Locator: 49423VACCINES.
From Bloomberg Law today. Fast and furious.
Patient-care medical workers who were denied religious exemptions to Covid-19 vaccine mandates are struggling to get their lawsuits in front of federal juries, despite the US Supreme Court making it harder for employers to deny faith-based accommodations.Workers demonstrating a religious basis for an exemption cited scriptures concerning bodily sanctity and personal conscience, or claimed that vaccines contain aborted fetal cell lines.
The 2023 Groff v. DeJoy decision changed the way employers assess religious exemption requests from workplace policies that conflict with workers’ beliefs. Employers must prove that granting an accommodation “would result in substantial increased costs” to their business, rather than just a minimal burden or expense, causing undue hardship.
Groff raised some expectations among legal observers that religious objections to vaccine requirements under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would succeed more often, even if the facts in each case differ. While some workers successfully invoked Groff, those in patient-facing roles repeatedly failed to win summary judgment rulings, according to a Bloomberg Law docket analysis of appellate court rulings.
There’s a “close nexus” between the purpose of vaccine rules and the “goal of the health care business itself, which is to make and keep people healthy,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a religious liberty, health law, and equity legal scholar at the University of Texas-Austin School of Law.
At least 10 appellate court opinions referencing Groff found undue hardship to an employer when an exemption risked violating state vaccine rules and exposing medically vulnerable patients and staff to the virus. Avoiding vaccination with daily testing, which may necessitate costly operational changes, and remote work that can hinder essential job functions, are among the factors that qualify.
The cost of having unvaccinated health care workers is making medically vulnerable patients ill and exposing providers to liability, Sepper said.
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The Book Page
Johnson's Boswell
Transition to Romanticism ("Johnson's Boswell")
From a biography of Samuel Johnson.
- Johnson was the old man, the established writer.
- Boswell was just starting out.
“They (Samuel Johnson and Boswell) first met in the back parlour of Tom Davies’s bookshop on the afternoon of Monday, 16 May 1763.
Johnson was born in 1709, so Johnson was 54 and Boswell was 24. If Johnson had been born in 1680 and Boswell in 1710, the difference between them would merely have been the difference between youth and middle age; but since Johnson’s birth date was 1709 and Boswell’s 1740 they are separated by one of those seismic cracks in the historical surface.
Boswell is a new man in Johnson’s world; he (Boswell) belongs to the epoch of Rousseau (Romanticism; whereas Johnson was still classical); all the attitudes that we associate with the end of the eighteenth century – the onset of ‘sensibility,’ the obsession with the individual and the curious, the swelling tide of subjective emotion – are strongly present in him. Where Johnson still belongs to the world of Aristotle and Aquinas, the world of the giant system-builders, Boswell inhabits the ruins of that world. Where Johnson instinctively proceeds by erecting a framework and then judging the particular instance in relation to that framework, Boswell is the sniffing bloodhound who will follow the scent of individuality into whatever territory it leads him. The fascination of their dialogue, that dialogue of mind, heart and voice round which Boswell organized his great Life, is that is it not merely between two very different men but between two epochs. In its pages, Romantic Europe speaks to Renaissance Europe, and is answered.” – Samuel Johnson, A Biography, John Wain, p. 229 – 230.
But the book today, actually two books, in one volume, from Everyman's Library, #253, c. 2002:
- Samuel Johnson: A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, the heart of England;
- James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. born in Edinburgh, Scotland; the heart of Scotland.
The journey, 1773, three years before the US Revolution (1776); August - November.
