Religious challenge to COVID vaccine mandate fails

COVID-19 religious discrimination cases are now being decided on a regular basis by the Court of Appeals, as the cases that were filed in 2020 and 2021 are being resolved in the district court and reaching the Court of Appeals, which is slowly developing a body of case law on these issues. In this case, the plaintiff loses after claiming a religious exemption to a COVID vaccination mandate.

The case is D'Cunha v. Northwell Health Systems, a summary order issued on November 17. Plaintiff did not want the vaccine and claimed a religious exemption. Management fired her, claiming they were not longer accepting religious exemption requests. 

The religious discrimination claim is dismissed for good. The Court of Appeals (Cabranes, Chin and Kahn) says plaintiff cannot win the case, even under the lenient, pre-discovery Rule 12 standards, because she was working directly with patients.  An exemption would create an undue hardship for this medical defendant, which was required to follow the Department of Health's mandate that all hospital employees be vaccinated by September 27, 2021. 

Undue hardship is an affirmative defense, meaning the employer has to raise and prove that defense to win the case. But the employer can win the case even under Rule 12 if the undue hardship is clear from the plaintiff's allegations in the Complaint. Here, the Court of Appeals holds, the employer wins the undue hardship argument at this early stage because "Title VII [which prohibits religious discrimination] does not require covered entities [like hospitals] to provide the accommodation that Plaintiffs prefer -- in this case, a blanket religious exemption allowing them to continue working at their current positions unvaccinated." It would be an undue hardship for defendant to violate the State vaccination mandate, the Court of Appeals holds, as Title VII cannot require employers to violate binding regulations.