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Appeals court revives vaccine exemption lawsuit against Beth Israel
Amanda Bazinet, a former executive office manager at the hospital in Milton, filed for a vaccine exemption based on a religious objection relating to anti-abortion views.
A federal judge ruled in favor of a woman after she was fired by Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital after refusing the COVID-19 vaccine over her religious beliefs and anti-abortion views.
Amanda Bazinet, a former executive office manager at the hospital in Milton, filed for a vaccine exemption based on a religious objection in 2021, according to court documents. She was fired when the hospital rejected her accommodation, and Bazinet took religious discrimination claims to court.
The U.S. District Court for Massachusetts dismissed the lawsuit last year, finding that Bazinet did not prove her beliefs were sincerely held and that the hospital would have suffered undue hardship by allowing her to mask and test regularly in lieu of the vaccination.
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Federal Judge Seth Aframe of the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday in favor of the former employee in a 21-page opinion.
“Whether few or many share that religious view is irrelevant,” Aframe wrote. “That the Hospital disputes Bazinet’s factual foundation for her belief about the development of the vaccines does not change the religious character of the belief.”
Bazinet refused the vaccine because she is a “Christian who believes in Jesus Christ and His holy word, the Bible” and that the “COVID-19 vaccines currently available developed and confirmed their vaccines using fetal cell lines, which originated from aborted fetuses,” the opinion said.
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She argued the vaccine would make her “complicit in an action that not only offends, but … is an aberration to [her] Christian faith,” according to court docs.
The hospital argued that many Christians who oppose abortions still receive vaccines and that her request appeared to be from “cookie-cutter, anti-vaccine forms” available online.
The hospital also argued that the factual foundation of her beliefs — that the vaccines were developed from tissue cells from aborted fetuses — is incorrect, but the appeals court decided that the belief is still religious in character, Aframe wrote.
The District Court ultimately decided that her exemption request lacked “necessary factual details,” but the appeals court disagreed, writing that, in part, the case should return to court because Bazinet’s views were proven sincere.
The judge remanded for further proceedings consistent with the opinion to vacate the District Court’s decision.
“Bazinet provided numerous quotations from religious sources that she says support her view,’ Aframe wrote. “Accepting those allegations as true for present purposes, she has sufficiently pleaded a religious belief that conflicts with receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.”
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