Unvaccinated firefighters sued Washington state and Spokane officials over the vaccination requirements.
A U.S. appeals court on June 18 revived a case against a COVID-19 vaccine mandate issued by a city in Washington state under a proclamation from state officials.
Firefighters who applied for exemptions to the Spokane mandate “plausibly assert that the individual city defendants applied the proclamation arbitrarily and capriciously, and that they thereby showed callous disregard to the firefighters’ Free Exercise rights,” U.S. Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson wrote in the ruling.
Spokane officials imposed the mandate on health care providers after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, in a 2021 proclamation, ordered providers to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Spokane firefighters have emergency medical technician licenses, so they fell under the mandate.
Firefighters who submitted exemptions on religious or medical grounds sued the city and state after the city refused to accommodate them. City officials said that employing unvaccinated personnel would delay emergency response times, posing a scenario where an unvaccinated technician was dispatched to a patient requiring hands-on care. The unvaccinated technician could not “safely … provide” the care, “negatively impact[ing] response time and likely requir[ing] the city to dispatch additional resources,” lawyers for the city said in a brief.
Dr. Joel Edminister, medical director for the Spokane Fire Department, said that science supported imposing the mandate to achieve herd immunity, pointing to a non-peer-reviewed paper from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that concluded, in one county in California for about two months, unvaccinated people comprised most of the known COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
The firefighters disagreed. Some of them recovered from COVID-19, giving them immunity similar to that conferred by vaccination, they said in a brief. The city could have also accommodated them by moving them to different roles or requiring testing and masking in lieu of vaccination, they said.
Several neighboring cities granted accommodations to firefighters, plaintiffs noted, and under pre-existing agreements, those cities send firefighters to Spokane to work at certain times. That means Spokane firefighters were being treated differently than firefighters from outside the city, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, the firefighters said in their complaint.
