ST. PAUL, Minnesota (LifeSiteNews) – A veteran basketball referee is suing the National Basketball Association (NBA) for firing him over his refusal to take a COVID-19 vaccine and rejecting his appeals for both religious and medical exemptions.
Alpha News reported that Kenny Mauer was an NBA referee since 1986. By summer 2021, the NBA was requiring referees, coaches, and crowds (but not players) to be vaccinated for COVID. Under the referee contracts at the time, those who refused would be suspended for a year but could apply for medical or religious exemptions.
As a Catholic who had already recovered from COVID and therefore acquired natural immunity, he filed for both, but both were denied. He and two fellow referees took the matter to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). After six months of not receiving a response, they filed and were granted the right to sue. The case has since been working its way through the courts.
“I think the NBA wants to break me,” Mauer said. “This is why people don’t do this. They can’t stand the stress or the challenge.”
What’s more, he says, the NBA has been blocking his access to his pension funds since January. “They don’t want me to have the money to continue to fight this,” he said. “I’ve lost a lot of respect for them.”
Still, Mauer does not regret taking a stand. “It’s not about Kenny Mauer, it’s not about [Alpha News interviewer] Liz Collin; it’s about people who should have a God-given right to make a decision for themselves,” he said.
Religious and conscience-based objections to taking the COVID shots, which were developed and released under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take, stem from the use of cells derived from aborted babies in their creation.
According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used aborted fetal cells during their vaccines’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design and development and production phases. The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science and even the left-wing “fact-checking” outlet Snopes have also admitted the vaccines’ abortion connection.
Additionally, many continue to doubt the shots’ safety in light of a significant body of data linking them to adverse effects.
The federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting system (VAERS) reports 35,646 deaths, 206,697 hospitalizations, 20,439 heart attacks, and 27,322 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of July 21, among other ailments. An April 2022 study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection itself cannot fully account for the myocarditis numbers, despite common insistence to the contrary.
Jab defenders are quick to stress that reports submitted to VAERS are unconfirmed, as anyone can submit one, but U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
Further, VAERS is not the only data source containing red flags. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
Last September, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland that found the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” and the “Moderna trial exhibited a 6% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” for a combined “16% higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients.”
In December 2022, Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin hosted a roundtable discussion during which civil rights attorney Aaron Siri detailed data from the CDC’s V-Safe reporting system revealing that 800,000 of the system’s 10 million participants, or approximately 7.7%, reported needing medical care after COVID injection. “Twenty-five percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48% sought urgent care,” Siri added. “Also, another 25% on top of the 7.7 % reported being unable to work or go to school.”
Another study by a team of American, British, and Canadian researchers, published in December by the in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found that COVID booster mandates for university students – a relatively healthy group at relatively low risk from the virus – do far more harm than good: “Per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation).”