Nurse who rejects major tenets of Western medicine can continue her religious-discrimination suit against Boston Medical Center over the Covid-19 shots she refused, judge rules

A federal judge ruled today that a nurse who believes in Mother Nature but not most of western medicine can continue pursuing her lawsuit against Boston Medical Center for firing her in October, 2021 after she refused to comply with a hospital requirement that employees get vaccinated against Covid-19 in 2021.

The ruling, by US District Court judge F. Dennis Saylor, does not mean that Amy Munroe has won her overall case, only that in Saylor's opinion, she proved, even if only very barely, that she was following religious beliefs in objecting to the shots. She still has to prove that the hospital did her wrong by firing her and that the hospital could have accommodated those beliefs, for example, by letting her wear a mask as she worked with patients.

Saylor wrote that in rejecting the hospital's request to simply dismiss the case based on what has been filed to date, he had to discern whether Munroe was following religious tenets or simply "personal" beliefs, and that that proved difficult in her case:

The question presented here is whether plaintiff’s beliefs are religious beliefs (which are protected) or strongly held medical, scientific, or personal beliefs (which are not). Plaintiff does not profess to adhere to a mainstream, well-established religion, but to an individualized and idiosyncratic set of beliefs. The Court must therefore consider whether those beliefs, in fact, may be reasonably characterized as religious in nature.

As an initial matter, the plaintiff refers to no external or objective manifestations of her asserted religion. There is no scripture, sacred text, holy teaching, or other form of divine revelation. There are no rites, rituals, observances, or ceremonies. There are no services, prayers, devotionals, offerings, or other forms of worship. There are no sabbath days, holy days, or holy festivals. There are no priests or clergy. There are no established places of worship or other holy spaces (other than "outside." She is not part of any congregation or gathering. She describes no institutional or spiritual leadership, no structure or church organization, and no efforts at propagation or conversion.

But, he continued, Munroe's belief that an RNA-base vaccine is not something Mother Nature would put up with squared with her other professed beliefs, including being against "chemotherapy, radiation, dialysis, artificial nutrition etc.," - although she has come to accept flu vaccines because they are derived from "dead or weakened naturally occurring virus" rather than something built in a lab. And, Saylor continued, she professed additional thoughts to make her objections to the vaccine more than just a "personal" choice - she believes Mother Nature rules everything and set the Covid-19 virus loose - and caused other natural disasters as a way to punish her wayward children or to restore balance to the world.

The question thus becomes whether all those factors, taken together - plaintiff's medical beliefs and practices, her use of a religious label, and the expression of Mother Nature as having some qualities of divinity - are enough to establish that her beliefs may be fairly characterized as a religion. Again, the issue is not the sincerity of her beliefs - for present purposes, that is conceded - but whether they are religious rather than merely personal.

For purposes of evaluating her claim at this preliminary stage, the Court concludes that the complaint is sufficient, if only barely so, to plead a claim of a bona fide religious belief. It is of course true that any lawsuit based on a claim of idiosyncratic religious belief must inevitably rest on the plaintiff's own statements. In that respect, the difference between a blanket claim of religious belief ("my religion does not permit vaccination") and a complete description of the tenets of a claimed faith is only one of degree. Still, for purposes of evaluating the plausibility of a claim, the level of factual detail provided is important. And here, plaintiff has alleged some details of her claimed faith, including why she contends it is religious, not merely personal, and examples of how she has followed that claimed faith in the past, and therefore that her beliefs are not recently fabricated. While there are certainly other questions that need to be resolved before plaintiff can prevail, for present purposes her allegations as to her religious beliefs are sufficient.

Saylor, continued, however, that the case has a number of "unresolved issues" to go through before it goes to a jury, including:

[W]hether the hospital can show that it offered a reasonable accommodation or, if it did not, whether doing so would have resulted in undue hardship. Cloutier, 390 F.3d at 133. There is certainly a question as to how a hospital could reasonably accommodate a nurse who is involved in direct patient care but who does not “participate in Western medicine,” takes no medications, and indeed has not visited a doctor in 15 years, and who refused to be vaccinated against a highly contagious disease during a worldwide pandemic. Nonetheless, that issue has not been raised by the motion for judgment on the pleadings, and its resolution will await another day.