A faith-based healthcare organization, Ascension Healthcare, has denied an employees religious exemption for COVID while simultaneously approving one for the flu. "Undue hardship" on the organization was cited, while undue hardship on the employee was ignored. The denial letter she received appears as boilerplate.
"I went to school for eight years... and in six months, it was taken away from me by a so-called Catholic organization that does not respect my religious beliefs."
Our source submitted exemption requests for both influenza and COVID-19 on Sept. 13:
"I am writing to formally and respectfully apply for a religious exemption to immunization. I personally hold wholehearted and authentic religious beliefs that forbid immunizations.
Regarding the COVID-19 vaccination in particular, the vaccine goes against my sincerely held belief that I am not to introduce foreign substances into my body that change how God designed it. Vaccines deviate from the process in which my body was designed to fight illnesses, and I cannot, in good conscience, take a vaccine that would alter my body's God-given abilities to fight illnesses.
The exemption request letter also cited the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who published a 'Note on the morality of using some anti-COVID-19 vaccines' on Dec. 21, 2020:
"COVID-19 vaccines that used cell lines originating from aborted fetuses are morally compromised... The J&J vaccine 'is an adenoviral vector grown in the PER.C6 cell line that originated from a healthy 18-week-old aborted child.' The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were tested using the 'morally compromised HEK-293 cell line,' originating from 'a child aborted in the Netherlands in 1972.'"
