Supreme Court rejects fired AstraZeneca employee’s appeal over refusal to take COVID-19 shot

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal from a former AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals employee fired in 2022 for not taking the COVID-19 shot, which she declined on religious grounds.

Tina Goede, who worked at AstraZeneca as an account sales manager for a little more than a year, refused to take a COVID-19 vaccine, as required by her employer. In her role, she often had to visit health care facilities where proof of vaccination was required. 

She said her denial was due to her pro-life Catholic and Christian worldview, which meant that her body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit” and that the vaccine was tested on aborted fetal cells. She declined to take either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, according to court records.

The company, though, fired her for noncompliance and rejected her religious objection to taking the shot. She filed for unemployment benefits with the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, but the unemployment law judge denied her any benefits.

The judge said her beliefs were not sincere, and overlapped with her secular beliefs that the vaccine “doesn’t work.” She had testified that even if the COVID-19 shot worked, in her view, she would not take it because “it’s just like the flu.”

“The vaccine has killed more people than it’s saving and I haven’t had the vaccination and I had COVID once. More people that have been vaccinated have gotten COVID multiple times. It doesn’t work. What’s the point?” she said, according to court papers.

“I’m pro-life, so that goes along with that, so any aborted tissues, anything that is utilized with any of the vaccines, I will not, I will not use.”

The decision by the unemployment law judge was affirmed by the appeals court, prompting Ms. Goede’s lawyer to take the case to the Supreme Court.

Her lawyer had sought for the high court to hear her First Amendment arguments against the state’s Department of Employment and Economic Development and AstraZeneca.

“Religious belief is intimate and differs substantially among Americans. The promise of religious liberty in the First Amendment is that such differences may persist without punishment from the state,” her petition read.

But on Monday, the justices rejected the case in an unsigned order. It would have taken four justices to vote in favor of hearing the dispute for oral arguments to be scheduled.

A lawyer for AstraZeneca waived the opportunity to file a brief in the dispute, reasoning Ms. Goede’s case weighed on the state’s denial of her unemployment benefits, leaving the issue between those parties.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, filed a response on behalf of the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, urging the court to reject the case.

He said state law denied unemployment benefits to anyone who was fired for “employment misconduct.”

“Ms. Goede vaguely suggests that a shift towards courts over-scrutinizing religious beliefs is ‘trending,’” he wrote in his brief, but said precedent “does not show a trend amongst federal courts of inappropriately questioning religious beliefs.”

AstraZeneca is a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company that developed a COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic. It is headquartered in Cambridge, England.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.