By Jason L. Cassidy and Daniel S. Herder, Attorneys at Ryley Carlock & Applewhite Over the past year, the big story has been the search for vaccines to protect people from Covid-19. You can’t vaccinate a business, but Arizona businesses are now protected from liability related to Covid-19. Arizona has given businesses a qualified immunity for their Covid-19 response. On April 5, 2021, Governor Ducey signed SB 1377 into law, which creates a statewide Good Samaritan-esque law that protects against civil lawsuits over an injury or death that “relates to a public health pandemic.” Under the new A.R.S. § 12-515, any person or “provider” (meaning all healthcare providers, landlords, businesses, employers, schools, nonprofits, religious institutions, and governmental entities) that acted “in good faith” to protect someone from Covid-19 will be functionally immune from lawsuits over a failure to protect that person. Its companion law, A.R.S. § 12-516, broadly protects healthcare providers from lawsuits based on injuries directly caused by Covid-19, and also against indirect injuries arising from the delay of non-Covid procedures or the failure to provide treatment altogether, so long as those services were withheld because of the pandemic. Both laws go into effect immediately and apply retroactively to March 11, 2020. It’ll be very difficult for a lawsuit to circumvent these new business protections. The only people who are explicitly not protected by this act are those who acted with “willful misconduct or gross negligence.” Generally speaking, that legal standard means that the law doesn’t protect you if you acted recklessly or intended to hurt someone. But the act goes even further by including a presumption that eac
