In Colonel Financial Management Officer v. Austin, (MD FL, Aug. 18, 2022), a Florida federal district court certified as a class all Marines who have a sincere religious objection to COVID vaccination and whose request for a religious accommodation has been (or will be) denied on appeal. According to the court:
The Marine Corps has granted only eleven accommodations, less than three-tenths of a percent (0.295%) of the 3,733 applications. The record presents no successful applicant other than a few who are due for retirement and prompt separation.
The court found "a systemic failure by the Marine Corps to satisfy RFRA." It said in part:
Notwithstanding a chaplain's affirmation, the Marine Corps rejects as insubstantial any religious objection grounded in the vaccine's connection to aborted fetal tissue because "fetal stem cells are neither used in the manufacture of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine nor are they present in the vaccine itself." This "finding," a unilateral lay declaration about a much discussed and much-debated topic, says nothing about the use of aborted fetal cells in the development of the vaccine and this finding says nothing about (and can say nothing about) the theological consequences of that use or about either moral or factual uncertainty. The "finding" says nothing about the religious concepts of, for example, accepting a personal benefit from evil, assisting someone in profiting from evil, cooperating in evil, appropriation of evil, de-sensitization to evil, moral contamination by intimacy with evil, ratification of evil, complicity with evil, or other considerations undoubtedly familiar to a theologian and likely familiar to a thoughtful and religious lay person who has contemplated evil.
The court issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the vaccine mandate against class members, or discharge or harassment of them.
