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Snohomish firefighters' religious discrimination lawsuit over Covid vaccine mandate awaits 9th Circuit decision

caption: David and Lauren Petersen in Lake Stevens, Washington, in May 2025. David is one of eight plaintiffs suing Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue for religious discrimination related to the Covid vaccine mandate.
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David and Lauren Petersen in Lake Stevens, Washington, in May 2025. David is one of eight plaintiffs suing Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue for religious discrimination related to the Covid vaccine mandate.
KUOW/Amy Radil

They call themselves the “Snohomish Eight” — eight firefighters suing Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue over alleged religious discrimination. The plaintiffs say the department mishandled their requests for religious exemptions to Washington state’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate.

The case has been heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Legal experts note that in recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court strengthened the rights of employees seeking religious accommodations.

David Petersen is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit and has been a firefighter EMT with Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue for 17 years. Petersen describes his work as a calling by God that began at age 11, when his grandfather collapsed and Petersen performed CPR on him until paramedics came.

“Probably a week later the same paramedic came by the house and said, ‘You saved him. What you did saved his life,’” Petersen recalled.

In 2021, though, Petersen and his wife felt that their faith was calling them to another decision: to reject the Covid vaccine. Lauren Petersen said she wrestled with this decision.

RELATED: 1 in 10 Americans say the COVID-19 vaccine conflicts with their religious beliefs

“I didn’t like the answer, ‘Do not take it. Do not inject yourself,’” she said. “I actually had a lot of prayer like, ‘I don’t know if I trust this.’ Because I knew that doing this, our income would be gone.”

The National Institutes of Health found the Covid vaccine reduced rates of infection, and dramatically lowered rates of disease severity and death from the virus. Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue said it couldn’t allow employees who declined the vaccine to continue to provide patient care and it didn't have alternative work to offer. So instead it negotiated an agreement with the union to place those seeking exemptions on unpaid leave.

While on leave, David Petersen went to work for neighboring agencies that allowed unvaccinated employees. But because of mutual aid agreements, he still found himself working alongside his old colleagues.

“They would all come up to me on separate fires and ask, ‘What is going on, why aren’t you back?’ And my only response is, ‘I don’t know,’” he said.

About eight months later, the fire department allowed Petersen and other employees to return to their old jobs. Petersen said he felt “shock and gratitude” when his employer allowed him to return. But he said he’s also been haunted by a feeling that “something’s not complete.”

A group of those firefighters subsequently sued for religious discrimination under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act and the Washington Law Against Discrimination. It’s one of many vaccine mandate-related lawsuits playing out around the country.

RELATED: WSU had 'just cause' to fire former football coach Nick Rolovich for refusing Covid vaccine, court finds

Last year, U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly in Seattle ruled against the Snohomish firefighters, granting summary judgement to the fire department to dismiss the case. He said the expert evidence introduced by the fire department “demonstrates that unvaccinated firefighters were at a higher risk of contracting and transmitting Covid-19 even with the use of masks, [personal protective equipment], testing, and social distancing.”

The firefighters appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which heard oral arguments on April 3 this year. Attorney Shannon Phillips represented their employer, Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue. She told the court that retaining unvaccinated workers would have posed undue hardships in the form of health risks, potential liability, and lost contracts.

“If we are sending our employees out to an EMS call, they are more likely to get Covid, they are more likely to transmit it to their fellow workers as they are driving in those vehicles together, and when they go into a home, our employees are more likely to transmit Covid — even with other precautions — to patients,” Phillips said.

The firefighters’ attorney is Jennifer Kennedy. She rejects the fire department’s claims of undue hardship.

“It was, in our opinion, all speculation and hypotheticals,” Kennedy said.

“Where in contrast, the firefighters’ evidence was the evidence that they’d been working safely for nearly two years under the department’s safety protocols that didn’t include vaccination.”

RELATED: A religious group gives tips on avoiding the Covid-19 vaccine in Washington state

Kennedy said the courts have typically deferred to employers if they could show even minimal evidence that an employee’s religious accommodation posed a hardship. But she said the legal landscape changed two years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court backed a postal worker who opposed working on the Sabbath in the case Groff vs. DeJoy.

Kennedy said that decision told employers, “You have to bend over backwards to find a way to accommodate [those employees]. And if you don’t, you have to show us hard proof of why not.”

Dallan Flake is an associate professor at Gonzaga School of Law. He agreed that the Groff decision gave employees new leverage.

“Employers now can only deny religious accommodations if they can show that the accommodation would result in substantial increased costs to their business,” Flake said. “So that really represents a radical change.”

Flake said there are differences in the ways the federal appeals courts are addressing requests for religious accommodations.

“In the First and Second Circuit, courts almost always want to see an employee to tie their objection to some sort of tenet of their religious belief,” he said. “So citing a scripture, a quote from a leader, something of that nature. But here on the West Coast in the Ninth Circuit, we take a very different approach, a more hands-off approach.”

He said the Ninth Circuit seems more concerned about running afoul of First Amendment protections. And he said those differences suggest the issue of religious accommodations in the workplace could return to the U.S. Supreme Court in the future.

Lauren Petersen said what her husband and the other lawsuit plaintiffs seek is to be made whole after their unpaid leave.

“Bringing them back did not erase what happened,” she said. “That’s what our goal is now — to get those questions answered.”

The firefighters want the federal appeals court to send their case back to district court for a trial on the evidence. Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue is asking the appeals court to affirm its handling of religious accommodations.

The agency said nearly a quarter of its firefighters overall requested vaccine exemptions or accommodations on religious or medical grounds.

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