![]() ![]() “The employer may say ‘Well, I can’t have you working inside a nursing home with a vulnerable patient if you’re not taking the vaccine but I’ll give you an administrative job away from the patient.’” “What employees are entitled to is reasonable accommodation, which means they don’t have to be given exactly what they want, such as a complete exemption,” Reiss says. “It has to be sincere which means employers are on decent ground if they try to evaluate sincerity although there are a lot of pitfalls in evaluating sincerity.” Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, “If an employee has a sincere religious objection to a workplace rule, the employee deserves reasonable accommodation unless it’s an undue burden,” explains Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC Hastings who has written extensively about vaccine requirements. While some who hope to avoid a vaccine have had some victory on the state level-a court recently ruled that New York’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health-care workers had to allow for religious exemptions-employer-based mandates could be harder for the vaccine resistant to crack. “There are more people than we can help and we hope you can take some referrals in your state to send demand letters,” the firm instructs prospective affiliates. The demand for the firm’s exemption demand-crafting services has grown so much that Liberty now advertises for attorneys to work as affiliates to help cope with the “thousands of people” reaching out to them. The group did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast but Liberty Counsel has been inundated with requests for help in crafting exemption requests to employers, schools, and government agencies, according to Liberty’s website. Last week, the Supreme Court declined to grant an emergency injunction as the case plays out in lower courts. Just recently, one of Liberty Counsel’s most prominent cases involved health-care workers in Maine with a suit aimed at overturning the state’s vaccine mandate for hospital and nursing home employees. In speeches, he’s called COVID-19 shots part of a “depopulation” conspiracy to force the world to “have a tracking mechanism to determine whether or not you've had one of these particular injections.” The group previously focused on more traditional culture-war issues like anti-abortion suits and cases seeking to deny LGBTQ Americans their rights but Liberty’s founder, Mathew Staver, shares many of his clients conspiratorial views about vaccines and likes to air them in public. ![]() Liberty Counsel-an evangelical nonprofit legal foundation-has been offering pro bono representation for clients in pursuit of religious exemption. To hire Siri Glimstad’s attorneys for help on crafting a letter, their website says a consultation on religious exemptions runs around $1,400 per client. The firm advertises that “hundreds of individuals” have obtained a vaccine exemption through its services.īut those exemptions don’t come cheap. ![]() “I would say, for the most part, they’re accepted, but it does vary by circumstances and employer,” Siri says. When it comes to religious exemptions, Siri says employers have generally been obliging and he hasn’t had to file a suit over a request yet. Phil Show producer Del Bigtree, against the CDC and Department of Health & Human Services, as well as on behalf of clients seeking to overturn employer mandates entirely. Siri Glimstad attorneys have filed cases on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a Texas-based anti-vaccine group founded and funded by former Dr. "There’s been an incredible rise in the number of people seeking exemptions from our vantage point,” said Aaron Siri, managing partner of Siri Glimstad, a law firm well-known in the anti-vaxx world because the firm specializes in vaccine-related litigation and worked in the niche field well before the pandemic. In response to that desperation, a range of services with varying price points have cropped up: from $25 Zoom seminars with untrained activists who lack legal training, to pastors offering “concierge packages” and attestations of faith for a generous donation, to the pricier option of $1,400 consulting sessions with attorneys who specialize in anti-vaccine litigation.Īnd while federal courts offer contradictory guidance on who should get a religious exemption and under what conditions, the demand is only getting higher, according to one sought-after firm. With government and employee vaccine mandates taking hold, religious exemptions that assert a worker’s theological objection to inoculation are one of the few legal routes left for anti-vaxxers holding out on getting a COVID-19 shot. The spike in anti-vaxxers seeking religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine is creating a cottage industry of pastors, lawyers, and activists offering help with crafting letters that they say can help you dodge the jab and still keep your job. ![]()
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