
Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) has reached a settlement with two former employees who were fired for refusing to receive COVID-19 vaccinations.
The employees, John Lott and Jeremy Beer filed a complaint in December 2021, alleging that the pharmaceutical business violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by rejecting their request for a religious exemption to vaccination. They took their case to federal court in New York’s Southern District, where four additional terminated workers would subsequently join them in October last year.
Beer was a senior executive for data integrity at BMS, while Lott was a deputy director of strategy and proposals and the lead for patient safety and epidemiology. The former’s annual salary was just south of $180,000, while the latter earned $146,000. Carrie Kefalas and Kamila Dubisz, two other employees, filed suit against the company after they were also denied religious accommodations.
Kefalas stated in the lawsuit that getting the COVID jab “would permanently destroy my relationship with My Savior, prevent eternal salvation and promise eternal damnation of my soul as it is described in the Bible because I would be accepting the Beast as my Savior.”
Kefalas’s request for a religious exemption was denied by BMS in November 2021 on the grounds that her religious convictions were not truly cherished and that she had made generalized statements against the safety of COVID-19 treatments for reasons unconnected to her religion. Earlier this week, the charges against Kefalas were dropped.
Now that we are in 2023, strict vaccine restrictions, including the requirement to produce proof of immunization in order to enter bars or indoor areas in New York City, have mostly faded away. However, during the height of the initial vaccination push in 2021, a large number of businesses mandated that their staff receive vaccinations.
As soon as vaccines became readily available to the public in 2021, BMS required that every employee get immunized. The organization informed its staff members that they would be terminated if they did not have proof of vaccination by November 1 of that year.
These vaccine mandates were met with a great deal of resistance from individual workers as well as politicians inclined to the right, such as the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who in October 2021 announced an executive order prohibiting the use of vaccine mandates. People who made the decision not to get vaccinated frequently sought religious exemptions, and there were several lawsuits filed against legislation that required people to get vaccines. Both legal and public health professionals were prepared for that level of resistance.
In the U.S., opposition to vaccine shots has evolved into a major political issue, and employees have resisted vaccination regulations in a variety of different ways. The courts dismissed a vast majority of such cases. For instance, a U.S. district judge rejected a case filed by five former employees of the aerospace corporation United Launch Alliance in late 2021.
Most workers who disagreed with their employers’ mandated COVID-19 vaccination policy have been waiting until now to file lawsuits because doing so required them to go through the cumbersome process of obtaining EEOC clearance.
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