Eddie Farah: Waiving COVID-19 liability protects special interests, not people

Imagine you or a family member were injured because of a defect in your car’s air bag, but you weren’t allowed to hold the automaker appropriately accountable.

Imagine you or someone you care about being hurt by an underage drunken driver, but the law protected the bar that served him from any legal responsibility, even though they never checked his ID and overserved him.

Or, imagine your child suffers a broken arm because of faulty playground equipment, but you’re prohibited from seeking justice from the manufacturer because its industry got a law passed to protect them from safety accountability.

Now, imagine you or a family member became sick with COVID-19 because a business didn’t bother to follow expert advice about best practices for health and safety requirements — because they knew there was nothing you could do about it.

In this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic era, that last scenario is exactly what the future could look like for millions of Floridians — if special interests enact their priority to protect themselves instead of the public’s interest.

Specifically, big businesses and industries are already making active moves to persuade the Florida Legislature to issue a massive and undeserved liability security blanket to protect them from lawsuits related to COVID-19.

Surely, we know most good businesses are working hard to protect their employees, clients, and customers by embracing health experts’ advice about working from home, masking, safe distancing, and other proven best practices. But for those bad actors who callously disregard such safe, smart, strong, strategic steps, they don’t deserve a pass on responsibility.

Before the 2021 session of the legislature convenes in March 2021, the moneyed corporate interests are aggressively pushing for sweeping legislation to shield them from being sued over COVID-19 cases, even when their actions, decisions, policies, or mistakes could lead directly to people getting sick or worse.

This is especially worrisome as thousands of Floridians return to work, many of them discovering that their employers aren’t providing a safe working environment that follows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health guidelines.

The reality is bad things can, and do, happen to good people. When it’s someone else’s fault, the injured person should have the right to hold those responsible accountable — and to seek justice. As scary as the threat of this pandemic has been and continues to be, it only makes matters worse to intentionally create a new monster that hurts the public: absolute insulation from legal accountability.

Those pushing for such broad liability protection assert that COVID-19 and its impact isn’t their fault. The flawed logic then extends to suggesting they shouldn’t be held responsible for people who get sick or die — even if they have culpability by actions or inactions that can be proved to have contributed to, or caused, the bad outcome.

They will tell you that businesses are already suffering financially, and they can’t be expected to operate under the constant threat of being sued. But if they follow proper guidelines that we’re all expected to live by in this pandemic, they wouldn’t have to worry.

And if they aren’t making the health and safety of the public and their employees a priority, they certainly need to be held accountable.

Some big business champions say that anyone who disagrees with their position is simply seeking to cash in, either greedy plaintiffs or money-grabbing lawyers. This cynical, hardhearted view shows just how callous they are to human suffering — and their bottom line is the focus.

For more than 230 years, American courts of law have been the institution where private citizens turn to seek justice from those who harm others. This tradition dates to the earliest years of our republic, founded on the principle that everyone must be responsible and should be held accountable for their actions.

The idea of a sweeping liability waiver to protect businesses from legitimate claims over COVID-19 flies in the face of this tradition, upending one of the very cornerstones of our system of justice. Lawsuits are often the only recourse the “little guy” has against businesses that do them harm, and we must not strip away the right of individual citizens to seek justice.

Real people are the victims of COVID-19 — mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, grandparents. Over a half-million Floridians have been infected, and nearly 9,000 of our family, colleagues, friends and neighbors have been lost to the virus.

The Florida Legislature must keep these individuals and the rest of our 22 million residents in mind — and reject any big business push to let them off the hook for any calculated failure to prevent even more of us from being added to the sad and dark count.

Before it’s too late, let’s stop a terrible idea from becoming a bad legislative bill that could ultimately become a very dangerous law.

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Eddie E. Farah, J.D., is the founder and managing partner of Farah & Farah, a leading personal injury law firm founded in Jacksonville in 1979. Over the last 40 years, Farah & Farah has expanded to 16 offices spanning Florida and Georgia with more than 300 attorneys and employees.

Connect with Eddie E. Farah via Twitter.