With the clock ticking, thousands of public employees — many of them police and firefighters — are claiming and receiving religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine requirements that state and local governments have adopted in an effort to reduce the spread of the virus.
The vaccine mandates have been pushed by public officials looking to crack down on shot-shunners they blame for facilitating the virus’s deadly spread. But the number of granted exemptions suggests it can be challenging to enforce the mandate on unwilling workers whose religious beliefs are protected under federal and state law, especially if those workers are backed by a strong labor union.
San Jose has approved about four out of five religious exemption requests from the vaccine requirement, a total of more than 300. Although no major religious leaders oppose vaccination of their faithful, workers still can legitimately claim the shots violate their personal religious beliefs.
“It’s hard for us to say what someone believes isn’t sincere,” said Jennifer Schembri, San Jose’s director of employee relations and human resources. “Under the law, I’m not sure we have a lot of ability to do that.”
But that doesn’t mean exempted employees get a pass either. Employers must try to accommodate a worker’s religious beliefs just as they do with medical restrictions and disabilities. Those accommodations can be burdensome for the employee, like frequent test mandates, and can be changed if they prove unworkable.
“Just because we approve something doesn’t mean we can accommodate it,” Schembri said. For San Jose workers exempted from vaccination for religious or medical reasons, it typically means having to wear face masks on the job and being tested twice weekly for COVID-19, she said.
Other public agencies that have adopted vaccine requirements also have received a significant number of religious exemption requests. In Santa Clara County, 977 of 22,334 employees claimed religious exemptions from the vaccine requirement. County officials were still evaluating them and would not say how many have been approved.
In San Francisco, the first major city to adopt an employee COVID-19 vaccine requirement, 470 of the city’s 36,000 workers requested medical and religious exemptions — 194 of them in the police department — as of late Friday, said human resources policy chief Mawuli Tugbenyoh. Fewer than 25 had been approved and accommodations had yet to be worked out. Numbers were in flux as employees in high-risk jobs like police had to be vaccinated by Sept. 30, and 2,376 as of Friday either weren’t vaccinated or hadn’t indicated.
In Los Angeles, more than 2,600 city police officers were planning to seek religious exemptions from the city’s vaccine requirement, something the civilian Police Commission President William Briggs had called “extremely dubious,” KABC reported.
In the University of California system, 5,700 of its 230,000 employees, or 2.5%, requested a religious exemption to the vaccine requirement, spokeswoman Heather Harper said. Of those, 97% or about 5,500 have been approved, she said.
As of Sept. 30, 376 of San Jose’s 7,067 employees had requested religious or medical exemptions — Schembri said the overwhelming majority were religious — and 80%, had been granted. Though that’s a small slice of the overall workforce — less than 4% for San Jose — a significant share of those requests came from the police and fire departments, where jobs are critical to public safety.
San Jose officials Friday announced a one-week grace period on getting the first vaccine dose, and the police union reached a deal allowing unvaccinated officers to be tested for COVID-19 twice weekly instead of getting vaccinated.
Oakland has circulated a draft employee mandatory vaccination policy to its employee unions for review, but it is not final so its provisions are not yet in place. Contra Costa County was still gathering figures on exemption requests.
Religious belief exemptions for employees might seem out of step in California, one of a half-dozen states that doesn’t allow nonmedical exemptions from current required school vaccinations. But separate laws govern employees, whose religious beliefs are protected under the federal Civil Rights Act and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act. Those laws require reasonable accommodations for a worker’s religious beliefs that do not cause a hardship for the employer.
Sandra L. Rappaport, an employment law specialist and partner with San Francisco’s Hanson Bridgett firm who has been fielding many calls in recent weeks from public and private employers about vaccine mandates, said they don’t have to accommodate beliefs that aren’t religious or sincere. But will they be comfortable asking for proof?
“Employers are permitted to ask for additional information about the nature or tenets of their belief or practice, including written materials describing it if they exist,” Rappaport said. “The employer can take into account how recently the employee subscribed to the belief, and whether their past practices deviated from the tenets of the belief.”
Some request forms, like San Jose’s, are simple, asking employees to identify their religious belief, state how it conflicts with the vaccination requirement and provide any other information they think will be helpful. San Francisco’s asks for more detail, such as when their belief practice began and what specific tenet bars vaccination. It also asks if that tenet is different for other vaccines the employee may have gotten.
Government employers wouldn’t provide examples of their employees’ religious exemption requests. But organizations that oppose vaccine mandates, like Children’s Health Defense, chaired by personal injury lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., provide sample form letters for employees.
“The Bible encourages Christians to abstain from contaminating one’s body with substances that may be threatening to one’s bodily health,” the CHD sample letter says, citing St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians “that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.”
Rappaport said questioning an employee’s beliefs is difficult because “the definition of religion is fairly broad.” And it doesn’t matter that faith leaders from Pope Francis to the Dalai Lama encourage vaccination.
“It’s not a requirement that the employee be a member of an organized church in order to sincerely hold a religious belief,” Rappaport said. “A letter from a clergy person is not necessarily required. Given all this, ordinarily an employer should assume that a person’s belief is sincerely held.”