One year ago, New York City fired over 1,430 city employees who refused to take the COVID vaccine. Several of those workers filed a class action lawsuit against the City. During that lawsuit, the teachers’ attorney introduced a sworn deposition stating that, when teachers refused the vaccination, the city flagged them as “problems” and handed their fingerprints over to both the FBI and the New York criminal justice system.

Michael Kane, the named plaintiff in Kane v. DeBlasio, has written a post revealing how New York City tried to criminalize teachers who refused to comply with the demand that they take injections of an experimental agent that’s now proving to have been extremely dangerous. He explains that, during a hearing on February 8, the attorney defending New York City “stated that educators fired for declining covid vaccination were not removed for misconduct, but rather for not meeting a requirement for employment.”

Image: Teacher by freepik.

The plaintiffs’ attorney, John Bursch, countered by pointing to the sworn Declaration of Betsy Combier, attesting to the fact that the City gave the fingerprints of these same teachers to the FBI and New York criminal justice system—an action indicating that the city viewed the teachers as criminal, rather than simply failing to meet a “requirement for employment.” Here’s what Combier, a paralegal specialist who worked for the United Federation of Teachers (“UFT”), stated under oath regarding the city’s actions vis-à-vis the FBI and the New York criminal justice system:

8. I am also very familiar with "problem codes"—the flag the DOE [New York Department of Education] puts in the personnel file of employees to indicate that they should not be hired due to unexplained misconduct of some kind. Employees can be flagged for everything from receiving an unsatisfactory or ineffective rating to engaging in egregious criminal acts.

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9. When the DOE puts a problem code in the employee's personnel file, it also places a flag on the employee's fingerprints, which is then sent to the national databases at both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State Division of Criminal Justice Services.

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12. I know of many former DOE employees who have problem codes in their personnel files because they declined to be vaccinated in violation of the DOE's mandate and were not granted a religious or medical exemption. The DOE places a problem code on the employee's personnel file immediately upon getting information that the employee did not submit proof of vaccination. As soon as the employee gets the vaccination and submits proof, the code is removed from his or her file.

Combier further testifies that schools in New York state that are thinking of hiring those teachers fired for not receiving the vaccinations would check the teachers’ records in a system called Galaxy, which also contained that “problem” designation. Those teachers who were refused new jobs believe that this designation, which carries with it the suspicion of criminal wrongdoing, was the bar to their finding new employment.

I don’t have any grand conclusions to draw about this. It’s sufficient to know that the New York City school system treated teachers who refused a vaccine as criminals, and those same teachers, unbeknownst to them, were suddenly and automatically part of the FBI’s and the New York criminal justice system’s database of people suspected of criminal activity or propensities. Really, do I need to say more?