Only 9 of 102 religious exemption requests survived the county's vaccine mandate
Cook County has defeated a religious discrimination claim brought by a hospital pharmacist fired for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
The Seventh Circuit on September 28 affirmed summary judgment for the county, holding that granting a vaccine exemption to an in-person pharmacist would have posed undue hardship during the pandemic.
The pharmacist had spent 12 years at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital in Chicago. She worked alongside roughly 60 colleagues in a shared room, counseled patients at a pharmacy window once a month, and voluntarily ran medications to a floor dedicated to treating COVID-19 patients.
That changed in August 2021, when Cook County Health told all staff to get vaccinated or seek an exemption. The pharmacist applied on religious grounds, citing her Christian faith. Her body, she wrote, "is the temple of the Holy Spirit and shall not be defiled."
The county said no. Only fully remote employees qualified for exemptions - and a hospital pharmacist's job could not be done from home. Across the system, 102 workers out of nearly 6,000 asked for religious exemptions. Nine got one.
She was placed on 90 days of unpaid leave to find a remote role internally. She never found one. In May 2022, the county fired her, citing "gross insubordination."
Her Title VII lawsuit raised two theories. The first - failure to accommodate - turned on whether the county could show undue hardship. The...
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