The legal fallout from the COVID vaccine mandate era is far from over.
While the pandemic has faded in the national conversation, the courts are delivering wins for Americans who were harmed by the mandates.
The latest ruling is a major victory for COVID Justice. It hints of a reckoning for those who violated the rights of Americans during the pandemic.
This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed down another significant victory for an employee who says she was wrongfully fired after seeking a religious exemption from her employer’s vaccine requirement.
The ruling is the latest in a growing series of decisions punishing employers for botching religious accommodation requests during the pandemic.
The case centers on Mimi Weiss, who spent more than 20 years working for Kaiser Permanente. Weiss wasn’t treating patients or working in a hospital. She worked remotely as a consultant. When Kaiser imposed its COVID vaccine mandate, she requested a religious exemption, identifying herself as a “Christian Jew” whose faith prevented her from receiving the vaccine.
Initially, Kaiser approved the request.
Then the company changed its mind.
According to court filings, Kaiser later subjected Weiss to additional questioning about her religious beliefs and medical history after deciding to scrutinize previously approved exemptions. When she declined to provide the additional information, the company revoked her exemption and fired her.
The Ninth Circuit unanimously revived Weiss’s Title VII religious discrimination claims, finding that she had adequately informed Kaiser of the conflict between her religious beliefs and the vaccine mandate.
“The employee must provide only enough information about her religious needs to permit the employer to understand the existence of an actual conflict,” Judge Danielle Forrest wrote for the court.
The court also warned against allowing employers to become arbiters of religious doctrine.
“Demanding more,” Forrest wrote, “would permit an employer to delve into the religious practices of an employee in order to determine whether religion mandates the employee’s adherence.”
In a separate 2-1 memorandum opinion, the court also revived Weiss’s California privacy claims, allowing that portion of her lawsuit to move forward as well.
The decision is notable on its own, but it is also part of a much larger trend.
Over the past two years, appellate courts across the country have increasingly sided with employees who say they were denied religious accommodations during the pandemic.
Late last year, the Fourth Circuit revived lawsuits brought by two remote Humane Society employees whose religious exemption requests had been denied before they were terminated. The court concluded they had plausibly alleged religious beliefs protected under Title VII.
Earlier this year, the Seventh Circuit reinstated claims brought by two former Aspirus Health employees, holding that a religious objection does not lose its legal protection simply because it is accompanied by concerns about vaccine safety or effectiveness.
Some plaintiffs have gone even further than surviving dismissal.
In Michigan, a federal jury awarded approximately $12.7 million to a Catholic IT employee after concluding Blue Cross Blue Shield unlawfully denied her religious accommodation request before firing her.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has also reached multiple multimillion-dollar settlements with employers over religious accommodation claims arising from COVID vaccine mandates, while ordering federal agencies to reconsider denials of religious exemptions.
To be sure, employers have not lost every case. Courts have upheld vaccine mandates for some frontline healthcare workers where employers demonstrated that accommodating unvaccinated employees would create significant operational or patient-safety burdens. But since the Supreme Court’s decision in Groff v. DeJoy raised the standard for proving an “undue hardship,” employers have faced a steeper climb when refusing religious accommodations.
Taken together, these cases suggest the courts are beginning to correct what many saw as one of the excesses of the pandemic: employers treating religious exemption requests with suspicion, demanding increasingly intrusive explanations, and, in some cases, terminating employees who had worked successfully for years without incident.
That should be welcomed.
Religious liberty occupies a special place in American law, and courts are right to remind employers that they cannot interrogate workers about theology before honoring protections Congress has already written into federal law.
Still, these victories leave one question worth considering.
During the pandemic, millions of Americans objected to vaccine mandates for reasons that had nothing to do with organized religion. Some cited personal ethics, bodily autonomy, or deeply held moral convictions. Those objections generally received far less legal protection than religious ones.
America’s courts have done an adequate job protecting religious freedom. The next frontier is making our laws protect freedom of conscience more broadly, instead of drawing such a sharp line between religious belief and other sincerely held convictions.