Newly released texts show that Dr. Anthony Fauci privately told colleagues a reaction some people had after their second COVID-19 vaccine dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
Days later, he told the public that 10,000 pregnant women had received COVID-19 vaccines without any concerning safety signals being detected.
“No red flags,” as he put it. Granted, the texts don’t prove the vaccines caused harm. But they do show a gap between what officials knew and worried about privately and what they told the public.
All of this makes a court order out of Virginia worth attention.
Federal district court Judge Robert Ballou certified a “Disfavored Religions Class” this past April in Phillips v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, a suit brought by former UVA Health employees who were fired after the hospital denied their religious exemptions from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Coverage of the case has so far been limited to Virginia legal trade press and local Charlottesville outlets.
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UVA Health allegedly kept a list of “established religions” understood to object to vaccination.
Belong to one, and your exemption was automatic. Belong to anything else, and your request went to a “Religious Exemption Committee” empowered to reject it as insincere, not really religious, based on “misinformation,” or a misreading of your own faith.
Judge Ballou let the Disfavored Religions Class move forward: employees who asked for an accommodation, weren’t on the approved list of six faiths, and were fired or punished for it. He turned down two related classes, one over the vaccines’ link to abortion-derived cell lines and another over a broader failure to accommodate.
Here is what UVA Health’s list got backward.
A religious objection belongs to the believer, not the denomination.
I don’t have a religious objection to the COVID-19 vaccine, and neither do plenty of other Catholics. In fact, Pope Francis encouraged vaccination throughout the pandemic. But other faithful Catholics reached a different conclusion in good conscience, among them Sr. Dede Byrne, the surgeon and religious sister known for her public witness on life issues. Neither of us has to be wrong for the other to be right. A religious exemption protects the individual believer’s conscience, not a denomination’s official position paper.
That range is exactly what UVA Health’s list had no room for. Its committee asked whether your denomination had a “known prohibition” on file.
Employment law related to religious accommodation asks whether your own belief is sincerely held. UVA answered the wrong question. I’m not writing this from a distance. I live in Northern Virginia, the same commonwealth as the hospital system defending this lawsuit. I’m also a mother and a practicing Catholic.
When the government’s own health officials are still rethinking which vaccines belong on the schedule, and their past communications on vaccine safety are under fresh scrutiny, it’s harder to defend an employer treating a request like the Phillips plaintiffs’ as automatically unreasonable just because it didn’t come pre-approved by a familiar denomination.
The Phillips case exposes a design flaw the Supreme Court has already told employers to correct. In Groff v. DeJoy, the Court’s 2023 unanimous ruling threw out the old rule letting employers deny a religious accommodation over anything more than a trivial cost. Employers now must show a “substantial” burden, and the Phillips court has already applied that standard here.
Title VII’s religious-accommodation rules were never meant to let an employer sort belief into a favored list and an unfavored one, because sincerity is about a person, not a denomination.
The moment a hospital system decides which faiths carry a “known prohibition” against a medical procedure, it has made itself theologian-in-chief for its own workforce. Employees inside the approved six got the benefit of the doubt, while everyone else had to prove their sincerity to a committee deciding whether they practiced their religion correctly.
This is the sorting the Supreme Court’s religion-clause cases have spent the last decade tearing down. Neutrality means neutrality among religions, not between religion and no religion.
Watch the two classes Judge Ballou turned down too, especially the abortion-objectors claim.
Catholic teaching doesn’t forbid these vaccines, but it asks the conscientious to weigh their ties to abortion-derived cell lines, and plenty of Catholics raised that objection during the mandate years while others in the same pews did not. Institutions built to move fast during the mandate era built shortcuts around sincerity, favoring big religions over smaller ones, and denominational consensus over individual conscience.
Phillips is still far from over. But the certified class puts on the record that a religious exemption process that only trusts you if your faith has taken a public position on vaccine doctrine isn’t protecting religious liberty. It’s rationing it.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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