Big pharma began opening the adult vaccine market by phasing in flu shot mandates for healthcare professionals nationally, primarily hospital workers, across the 2010’s. This was largely driven by the federal HHS “Healthy People 2020” initiative launched in December of 2010. That market was further exploited with the deployment of covid shot mandates throughout multiple employment fields over the past two years. These steps generated an entirely new category of exemptions with its own unique set of challenges. Over the past decade, I’ve assisted thousands of employees nationally with exemptions. While this article series can’t duplicate the information in my past 3- to 4-hour consultations and periodic seminars, it introduces the primary legal issues to help all concerned better navigate the territory. So, without further ado, let’s dive in!
First, employee vaccine mandates come from both laws (state and/or federal statutes and/or regulations, depending on the situation) and private employer policies. Like it or not, employers can require vaccines as a condition of employment unless there’s a contractual agreement preventing that and no public health emergency overriding the contract, or a law prohibiting it. But most employees around the country are “at will,” and so potentially subject to an employer-required mandate. All of us, of course, are potentially subject to new mandate laws at any time.
Generally, “at will” employees can be fired at any time for any reason or no reason. But when employees have a legal right to refuse a required vaccine, they can’t be lawfully fired for not being vaccinated. Even employment law attorneys have confusion about this. I’ve helped employees get exemptions after they were told by an employment law attorney that there was nothing they could do. (The law with vaccines is different from everything else; this causes confusion for attorneys new to the exemption arena.)
Next, most state exemption laws apply to daycare, school, and college enrollment. Few states have exemption laws for employees. But federal laws provide an “out” on religious and medical grounds for some employees. In theory, an employer could allow philosophical exemptions in their own company policy, but I’ve not heard of an actual instance of this.
I’ll address employee medical exemptions in a later Part of this series.
As to religious exemptions, the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its many amendments can help. Being federal law, it applies nationally. The Act is divided into eleven sections call “Titles.” Title VII prohibits discrimination in the workplace. One of the several discrimination categories is “religion.” In brief, for our purposes, Title VII requires employers to “reasonably accommodate” their employees’ religious beliefs and practices unless it would cause the employer an “undue hardship.” These terms are vague. To understand how they may apply to any specific situation, we must look to legal precedent. (For more about how legal precedent works and the U.S. legal systems generally, see The Authoritative Guide to Vaccine Legal Exemptions.)
Title VII applies to public (government) and private employers with 15 or more employees. This includes the military, though Department of Defense regulations specify how this law applies to military personnel. But it starts with the same federal statutes that apply to civilians.
Title VII’s scope is considerably beyond religious objections to vaccines, so it’s not a vaccine religious exemption law per se. But it can function as one. Employers often implement a “vaccine religious exemption” policy, and it’s fine for them to call it that; that is, after all, what it is. But such policies, to be lawful, must comply with Title VII when Title VII applies (when the employer has 15 or more employees).
A few states have medical exemption laws for employees, a couple have religious exemption laws (last I checked; rights keep disappearing, so it’s hard to keep up). Employees in those states may have state and federal rights, though federal law is the higher legal authority of the two.
Next, while many employers voluntarily create religious exemption policies for their employees, they do so for their own convenience, as that’s not required by Title VII. Employers are required to “reasonably accommodate” their employees’ religious beliefs only when an employee makes the request. So, if an employer doesn’t have a religious exemption policy, that doesn’t mean their employees don’t have a legal right to refuse vaccines on religious grounds. The right is there regardless of whether the employer offers a religious exemption.
Legal rights, even Constitutional rights, are not absolute (See Constitution Confusion for more on this). Health concerns, when severe enough, can trump other rights. The concept is sound. But problems arise when the so-called “science” driving such decisions is corrupt. Sadly, outcomes are often better predicted more by what will profit big pharma than by what makes sense scientifically. But the legal component says that if granting a religious exemption would create a serious enough health risk, a religious exemption request can be lawfully denied. This is true in any exemption context—work, school, military, immigration, etc.
The starting place for employers, once an employee requests a religious exemption, is to determine whether the employee has a legally qualifying religious belief or practice opposed to vaccines. Employers may accept an employee’s asserted religious beliefs at face value, but they have the right to scrutinize the beliefs to determine whether they meet the legal requirements. While this may seem (and be) invasive to employees, and while employers often fail to do this correctly (failing to recognize that this is a legal evaluation, not a spiritual one), if employers lacked this authority, employees could declare any belief or practice to be religious and demand accommodation. That could have catastrophic results. So, the authority to scrutinize employee’s religious beliefs, however uncomfortable for individual employees, is a reasonable “lesser of two evils” in this case.
[In my two decades of exemption work, I’ve seen that most people’s commonsense approach to writing a statement of religious beliefs opposed to vaccines doesn’t fully meet the legal requirements. I provide detailed instructions on this in my Religious Exemption Manual.]
