When implementing the various vaccine requirements imposed on employers by federal, state, and local mandates, employers are required to consider requests from employees for reasonable accommodations from that mandate due to medical or religious reasons. An employer is not required to grant such an accommodation, however, if there are no “reasonable” changes that could be made to enable an unvaccinated employee to continue to perform their duties without posing a “direct threat” to the health or safety of themselves or others in the workplace.
An employer’s determination that an unvaccinated employee is a “direct threat” in many instances, however, may be driven in large part by the severity of the pandemic in a particular area, as opposed to the question whether an unvaccinated employee can perform essential job duties with an accommodation.
The recent evidence showing the highly contagious nature of the omicron variant could further complicate the “direct threat” analysis and make it very difficult for an unvaccinated employee to demonstrate that an accommodation request...
Lieff Cabraser partner Nimish R. Desai will speak at the Federal Bar Association’s virtual program, “How to De-Escalate Conflict in FCA Litigation,” on October 28. The panel brings together legal ...