Federal Appeal Filed in Case of Health Care Workers Fired Over Vaccine Mandate

Nursing student Brittany Woolery with her husband and their three kids. Woolery cannot complete nursing school because she was denied a religious exemption from a COVID shot mandate. Courtesy of Brittany Woolery

The State of Maine is accused of “having its cake and eating it too” in a federal appeal filed in Boston last month that could have national implications for health care workers fired after being denied religious exemptions from COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

The appeal, filed on Jan. 24, is founded on the argument that federal and constitutional law trump state law and policies. It currently sits with the 1st Circuit of Appeals.

It is also born out of a state where the former state CDC director, Nirav Shah, was just catapulted to second-in-command of the national CDC, serving as its deputy director.

Shah, who pushed for the elimination of religious exemptions in Maine, was named to the national post on Jan. 12, just a day after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services extended COVID-19’s status as a public health emergency.

‘One or the Other’

The bottom line issue in the newly filed appeal is Maine’s granting of medical exemption requests while denying religious ones.

Religious exemptions were banned by Maine Gov. Janet Mills, the primary defendant in the appeal, despite a longstanding provision under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination of any kind against religious beliefs.

While Title VII does not guarantee approval of a religious exemption, it mandates a process for it, argues Liberty Counsel, which filed the Maine appeal.

“Defendants cannot have their cake and eat it, too—relying on the vaccine mandate to say it would be an undue hardship to violate state law while at the same time espousing that the vaccine mandate does not prohibit employers from providing an accommodation under Title VII,” said Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver.

“It must be one or the other but cannot be both.”

Staver said the Maine court, in siding with the Mills administration, essentially “permitted a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ proposition.”

The appeal comes months after Maine U.S. District Court Judge Jon Levy dismissed a complaint, on Aug. 18, 2022, filed by seven health care workers.

The workers, mostly hospital nurses, lost their bid to be exempt from the COVID-19 jab for religious beliefs and thus their jobs.

Freeing Health Care Workers

Mills also threatened to revoke the licenses of all health care employers who fail to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for all their employees, a threat similar to one by President Joe Biden to withhold federal Medicaid and Medicare dollars from hospitals not mandating the shot.

In safeguarding the policies, Levy ruled that it would be an undue hardship for hospitals and other health facilities to grant the religious exemptions under Mills’s directives.

Liberty Counsel argues that Levy’s ruling is invalid because it undermines the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which requires that the Constitution and federal laws take priority over any conflicting rules of state law.

The prevailing argument could widen an already promising legal course that would finally free health care workers from a jab-or-job ultimatum, an issue that so far the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to take up.

In July, Liberty Counsel won a historic class action settlement with NorthShore University Health System for denying employees religious exemptions from the COVID-19 jab. The Chicago-based hospital giant will end up paying more than $10 million to 500 health care workers in the settlement.

Earlier this month, the tides turned in New York when a state Supreme Court judge ruled that Gov. Kathy Hochul and the New York State Department of Health (NYSDH) overstepped their authority by requiring the COVID-19 vaccine for health care workers.

“The mandate is beyond the scope of respondents’ authority and is therefore null, void, and of no effect,” Judge Gerard Neri wrote in his Jan. 13 decision in a lawsuit filed by a group of health care workers who have joined under the name Medical Professionals for Informed Consent.

Other Pending Lawsuits

There are pending lawsuits in other states as well, including many in Florida, which unlike Maine and New York, has passed laws outlawing jab-or-job ultimatums.

Last month, in a story The Epoch Times covered on the COVID-19 vaccine mandate and its effects on the already critical nursing shortage in the United States, Brittany Woolerey, a Keiser University nursing student, described how she wasn’t able to complete her degree because she was denied a religious exemption from the health care facilities where she was due to do her clinical exams—the final step to becoming a registered nurse.

There are also new lawsuits in Maine filed recently by Health Choice Maine on behalf of EMTs who can still drive an ambulance but have to stay at least six feet away from patients if they are not inoculated against COVID-19—another Mills-born directive.

In a story by The Epoch Times, one unvaccinated EMT recounted a call when he drove an ambulance to a scene with multiple injuries and was forced to stand around while patients needed care.

Hospitals and state governments, however, are not throwing in the towel.

In a statement reported by Becker’s Hospital Review, the NYSDH said it disagreed with the state Supreme Court’s decision and would be “exploring all options.”

Maine’s largest hospitals, most of which are named in the federal appeal as defendants, have also stood firmly by Mills’s COVID-19 policies.

In several exhibits submitted in the Maine appeal, one of the hospitals, MaineGeneral, repeatedly told health care workers—when refusing to consider their religious exemptions—that only medical ones would be considered “under the Governor’s mandate.”