Assuming an employer confirms the lawfulness of an employee’s accommodation request (or accepts the request at face value), the employer must then determine whether it can provide a reasonable accommodation without incurring an undue hardship. With health matters, this boils down to whether the employer can reasonably address the health risk presumed to be posed by the unvaccinated employee. Title VII requires religious accommodation requests to be assessed individually, but there are vaccine issues that apply across the board. One example is the “reasonable accommodations” commonly applied to employees with religious exemptions, restrictions such as face mask, disease testing, and name badge requirements, and compensation and other job duty restrictions. These are, categorically, illegal, yet very difficult to successfully challenge. Here’s why:
First, the real purpose for vaccines is: 1) to introduce chronic illness in the population, thus expanding the market for other pharmaceutical products to treat those new illnesses; 2) to perpetually increase pharma profits by continually increasing the number of vaccines mandated and administered each year; and 3) to continually advance malevolent control in other respects. But since this agenda crosses moral, ethical, and criminal boundaries, it must be advanced under cover, a false veneer of “protecting the public health.” Until the real underlying agenda is fully exposed, we are stuck fighting this on the surface fake “public health” level. While doing this, we must understand that when we argue or exercise exemption rights, we are implicitly endorsing the underlying corruption on which all vaccine policy and law lies, the false narrative that vaccines are necessary, safe, and effective. Until we successfully address the underlying corruption, mandates will keep expanding and exemptions will keep getting harder to get until they disappear altogether. This is not a theory; the long-term trend is perfectly clear, and there’s no sign of stopping anytime soon. (We’ve been “winning” for decades yet the agenda keeps raging forward.) So, if you need an exemption, do all you can to get one, it could save your life. But then move on to address the larger problem, because exemptions are ultimately only a temporary solution. The belief that we can permanently opt out of ever-advancing control is, respectfully, an illusion.
So yes, the healthcare system is systemically corrupt, but mainstream medicine still offers some support. For example, the medical literature tells us that vaccines don’t work in everyone and that vaccine-induced immunity wanes in many vaccine recipients over time. At any given time, then, there are vaccinated employees lacking immunity. In fact, statistically, they significantly outnumber exempt employees. So, if the basis for imposing restrictions on exempt employees is that they pose a health risk for lacking immunity (of course, they may have natural immunity, but assuming they don’t), those restrictions would have to be applied to the non-immune vaccinated employees as well for them to be scientifically tenable and legally sound. When they are applied only to exempt employees, that discriminates against those employees; and when the exemption is religious, the discrimination is arguably unlawful religious discrimination in violation of Title VII and our federal Constitutional First Amendment “free exercise” (of religion) rights. Making this case formally requires citing applicable medical studies and law (state and/or federal statutes, agency regulations, applicable legal precedent), but a powerfully persuasive legal argument is clearly available.
For an employer’s exemption restrictions to be legally sound, they would have to identify which employees lack immunity, vaccinated or not, and then apply restrictions equally to all employees found to be lacking immunity. That would require periodic testing of all employees, which employers would surely say is too costly. But if the health concerns are not serious enough to undertake such expense, they couldn’t be severe enough to impose restrictions on only one part of the total non-immune population, especially the smaller part, the exempt employees.
Yet, employers nationally consistently impose restrictions on exempt employees only, blindly following CDC recommendations and the practices of other employers. They don’t independently investigate for themselves to come to their own conclusions. But this isn’t because they’re ignorant or incompetent. Group mentality is a powerful psychological force, often more powerful than logic; and most employers have full schedules and strained budgets without adding a research task that falls outside of their expertise. And let’s face it: Most people employers would hire to conduct such an assessment are either loyal to the corrupt agenda, coerced by it, or brainwashed, so an accurate scientific result would be unlikely. Finally, challenging authority can subject one to potential retaliation, whether it should or not (anti-vaccine doctors aren’t losing their licenses for doing anything wrong). So yes, no employer can reasonably say that restrictions for exempt employees are scientifically tenable, but these restrictions happen anyway, routinely throughout the nation, and they are difficult to successfully challenge.
Upcoming Parts of this article series will address employee medical exemptions, past vaccines, Title VII’s “disparate impact” standard, HIPPA, employer exemption forms, the EEOC, forced “volunteer” resignations, unemployment, and more.
With gratitude,
Alan Phillips, J.D.
Vaccine Rights Legal Expert
· February 26, 2023 Employee Religious Exemption Seminar
Facilitator: Carmel Moody, CMT, A.A., B.A., MBA, Ph.D.
· Exemption Manuals for employees, immigrants, and religious exemptions generally
· Facilitate an exemption seminar for a share of the proceeds! For more information, Contact Alan
Have an exemption question? Contact Alan.
Exemption Articles: vaccinerights.com/articles, vaccinerights.substack.com/archive
E-Book: The Authoritative Guide to Vaccine Legal Exemptions introduces the state and federal legal systems, exemption types, and the primary exemption categories (U.S.). Available at vaccinerights.com.
Alan Phillips, J.D., is the nation’s leading vaccine rights legal expert, the only one who’s worked fulltime with exemptions in all 3 dozen exemption contexts and sub-contexts (indeed, the only one who can name ½ of them), and who’s worked with clients, attorneys, legislators, and activists nationally for over two decades. vaccinerights.com