Massachusetts hospital employee who was fired after not getting COVID vaccine scores win in appeals court

A Beth Israel employee who was fired after she refused to get the COVID vaccine has scored a win in federal appeals court.

Amanda Bazinet, who worked as an executive office manager at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Milton, sued the hospital when she was terminated over the vaccine mandate.

She had tried to get a religious accommodation for the COVID vaccine in 2021, which the hospital rejected and then sent her packing.

When Bazinet sued Beth Israel over religious discrimination, the federal district court dismissed the case. But now, the federal appeals court has tossed the district court’s ruling.

“Whether Bazinet’s religious discrimination claims will succeed or even survive summary judgment is uncertain. But these claims should have advanced…” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit wrote in its ruling on Tuesday.

“Accordingly, we vacate the district court’s order dismissing Bazinet’s religious discrimination claims and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” the appeals court added.

The hospital’s mandatory vaccine policy had exemptions, including for medical and religious reasons.

When the lower district court dismissed the religious discrimination claims, the judge said Bazinet failed to allege that she maintained a “sincerely held religious belief” that prevented her from taking the COVID vaccine.

Also, the judge ruled that the hospital would “suffer an undue hardship” by granting Bazinet’s request for an accommodation from the vaccine requirement.

“The complaint sufficiently alleged that taking the vaccine would violate Bazinet’s religious beliefs,” the appeals court wrote on Tuesday. “Moreover, determining whether an undue hardship would result from the Hospital excusing Bazinet from the vaccine requirement cannot be accomplished at this preliminary stage of the litigation.”

In her religious accommodation request, Bazinet noted her understanding that the available COVID vaccines were developed using fetal cell lines that originated from aborted fetuses. She also explained that taking the vaccine would make her complicit in the performance of abortions which would be “an aberration to (her) Christian faith.”

Bazinet provided quotations from religious sources that she said supports her view.

“Accepting those allegations as true for present purposes, she has sufficiently pleaded a religious belief that conflicts with receiving the COVID-19 vaccine as required by the Policy,” the appeals court wrote.

“Bazinet… grounded her objection to taking the vaccine in a religious belief connecting the COVID-19 vaccine to opposition to abortion,” the court later added. “Whether few or many share that religious view is irrelevant. For similar reasons, it is also irrelevant at this stage of the litigation that the Hospital tells us that Bazinet is mistaken in believing that the COVID-19 vaccines were developed from fetal tissue obtained from aborted fetuses. 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.”