California law student defying COVID vaccine mandate sues school, claiming it’s making him abandon legal career

A Santa Clara College law college student defying the school’s COVID vaccination specifications filed a lawsuit this 7 days proclaiming the college is blocking him from relocating to a various law school for a diploma.

Ryan Driggs, who does not have a law firm for the situation and is representing himself, alleged in the match that the university, soon after barring him from registering for courses, is denying his transcript requests in order to continue to keep him from “securing the economic positive aspects completion of his authorized training would provide.” Driggs, of San Jose, claimed the purported moves by the faculty will thrust him into a “substantially much less prestigious and remunerative vocation.”

The university did not straight away reply to a ask for for remark on the allegations.

Driggs started off at Santa Clara Regulation in 2020, and the problems of his enrollment did not include things like a COVID vaccine or booster, his match filed Thursday in Santa Clara County Top-quality Court explained.

The college in April 2021 mandated that students be vaccinated in opposition to COVID by the fall 2021 expression. In December, a booster mandate was included. Both of those orders allowed for health care exemptions. In a March courtroom filing from a equivalent lawsuit by two Santa Clara College undergraduates and a distinguished anti-vaccination team, the school’s campus doctor mentioned he had reviewed 28 exemption requests, granted six on a long-lasting basis and two on a non permanent basis, with 4 pending and 16 denied.

Driggs said in his go well with that he did not “consent to or comply with” the vaccination or booster necessities. His fit did not provide reasons for his non-compliance. He claimed in the go well with that he repeatedly attained out to the college in an try to take care of the issue. “When he requested to be set in call with a human being who experienced the authority to modify Santa Clara University’s COVID-19 plan he received no response,” the accommodate reported.

Driggs claimed in his match that the school’s alleged violation of his instructional contract and interference with his programs to become a lawyer price tag him the “expected pecuniary gains of a profession of authorized practice and the decline in relative social standing.” He is looking for unspecified damages.

The other university student plaintiff in that go well with, sophomore Harlow Glenn, agreed to get her initial Pfizer COVID-19 shot final 12 months to comply with the university’s vaccine mandate, but alleged she experienced numbing in her legs, extreme complications, menstrual cycle disruptions, bloody urine, human body pains and hair loss, the go well with reported.

The university, she stated, denied her requests for spiritual and professional medical exemptions from the photographs.

The school’s campus physician, Dr. Lewis Osofsky, mentioned in a court docket submitting a week following the lawsuit was introduced that Glenn experienced mentioned she was diagnosed in a medical center with a significant urinary tract an infection, which appeared to clarify some of her symptoms, relatively than a vaccine response. Other signs seemed “consistent with COVID-19, the diagnosis she admits she been given on or about Sept. 5, 2021,” Osofsky mentioned. Glenn’s case is ongoing.