In Spivack v. City of Philadelphia, (ED PA, Jan. 4, 2023), a Pennsylvania federal district court held that Philadelphia's District Attorney Lawrence Krasner did not violate the religious rights of an Orthodox Jewish Assistant District Attorney when he refused to grant her an exemption from the Office's COVID vaccine mandate. The mandate, in its final form, offered no religious exemptions and only limited medical exemptions. According to the court, in seeking a religious exemption plaintiff submitted a letter from her rabbi that explained:
congregation members are forbidden from (1) benefitting from the live dissection of animals; (2) using hybridization technologies; (3) "self-flagellating"; (4) exposing themselves to unnecessary risk (Spivack's "natural immunity" to the virus made vaccination unnecessary); and (5) injecting a product whose precise ingredients are undisclosed.... Neither Krasner nor the City disputes that Spivack's sincerely holds her religious beliefs.
Rejecting plaintiff's First Amendment challenge, the court said in part:
Spivack offers no evidence that Krasner's exemption changes "stemmed from religious intolerance, rather than an intent to more fully ensure that employees [at the DAO] receive the vaccine in furtherance of the State's public health goal."...
[T]he medical exemption Krasner finally approved was for an objectively and narrowly defined category of persons: non-union DAO employees for whom a vaccination could be life-threatening. This is not the kind of exemption that undermines the Policy's general applicability....
The DAO ... "seriously considered substantially less restrictive alternatives" in the hope that they could achieve the Office's compelling interest-- "trying to keep people as safe as we can."... Concluding that these alternatives were inadequate, the Office required vaccinations for all non-union employees save one.
In these circumstances, the DAO Vaccine Policy survives strict scrutiny review.
