What is the meaning of our brief time on Earth? is there life after death?  Is there a God?  If so, why would The Almighty permit so much wickedness and suffering in the world?  How can one explain the existence of contention interrogatories?

Unlike the Drug and Device Law Daughter, who attended Divinity School, we are ill-equipped to answer these profound questions. By scurrying into the legal profession, we managed to avoid both math and theology.  Or so we thought. It turns out that, every once in a while, the law is forced to contemplate Higher Things. 

Such was the case in Slattery v. Main Line Health, Inc., 2025 WL 1758616 (E.D.Pa. June 25, 2025), where the plaintiff, a physician, alleged that she was denied a COVID-19 vaccination exemption “based on her sincerely held religious beliefs as an Evangelical Christian.” The defendant medical practices had announced a mandatory Covid-19 vaccination requirement in 2021.  The plaintiff applied for a religious exemption by submitting a narrative statement and completing a required questionnaire. 

The plaintiff had taken other vaccines (including flu) before. Here, she claimed that the COVID vaccine utilized different technology. Perhaps that explained what to a neutral observer might appear to be the plaintiff’s contradictory, or at least situational, positions on vaccinations.  The plaintiff claimed that the vaccine permanently altered her genetic makeup – which “violates God’s intended design for [her] makeup.” 

The defendants’ Religious Exemption Committee declined the plaintiff’s request, determining that the plaintiff had not stated a basis why her religious belief required her to refuse the Covid-19 vaccination. 

The plaintiff filed a lawsuit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act for disparate treatment and for failure to accommodate based on her religious views.  The defendants moved for summary judgment. 

In COVID vaccination cases, most courts have shown deference to plaintiffs asserting “religious” objections to vaccination.  But what makes something “religious”?  Do courts even want to wade into such deep waters?  Sometimes, as in the Slattery case, they have to slip into their waders. In Slattery, the court called out the plaintiff’s religious objections for what they were – quibbles of a scientific, not religious, nature.  

The court reasoned that whether a belief is religious in nature depends on whether such belief “addresses fundamental and ultimate questions having to do with deep and imponderable matters” that are “comprehensive in nature.”  The plaintiff’s stated justification for an exemption was “scientific and/or medical in nature, not religious.”  Merely draping general religious terminology (the body is a temple, etc) over quarrels with particular medical mechanisms does not transform what is essentially a scientific distinction into a religious stand. Whether these beliefs were “sincerely” held was irrelevant, because they did not relate to any religious faith. (There is no more overrated ‘virtue’ than sincerity.)

Nor was a reasonable accommodation possible, since the plaintiff’s job required 40 hours a week of direct patient care.  While it might be all fine and good for the plaintiff to expose herself to increased COVID risk, the employer could reasonably refuse to permit her to pose an increased Covid-19 (and death) risk to the patients. That is a risk and cost to health and safety that was “immeasurable” and constituted an “undue hardship” for the employers. Such an undue hardship is, as a matter of law, a complete defense to a failure-to-accommodate claim.  

The disparate treatment claim went nowhere, too, because the plaintiff was “unable to distinguish which classes of people, or non-members, were treated more favorably than Plaintiff.”  

The court granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment and dismissed the plaintiff’s complaint. The plaintiff’s case never had a prayer.