Decisions in suits by former employees who were denied religious exemptions from employer Covid vaccine mandates continue to be handed down by the courts. Here is a recent example:
In Brandon v. Board of Education of the City of St. Louis, (ED MO, May 8, 2025), a Missouri federal district court in a 76-page opinion refused to dismiss 16 employees' free exercise, equal protection, Title VII and state human rights act claims against the St. Louis school board. However, damage claims against the superintendent and the chief human resource officer were dismissed on qualified immunity grounds. Plaintiffs all had requested religious exemptions from the Board's Covid vaccine mandate. The Board received 189 requests for religious exemptions from its 3500 employees. None of the requests were granted. The board granted between 40 and 50 disability and medical exemptions. The court said in part:
Defendants have failed to meet their initial summary-judgment burden of showing that no genuine dispute of material fact exists as to Plaintiffs’ sincere religious beliefs....
... [T]he very providing of exemptions rendered the contract not generally applicable because it “‘invite[d]’ the government to decide which reasons for not complying with the policy [were] worthy of solicitude.”... For these reasons, the Court holds that the strict-scrutiny standard governs here....
Defendants point to three interests that Policy 4624 purportedly served: (1) education, (2) stemming the spread of COVID-19, and (3) promoting “the health, safety, and general welfare of students.”...
Defendants argue that Policy 4624 was necessary to providing “children of any and all backgrounds safe access to education, social mobility, and athletic, cultural[,] and social development.”... The Court agrees that these interests are compelling. ...
But the Court disagrees that Defendants have satisfied their summary-judgment burden and proven that Policy 4624 was narrowly tailored to serve those interests....
... [T]he Board could have granted every request for religious exemption, while still granting all the disability and medical exemptions that it granted, and achieved a total employee vaccination rate of between 93.1% ... and 93.4%.....
In sum, the record at a minimum strongly indicates that the Board denied all religious-exemption requests wholesale, and Plaintiffs thus received vastly different treatment than their comparators did....
Plaintiffs marshal evidence that the Board denied Plaintiffs’ religious-exemption requests because the Board thought that the religious-exemption requests were less important than other exemption requests. With this evidence, Plaintiffs more than show that a genuine dispute of material fact exists as to whether Defendants unlawfully intended to discriminate against Plaintiffs based on Plaintiffs’ protected religious beliefs....
