Many lessons are still being learned related to the disastrous COVID policies, especially the Biden mandate for firms with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce was fully vaccinated or require unvaccinated workers to produce a negative test result on a weekly basis.
Some companies took the mandate to extremes, neither allowing for weekly testing nor accommodating refusals based on religious beliefs.
Now, one of the largest settlements in recent cases involving COVID-19 vaccine mandates and religious discrimination has just been handed down in favor of a former Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) employee.
A federal jury awarded a $13 million verdict to a former Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan employee who says she was wrongfully terminated for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine due to her religion.Lisa Domski filed a lawsuit in August 2023 through the U.S. District Court Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division, alleging that the health system fired her after she refused to get the vaccine due to religion.Attorney John Marko says Domski is a devout Catholic and applied for a religious exemption to the vaccine. Marko says Domski, who worked for the health system for nearly 38 years, provided a written statement explaining her beliefs and the name and contact information of her priest.
Domski’s lawyers asserted that she posed no risk to others as she had been working remotely during the pandemic and was on a hybrid arrangement prior to the COVID outbreak.
Court records show Domski worked 100% remotely during the pandemic and 75% remotely before COVID-19 emerged in 2020. Her attorney, Jon Marko, argued that even without vaccination, she posed no risk to others due to her remote work arrangement.”Our forefathers fought and died for the freedom for each American to practice his or her own religion. Neither the government nor a corporation has a right to force an individual to choose between his or her career and conscience,” Marko said in a statement.”Lisa refused to renounce her faith and beliefs and was wrongfully terminated from the only job she had ever known. The jury’s verdict today tells BCBSM that religious discrimination has no place in America and affirms each person’s right to religious freedom.”
The jury verdict gives Domski $10 million in punitive damages, approximately $1.7 million in lost wages, and $1 million in noneconomic damages.
This is bad news for a slew of other employers, as Marko has over 100 other cases teed-up and ready to go.
The payout comes months after Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee paid a woman nearly $700,000 in a settlement after she was similarly fired for refusing to comply with its COVID-19 vaccine requirement.The Tennessee federal jury found in July that Tanja Benton “proved by a preponderance of the evidence” that her decision to refuse the vaccine was based on a “sincerely held religious belief.” Benton also worked on a mostly remote basis prior to the pandemic.Marko said he is representing 170 others in separate wrongful termination cases who are taking similar action against Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan over the 2021 vaccine mandate. The trials are set to begin in the new year.
With so many public health officials itching to enact more pandemic policies in the event of other diseases (e.g., bird flu and monkeypox), companies should reflect upon these court cases and perhaps avoid being injection-fascists when it comes to novel viruses and newly developed vaccines….should anyone ever try to implement “two weeks to stop the spread” again.
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