(DCNF)—The Biden Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sat on its hands as it was flooded with thousands of discrimination charges related to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, acting Chair Andrea Lucas said in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Major new settlements and lawsuits over the mandates, which Lucas called one of the “greatest civil rights violations” of the past few decades, signal a substantial shift in priorities since President Donald Trump selected her to lead the agency in January.
“During fiscal year 2022 alone, we got almost 13,000 religious accommodation requests,” she told the DCNF, noting the requests made up 20% of the agency’s discrimination charges.
Even this number is “only a fraction” of the thousands of other people pushed out of jobs or refused accommodations during the mandates, Lucas said, yet Biden-appointees chose not to “spotlight” concerns.
“The agency was doing some work, but it was always doing it quietly,” Lucas said. “It was shoving it under the rug … It didn’t want to push it because it wasn’t the right narrative, apparently, for the Biden administration.”
One health care system with clinics in Illinois and Wisconsin, Mercyhealth, agreed to a $1 million settlement on Wednesday, which will provide financial compensation to employees wrongfully terminated for refusing to comply with its vaccine mandate for religious reasons. The settlement includes an offer to reinstate fired employees.
“When a worker has been harmed and shoved out of their job, you can give them money to try to help compensate, but the chance to go back into their well-paying job at a solid hospital system — that can really change the course of someone’s life,” Lucas said.
The EEOC launched new lawsuits against the Mayo Clinic in July and Silver Cross in August for failing to provide religious accommodations to their COVID-19 vaccine policies. Two Las Vegas casinos likewise agreed in July to settle religious discrimination charges over vaccine mandates.
Recent agency actions stand in stark contrast to Biden’s EEOC, which announced one religious discrimination lawsuit against United Healthcare Services for its COVID-19 vaccine policy in 2023.
Lucas noted the agency did previously recover $55 million for some individuals who filed religious or disability accommodations related to vaccine mandates between the Biden administration and the Trump administration, but almost “none of it was public.”
“It was all confidential settlements that were really hushed up,” she said. “We’re not doing that anymore. When we secure an important religious liberty victory, we’re going to talk about it wherever we can.”
The Supreme Court blocked enforcement of President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for large private businesses in January 2022, finding the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) lacked authority to impose the rule. In December 2023, it directed lower courts to wipe rulings on mandates for federal employees and military members that had been rescinded by the administration.
Petitions in several cases over mandates imposed by local governments are currently pending at the Supreme Court, including lawsuits brought by workers denied religious exemptions.
Religious liberty is foundational, not a “second class right,” Lucas said.
Under Lucas’ leadership, the EEOC has also secured religious liberty victories and filed lawsuits outside of the vaccine mandate space.
“We also recovered close to $1 million recently against several different casinos for a host of religious accommodation requests that they had denied,” Lucas said. “Anything from the request to be able to have a beard, or to be able to take off time for a prayer service, to wear a skirt instead of pants — there’s a lot of low to no-cost accommodations that employers sometimes routinely refuse. We were really excited to be able to gather that much money for employees who were harmed.”
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