles.”
“God did answer our prayers,” she said. “He made the smartest men and women – the scientists, the doctors, the researchers – he made them come up with a vaccine. That is from God to us and we must say, ‘Thank you, God, thank you.”
Matland said his faith is personal, and he countered that God also has made information available to him. God is the only one who can cast judgement on him, he said.
Matland said he’s not sure how long he will stay in New York now that his religious exemption has been denied. He said some of his colleagues are looking into legal options.
Fighting for a Religious Exemption
Christopher Ferrara is part of a team of lawyers with the conservative Thomas More Society challenging New York’s vaccine mandate on the grounds that it did not offer a religious exemption. They filed a complaint in the Northern District of New York earlier this month on behalf of 17 medical professionals, including doctors and nurses.
Ferrara said New York’s mandate strips away federal Civil Rights Act protections that require employers to make reasonable accommodations for an employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs, as long as it does not impose more than a minor cost or burden on business operations. The mandate also strips away state and city human-rights protections, Ferrara said.
For about a week in August, New York’s mandate did include a religious exemption.
But, Ferrara said, “the powers that be in New York said, ‘Wait a minute. This is a problem. People can get religious exemptions from our draconian (vaccine) mandates. We have to slam that door shut.’ So eight days later, they stripped out the religious exemption, leaving only the medical exemption.”
The judge in the case has issued a temporary restraining order, reviving the religious exemption for now. He is expected to rule in early October about whether the restraining order will become a preliminary injunction, said Ferrara, who acknowledged he is skeptical of a lot of the COVID-19 data. He said his clients are facing irreparable harm to their professional standing, and without an exemption they would be unemployable statewide.
Ferrara noted that there is a real and ongoing debate, particularly in the Catholic Church, over the moral acceptability of the vaccines. While Pope Francis has said getting vaccinated and helping others to get vaccinated is an “act of love,” other church leaders have expressed “moral concerns” because of the connections the vaccines have to abortion-derived cell lines. Regardless of the intra-church disagreements, Ferrara said it is “fundamental to the law of religious discrimination” that people do not have to be following the commands of a particular religious organization or church leader to have a sincere religious belief.
Ferrara said it would be illegal to deny religious exemptions, even if a lot of workers claim them. “That would be religious discrimination,” he said. He said an exemption could be denied if an employer could prove a lack of sincerity. But that’s not the case with his clients.
“They have bishops who support them, who condemn these vaccines as immoral,” Ferrara said. “And what is the ultimate test of sincerity? These people are willing to lose their jobs rather than take the vaccine. That’s pretty sincere.”