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    • Jury awards million to woman fired for not getting COVID vaccine. Here’s why.
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    Jury awards $12 million to woman fired for not getting COVID vaccine. Here’s why.

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    A longtime Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan employee who was fired after religiously refusing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine has been awarded more than $12 million by a federal jury.

    The Detroit jury returned the verdict Friday afternoon, finding that Blue Cross discriminated against Lisa Domski of Wyandotte, who is Catholic, by denying her an exemption from its company-wide vaccination mandate, an exemption that he had sought her out on her “sincere religious” basis. faith.”

    The jury found that denying that relief, known as an accommodation, was a violation of federal and state law. They awarded Domski a total of $12.69 million, or $315,000 in back pay, $1.375 million in unpaid future wages, $1 million in non-economic damages and $10 million in punitive damages .

    Her attorney, Jon Marko of Marko Law in Detroit, said Domski’s lawsuit against Blue Cross was the first of its kind to be tried in Michigan involving an employer denying a religious accommodation for a mandated COVID-19 vaccine .

    One similar case Last month in San Francisco, a federal jury awarded more than $1 million each to six Bay Area Rapid Transit agency workers who also did not receive the vaccine for religious reasons.

    Domski worked at Blue Cross for 32 years, most recently in IT. Blue Cross terminated his employment on January 5, 2022, the deadline for all Blue Cross employees and contractors — including those who work remotely — to be fully vaccinated against COVID.

    Domski sought a religious exemption from her belief that the three COVID vaccines widely used at the time — by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — were all either developed or tested using fetal cells that came from abortion, and she he thought it would be a sin to inject her body with such a vaccine because abortion is wrong.

    “She was working from home, was not a danger to anyone else, and had a sincere religious belief against the use of the vaccine,” Marko told the Free Press on Friday. “Blue Cross, what they did was wrong.”

    According to a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services information sheetalthough the first three COVID vaccines did not contain fetal cells, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was indeed developed and manufactured by growing the virus in fetal cells, and a fetal cell line was used early on to test the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.

    Blue Cross can appeal the verdict. In a statement released Friday afternoon, the insurer said it was reviewing its legal options and would determine its next step in the coming days.

    “Throughout the pandemic, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, along with its employees, has worked to promote the health and safety of our colleagues, stakeholders and communities,” the statement said. “As part of this joint effort, in October 2021, Blue Cross and its affiliates adopted a vaccination policy that requires all of its employees to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 or obtain a religious or medical accommodation.

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    “In implementing its vaccine policy, Blue Cross designed an accommodation process that complied with state and federal law and respected the sincerely held religious beliefs of its employees. While Blue Cross respects the jury process and thanks the individual jurors for their service, we are disappointed. in the verdict”.

    Marko said he represents clients in nearly 180 similar cases against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan or its affiliates.

    “This is going to set the tone for Blue Cross, because it’s only going to get worse for them from here on out,” he said.

    Marko said he’s also Catholic, but he voluntarily chose to get vaccinated, so he was initially a little skeptical about the process.

    “But as I really got into the case and learned what Blue Cross had done to these loyal workers, I knew I had to do something about it,” he said.

    Domski’s lawsuit, filed in August 2023 in U.S. District Court in Detroit, accused Blue Cross of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for an employee’s religious beliefs and practices. It also alleged discrimination and disparate treatment under Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act.

    According to court documents, Blue Cross argued that Domski’s request for accommodation did not meet the criteria for a religious exemption. The insurer attempted to interview her in December 2021, but she refused to answer the interviewer’s questions, saying she would instead rely on a written statement she submitted.

    “My religious view has been and continues to be that abortion is a crime and a sin against God,” Domski wrote in the statement. “I have to consider the moral aspects of using any vaccines that have to do with fetal cell lines obtained from an abortion.”

    According to Domski’s lawsuit, the senior Blue Cross employee tasked with deciding who could get an exemption from the vaccination mandate told colleagues he doubted the validity of any request for religious accommodation.

    Ultimately, Blue Cross rejected 75 percent of all religious accommodation requests, according to the lawsuit, leading to the layoff of 250 employees in January 2022.

    Blue Cross conducted interviews with employees seeking such accommodations, lasting up to 15 minutes and involving 10 main questions.

    One of the questions was whether the employees took the over-the-counter drugs Aspirin, Sudafed, Tums or Tylenol, and the employees were told — erroneously — that Tylenol and Tums were developed and manufactured using stem cells, according to Domski’s lawsuit. .

    Ann Arbor attorney Noah Hurwitz of Hurwitz Law is of counsel with Marko on Domski’s case.

    Hurwitz said he is also involved in about 300 other lawsuits filed by workers who were fired from their jobs for not receiving COVID-19 vaccines. Hurwitz said all of those people were denied a religious or medical exemption.

    The other employer defendants include T-Mobile, Carhartt, Honeywell, Henry Ford Health, Ascension Health, Trinity Health, MotorCity and MGM Grand casinos in Detroit and the city of Ann Arbor.

    About 90 percent of the cases that have reached a conclusion so far have ended in settlements, he said, and most of those cases have focused on religious accommodations.

    Medical accommodation cases can be difficult to win, Hurwitz said, because they usually require a qualifying disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. So even a doctor’s note saying an employee has had bad reactions to other vaccines in the past can be insufficient to get out of an employer’s mandate to get a COVID vaccination, he said.

    Hurwitz said he knows of health systems that require annual flu shots for all their employees, even though the flu shots are far less than 100 percent effective, because they want to avoid a mass outbreak situation where all hospital staff get sick suddenly. Those types of vaccine mandates have been upheld in court, he said.

    Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or [email protected]. Follow X @I believe

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