The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a county’s termination of a county employee after she refused to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine as required by the county’s pandemic policy in Mason v. Cook County.
In August of 2021, the county adopted a policy mandating that county hospital staff members receive the COVID-19 vaccine. A hospital pharmacist applied for an exemption from the vaccine mandate based on her Christian faith. The county denied her request, stating that doing so would compromise workplace safety and pose an undue hardship on the county. The county gave her 90 days to comply. When she refused to do so, she was fired, and she filed a lawsuit against the county claiming that the county violated her civil rights in not accommodating her religious beliefs. The district court ruled in favor of the county, finding that allowing the employee to work unvaccinated during a public health crisis would have jeopardized the health of county staff and patients, causing undue hardship on the county.
On appeal, the Ninth Circuit agreed that the county had sufficiently shown an undue hardship that justified denial of the religious accommodation. The Court noted that the employee worked as a pharmacist in a hospital setting and worked in the same room with other pharmacist, and regularly interacted with patients where the risks and consequences of spreading the COVID-19 virus were high, and that masking and social distancing alone did not adequately reduce those risks.
