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Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it absolutely is a constitutional right [0] and yes, we agree that some of the limitations imposed by the federal tort act are counterproductive. The latter is also irrelevant to the current discussion, which is about filing suit against a private pharmaceutical company.

> and is divorced from any preventative or punitive process applied to the manufacturer.

Yes, this is precisely what feels outrageous to me. I am constitutionally entitled to petitioning for restitution from the private actor, directly, and in a manner that does not a priori exclude punitive damages. I am rather concerned that many of us were coerced into waiving this right.

Aren’t you?

[0] see “right to petition” under first amendment, which includes the right to sue for the redress of grievances. I am surprised someone accusing others of being misinformed would overlook this.

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The right to petition for redress of grievances is not abridged by the creation of methods other than a civil suit to redress a grievance. If it were, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/456 would be Unconstitutional on its face, and it does not seem to be (unless you can find evidence to the contrary in Court interpretation).

And in general: no, it doesn't feel outrageous to me. The law seems to have wide leeway to shape civil suit (statutes of limitations, bars to suit, no ability to sue agents of the government acting in the line of duty for burning one's house down to flush a criminal suspect), and the remedy would therefore be to elect better Congresspeople and state legislators if one is concerned about how civil law has been shaped.

> The right to petition for redress of grievances is not abridged by the creation of methods other than a civil suit to redress a grievance.

What a strange comment. Of course they aren’t. They’re abridged by the de facto obligation to get vaccinated (unless you want to lose your job) and — crucially - the total waiver of liability on the part of pharmaceutical companies.

It’s telling how you went from “you don’t have that right” to “okay, you have that right, but some particular thing isn’t violating it”. Im guessing the next stop is “okay, it was violated, but it’s not a big deal”.

I agree with you that redress of grievances is a Constituational right. Thank you for answering my original "Is that [bringing civil suit] a Constitutional right?" question with a framework in which one can see it as one.

> They’re abridged by the de facto obligation to get vaccinated (unless you want to lose your job)

Ah, here you do run into an issue. There is no Constitutional right to have a job. Kind of an oversight in the construction of the whole thing, really... Quite a bit of the pain in American culture can be traced to "The whole Constitution ultimately does not care if an individual starves to death because they can't participate in capitalism."

And there's plenty of precedent regarding one's health status precluding one from being able to have or maintain a job. Typhoid Mary, famously, was legally precluded from kitchen-work because she was a typhus carrier. Her repeated entry into that field in spite of this stricture placed on her for the health of the citizens of New York (and her entry into other service-sector fields, eventually resulting in the deaths of 3-50 New Yorkers) is how she eventually landed in permanent quarantine.

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