A teacher’s choice: Fired for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine

When COVID hit in 2020, New York City was one of the last places you’d have wanted to be if you valued your medical freedom.

Michael Kane, a public school special education teacher with over 13 years of experience, was employed in the city — before he was fired for refusing to take the experimental shot.

“I was fired for declining the shot, I’ve been suing ever since. Thank God for Bobby Kennedy and Children’s Health Defense. They picked up my lawsuits who are still suing today in a case called Kane vs. De Blasio, as well as New Yorkers for Religious Liberty vs. the City of New York and many, many, other cases,” Kane tells Nicole Shanahan on “Back to the People.”

Kane, who founded Teachers for Choice — which is a group of educators that opposes forced medical mandates — also very publicly left the teachers' union after seeing how weaponized it became during COVID.

“We were certainly pushed out and punished for having anything that wasn’t, you know, Faucian or dogmatic. You really needed to walk that line, so there’s definitely a target on me,” Kane explains, noting that while he doesn’t believe teachers' unions shouldn’t exist, “national and now international unions are a plague.”

And a plague that’s heavily infested with political corruption.

“Randi Weingarten and the head of the American Federation of Teachers went to the Ukraine on a mission. Why is the head of the teachers' union going to Ukraine? I’ll tell you why, because she’s really good friends with Joe and Jill Biden,” Kane tells Shanahan.

“That politicization is extremely, extremely dangerous,” he says. “I respect the institution of unions, but they’ve been horribly corrupted with politics that goes way beyond their membership, and when COVID came, it was clear they were not representing their members at all.”

“It ended up being Randi Weingarten going on ‘Meet the Press’ in August of 2021 and saying, ‘It’s time to mandate our members.’ And that was it. From that moment, then-Mayor Bill De Blasio did the mandate, because the truth is, Randy Weingarten’s more powerful than him,” Kane explains.

“So at the time, when things went down with COVID, I did leave the union, I saw no other option. I saw no one supporting us, and I led kind of a movement in New York City, at least at that time, that did that. And we got fired, and then we had to fight in the courts, and we lost our jobs, and we didn’t come back, and we’re still fighting in the courts,” he continues.

A year and a half later, Kane and around 60 other fired workers, mostly teachers, went to the union Labor Day rally in New York City — where they protested Weingarten.

“We chanted, ‘End all mandates, let us work,’ and we did that a couple of times, and all the rank and file cheered. All of them,” Kane recalls. “Randi ran away from me, she wouldn’t talk to me, but it forced her into a situation where she came on my show.”

“‘Here’s this dude, Mike Kane, that’s fired, and my members are cheering for him right now. That’s an issue,’” he continues. “Even if we didn’t have all the national cameras on it, that’s an issue internally for her.”

While Kane is proud of the major steps made toward a better system in New York City, he’s not convinced what goes on behind the scenes has been rectified quite yet.

“We’ll see what happens in the internal New York City politics,” he says.

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