Supreme Court rejects case from fired worker denied jobless benefits after refusing vaccine

WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court on Monday rejected the appeal of a Minnesota woman who said she was wrongly denied unemployment benefits after being fired for refusing to be vaccinated for COVID-19 because of her religious beliefs.

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development determined she wasn’t eligible for benefits because her reasons for refusing the vaccine were based less on religion and more on a lack of trust that the vaccine was effective.

The case shows that the vaccine debate continues to smolder after the pandemic and after the Supreme Court in 2022 halted enforcement of a Biden administration vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers but declined to hear a challenge to the administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care facilities that receive federal funding.

Still pending is an appeal from military chaplains who challenged the military’s vaccination requirement. Although that requirement was later rescinded at the direction of Congress, the chaplains argue they lost out on training opportunities and promotions because they requested religious exemptions.

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Minnesota said the unemployment benefit appeal denied Monday wasn’t worth the Supreme Court’s time because benefits have been given to others who were found to have a sincerely held religious objection to the vaccine, so there’s no overarching question to address.

Lawyers for the Upper Midwest Law Center, which represented Tina Goede, had argued she was treated differently by the Minnesota courts than others who successfully appealed their denial of benefits. 

Refusing to get vaccinated, fired from a pharmaceutical company

After refusing to get vaccinated, Goede was fired in 2022 from her job as an account sales manager for the pharmaceutical company Astra Zeneca. Her position had required her to meet with customers in hospitals and clinics, some of which required proof of vaccination.

She told the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development her religious beliefs prohibit injecting foreign substances into her body, which is a “temple of the Holy Spirit.”

A Catholic opposed to abortion, Goede also objected to the COVID-19 vaccine because she believed it was manufactured using or tested on an aborted fetal-cell line. (A cell line from an abortion decades ago was used to create Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine. Fetal cells were used in the early testing, though not in the production, of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.)

But Goede told the unemployment law judge she wouldn’t receive the vaccine no matter how it was made “because it doesn’t work.”

The judge said Goede was declining to take some vaccines, but not others, “because she does not trust them, not because of a religious belief.”

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Goede’s attorneys said the judge had interrogated her religious beliefs with “unfair `gotcha’ questioning."

“He couched his denial of benefits in Ms. Goede’s credibility and then discounted her religious beliefs by determining that her secular beliefs outweighed them,” the lawyers told the Supreme Court.

At the same time the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld that decision last year, it reached the opposite conclusion for two others who had been denied benefits after asserting religious objections.

Goede’s lawyers said her case presented a question that will reoccur: how to analyze a religious objection to an employer policy when those objections coincide with secular beliefs.