A woman who refused a COVID-19 vaccine was just awarded nearly $13 million

A Catholic woman who refused to comply with her employer’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for religious reasons has been awarded nearly $13 million in damages from a religious discrimination suit.
Lisa Domski, who is Catholic, worked remotely as an IT specialist for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan when the company put its mandate in place, per Catholic News Agency.
Domski requested a faith-based accommodation, citing her concerns about the fetal cells used in the development of the shots. She said getting vaccinated would make her feel complicit in abortion, since the fetal cells came from tissue obtained during abortions.
Company leaders refused to exempt Domski, and then they fired her in January 2022. She filed a religious discrimination lawsuit, which led to the big payout.
“Domski was awarded nearly $1.7 million in front pay and back pay damages and another $1 million in noneconomic damages. She also received $10 million in punitive damages, which are only awarded in civil cases when the jury determines that the defendant acted in a malicious or reckless manner,” Catholic News Agency reported.
Blue Cross said in a statement that it’s reviewing the court’s decision, as well as its legal options.
“While Blue Cross respects the jury process and thanks the individual jurors for their service, we are disappointed in the verdict,” the statement said.
Domski’s case was one of hundreds filed over vaccine mandates in recent years. Across the country, religious employees have fought in court for broader faith-based exemptions to the mandates, with mixed success.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, courts typically deferred to employers’ judgment about whether a religious exemption to a policy, including a vaccine mandate, will put an “undue burden” on the business, as the Deseret News previously reported.
But the COVID-19 vaccine cases came at a time when some religious freedom advocates were pushing for changes to that approach, changes that gave employees more power.
In recent months, hundreds of workers with faith-based concerns about the vaccines have received settlements related to their company’s response to their religious exemption request, per Catholic News Agency. And some states have passed laws requiring broader religious exemptions in vaccine mandates, as the Deseret News reported in 2021.
Still, religious employees haven’t always won. The Supreme Court has turned down multiple opportunities to intervene in faith-related vaccine mandate cases, leaving rulings against the religious employees in place, USA Today reported this summer.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, religious leaders attempted to reduce conflict around the vaccines by proactively expressing support for vaccination.
For example, Catholic leaders put out a statement saying that vaccination would not violate the church’s teachings on abortion, since the fetal cells Domski and others were worried about weren’t actually present in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The Vatican said that “obtaining the vaccine ‘does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion’ but emphasized that the statement is not ‘a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses,’” per Catholic News Agency.
But that religious statement and others didn’t deter all religious objectors to the vaccines, and it didn’t interfere with those people’s ability to file religious discrimination suits if their exemption requests were turned down. In religious freedom cases, courts typically defer to a person’s interpretation of their faith, not the faith’s official teachings.
In her case, Domski successfully argued that her former employer hadn’t respected her beliefs about the vaccines’ link to abortion.
“The jury found that the company had violated both federal and state laws that prohibit religious discrimination,” Catholic News Agency reported.