I would be surprised, though, if huge numbers of people quit their jobs over this versus just agreeing to get the vaccine and being mad about it, frankly.

Although, again, given how widespread these mandates are, it raises the question of: Where do you go? So it’s possible that people will quit their jobs. It’s a workers’ market for a lot of these folks. And who am I to question that? We’re in a landscape here where there are labor shortages. Crisann, the woman in Indiana, did say she’s willing to lose her job over this. It’s easy to say that you are willing to quit your job.

In a month or two, what do you think is the story you’re going to be writing about these mandates? You alluded to the fact that when the rubber meets the road, a lot of times people just cave–they do what their employer asks them because they want a job. Maybe We All Should.Ī lot of these mandates are pretty new. Nikki Haley Pulled a Bizarre Stunt With Her Husband. What Shia LaBeouf’s Life Would Be Like if He Actually Tried to Become a Catholic Deacon Only True Freaks Can Survive a 24-Hour Moby-Dick Reading Marathon. When I Became a Parent, I Finally Realized How Deluded Americans Are And they think the higher concern at this point is getting the vaccine. And they do say this is a legitimate moral concern but also so is the pandemic. And the Catholic Church has done a lot of writing about this and thinking about this. It is something that people who are very attuned to the abortion issue and are anti-abortion have talked about in the past with other vaccines, the MMR vaccine. And it’s something like two elective abortions in the ’60s and ’70s, so it’s remote. It’s, again, a very remote connection to the research and development phase of these vaccines. There’s a real spectrum of how thoroughly people understand the science on that, because certainly I’ve heard that there’s, like, fetal tissue in the vaccines themselves. It’s just that they were useful in terms of developing elements of the vaccine that are now in use. We should be clear that when we talk about the development of the vaccine, fetal cells are not in the vaccine, right? A mass new vaccination requirement in the middle of a pandemic when workplaces have already been under so much upheaval, it’s a much thornier situation for employers. Traditionally, the religious exemptions that HR departments are used to dealing with are things like “I would like a different holiday schedule,” or “I would like to just tweak the uniform or grooming requirements”-one-off things that they are accustomed to managing and can make pretty easy, obvious accommodations to. So you’re enacting a new requirement on your entire employee base all at once, and it’s an incredibly hot button issue as well. You have these requirements happening basically en masse across the country. No one I talked to from the employment perspective had ever dealt with a religious exemption situation on this scale and all at once. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.Ĭrisann’s story is pretty similar to one Ruth Graham’s been hearing from workers around the country, people are putting their company’s HR departments through a sudden stress test. On Monday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Graham about these exemptions and who will get one and who won’t. In other words, they feel pretty strongly about vaccines, and-they don’t want them. The millions of people now being mandated to get vaccines have a single escape hatch to cram through if they don’t want the shot: They need a religious exemption. Some have gone to protests, signed petitions. Lately, these personal anecdotes have begun to focus on one topic in particular: whether your job can require you to get a COVID vaccine and whether your religion might get you exempted if your employer is clamping down. “There’s a rising desperation in some of these quarters to find a way out of these mandates,” Graham says.

It’s hard for Graham to describe what she’s been hearing. For the past few weeks, Ruth Graham has been logging on to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, to eavesdrop. Graham reports on religion for the New York Times.

Letter for religious vaccine exemptions