Three Federal Workers Wrongly Denied Vaccine Waiver, EEOC Says

A branch of the US Department of the Interior discriminated against three federal employees by denying their requests for religious exemptions from a government-wide Covid-19 vaccine mandate, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said in a federal sector appellate decision.

The EEOC found that the Bureau of Indian Education illegally denied the requests from employees at the Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, Calif., who cited their Christian beliefs opposing the use of aborted fetal cells in the vaccine’s development.

The Interior Department office had claimed allowing an accommodation of testing and masking instead of vaccination would be too ...