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 majority said it could. Affidavits from senior officials described how hospital staff faced elevated transmission risks and how masking and distancing alone fell short once vaccines were available.
The second theory - disparate treatment - rested on a comparator. Another county employee, identified only as "Sanitarian I," worked at a separate department in Rolling Meadows and went unvaccinated for over a year without consequence. She had been in a blind vaccine study and did not know if she had received the real thing or a placebo. The court held the two were not comparable: different jobs, different worksites, different supervisors.
A dissenting judge saw things differently. The county had justified its mandate, the dissent argued, but had not shown that exempting one pharmacist - already masking, testing, and distancing - would have been an excessive burden. The dissent called the evidentiary record "very thin."
For employers weighing blanket health-mandate policies against individual religious accommodation requests, the split decision is a reminder that the evidence behind the refusal matters as much as the policy itself.
