MAYBE A HOSPITAL ISN’T THE BEST PLACE FOR ANTI-VAXXERS TO WORK (REGARDLESS OF THEIR REASON FOR BEING ANTI-VAXXERS): The EEOC just announced it reached another settlement (this one for $74K) with a hospital that had declined to hire a job applicant with religious objections to flu vaccines. The hospitals want workers who, in the event of a flu epidemic, will show up for work and won’t make other people sick.

I wrote sympathetically about religious accommodations here. But I was responding to my totalitarian colleagues on the Commission on Civil Rights who wanted to coerce people with sincere religious beliefs into doing things they didn’t want to do. Some of the stuff they were writing was pretty scary.  Now the EEOC is coercing hospitals into hiring someone that they don’t think is the best person for the job. And their reason doesn’t sound at all crazy to me.

In a few (but not all) of these cases the EEOC has argued that because the hospital accommodates people who have medical conditions that prevent them from getting flu shots, they must also accommodate religion too. Of course, the hospitals probably weren’t thrilled to have to accommodate the medical condition either.  But the Americans with Disabilities Act may require them to. Note that the legal standards are very different under Title VII (religion must be accommodated only if employer inconvenience would be de minimus) and under the American with Disabilities Act (“reasonable” accommodations to disability must be made).

One day there will be a serious epidemic that we are utterly unprepared to handle. Please God let us put it off for a few hundred years.