After half a decade of legal battles, 18 students and employees of the University of Colorado’s Anschutz School of Medicine will be awarded $10.3 million in damages, tuition, and lawyers’ fees after they were denied religious accommodations to mandatory vaccination for COVID-19.
This payout follows a 2024 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The decision ruled that the university’s medical school had violated the plaintiff’s First Amendment rights.
According to a Dec. 1 press release from the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm that represented the plaintiffs in court, this is one of the first times that a university has agreed to cover monetary damages under the First Amendment for a challenge to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Despite this victory, Michael McHale, senior counsel at Thomas More Society, said that the medical school’s failures had done serious damage.
“No amount of compensation or course-correction can make up for the life-altering damage Chancellor Elliman and Anschutz inflicted on the plaintiffs and so many others throughout this case, who felt forced to succumb to a manifestly irrational mandate,” McHale said in the release.
“At great, and sometimes career-ending, costs, our heroic clients fought for the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans who were put to the unconscionable choice of their livelihoods or their faith,” McHale said, “during what Justice Gorsuch has rightly declared one of ‘the greatest intrusion[s] on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.’”
McHale expressed confidence that the legal victory “indeed confirms, despite the tyrannical efforts of many, that our shared constitutional right to religious liberty endures.”
When enforcing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, the medical school initially refused all requests for religious exemptions. All students and staff who requested exemptions received a brief form email stating that they had failed to demonstrate “religious belief whose teachings are opposed to all immunizations,” according to the Thomas More Society.
While the medical school eventually agreed to consider religious exemptions, the Tenth Circuit ruled in 2024 that it still failed to respect First Amendment rights adequately.
The Thomas More Society filed an initial federal lawsuit in September 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. The original lawsuit was filed for just two plaintiffs, a Catholic doctor and a Buddhist medical student. The next month, more than a dozen more students and staff joined the lawsuit.
Madison Gould, one of the plaintiffs, was deeply frustrated by the experience.
“CU’s total disregard for our careers and livelihoods gutted the years of study and self-sacrifice poured out by so many in pursuit of serving the weakest among us,” she said in the release. “None of that mattered to the University.”
Peter Breen, Executive Vice President and Head of Litigation at Thomas More Society, commended the plaintiffs as “true heroes” for their stand against the medical school’s administration.
“They stood up, at great personal cost, to an injustice that never should have been inflicted on them—or on any American,” Breen said, according to Thomas More Society. These are kind, compassionate medical professionals who entered their field to serve and care for others, yet they were treated with shocking disregard for their rights and scoffed at for their deeply held beliefs. Because they had the courage to say ‘no’ when their religious freedoms were trampled, people of faith across the country now enjoy stronger protections.”
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