Pilots from 30 airlines including American, Delta, United, Jet Blue, Frontier, Alaskan, and Southwest are asking the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to address the health and safety concerns of several pilots who say they have been injured by the Covid-19 vaccines.
The pilots have joined 17,000 doctors and scientists who make up The Global Covid Summit in submitting a letter to the FAA and other civil aviation authorities. It outlines specific and serious concerns over the airlines' Covid policies and their effects on pilot health and flight safety.
The Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (VSRF) is a watchdog organization that promotes scientific inquiry and encourages an open dialogue of transparency regarding medical and scientific information.
VSRF is supporting the coalition's initiative by calling on the FAA to implement third party medical screening of all US-based commercial airline pilots, along with the public disclosure of all pilots who fail the screening.
Most major US air carriers enacted a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for all employees late last year. Employees who didn't qualify for a medical or religious vaccine exemption were fired. United Airlines was the first airline carrier to enact the mandate, which has since been rolled back.
The Covid-19 vaccines proved largely ineffective at preventing transmission and illness from Covid. There are serious and new emerging safety concerns about the vaccines. Most recently, the federal government limited use of Johnson and Johnson's Covid vaccine after initially fully endorsing it. The limits were enacted due to blood clot risks, which many scientists flagged in the early months.
Once airlines mandated vaccination, many pilots steadfastly refused based on risk and were subsequently put on unpaid leave or outright terminated. Principled professionals were forced out of aviation and the industry lost hundreds of thousands of hours of experience.
Now, the global airline industry is heading into a dire staffing crisis. Thousands of other pilots were coerced into vaccination to provide for their families. This has taken a toll on their mental health.
As sobering as all of this is, it merely set the stage for what we are now witnessing: a landscape which should greatly concern airlines and the travelling public.
The undersigned pilot advocacy groups, scientists and doctors are hearing daily from vaccine-injured airline pilots. These harms include cardiovascular issues, blood clots, neurological and auditory issues, to name just a few."
Coalition of pilots and Global Covid Summit members
Additionally the global coalition has demanded that the following conditions be met:
- Where it exists, mandated Covid-19 vaccination for aviation workers must be discontinued.
- A permissive environment for self-reporting needs to be reemphasized by regulators and airlines.
- Thorough and objective aviation medical screenings of pilots and cabin crew need to be a high priority. These must be backed by the regulator and should focus on high prevalence harms which are now showing up in the general public and in our flight crews.
- Airlines and regulators hold data about sickness and medical certificate suspension, including symptoms and causal reasons. This data should be analyzed by independent third parties to establish or rule out Covid-19 vaccination as a possible cause
Read the full letter here.
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