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Takeda Pharmaceuticals employees fired for not getting jabbed file religious discrimination lawsuit

November 19, 2022 | | Print Article

A group of former Takeda Pharmaceuticals employees who were fired for not abiding by the company’s vaccine mandate has filed suit against the company over its alleged religious discrimination.

“The lawsuit details how each of the employees (who are all Christians) requested to be exempt from the mandate on religious grounds and, after a series of questions from a company representative regarding the sincerity of their beliefs, had their accommodation requests denied. Each of the employees was subsequently terminated,” according to a press release from We The Patriots USA.

We The Patriots USA is a conservative activist group that’s helping the group of fired employees.

Legally, the group is being represented by two law farms: Pattis and Smith, and the Mendenhall Law Group. Pattis and Smith is of particular note because the firm also represents far-right commentator Alex Jones.

The lawsuit lists nine plaintiffs, all of whom lost their jobs.

“In response to the global pandemic caused by the spread of various strains of COVID-19, the defendant, a pharmaceutical company, elected to create a company-wide policy requiring vaccination against potential infection by COVID-19 of current and prospective employees,” the lawsuit reads.

“The defendant recognized the need to make exemptions available to employees claiming religious objections to the requirement of vaccination, so long as the employee’s, or prospective employee’s, religious beliefs or practices were ‘sincerely
held’ and accommodating those beliefs would not impose an ‘undue hardship‘ on its
business.”

The key words there are “undue hardship,” as it’s this stipulation that Takeda Pharmaceuticals used to fire most of the employees.

“When it cannot defeat the claims of a believer by claiming insincerity, Takeda then claims that accommodating the religious beliefs of an employee or prospective employee would pose an undue hardship on its business. The result is that Takeda almost never grants religious exemptions, in violation of Title VII,” the lawsuit explains.

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs “expressed concerns about their being required to inject a substance into their body that was developed in part by use of aborted fetal stem cells” and “also asserted various claims such as their bodies being a temple of the Holy Spirit, and asserted other religious grounds sounding in faiths and practices long recognized in the United States and throughout the world.”

Yet Takeda Pharmaceuticals denied all their requests, despite “similarly situated people who requested medical exemptions” being granted a waiver.

That said, while it’s true that some of the COVID vaccines were developed using aborted fetal stem cells, left-wing “fact-checkers” like FactCheck.org say this doesn’t mean the final vaccines themselves contain aborted fetal stem cells.

“In an early phase of development, two of the coronavirus shots — the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna — were tested in cell lines that were long ago made from an aborted fetus. And the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is manufactured using a cell line derived from aborted fetal tissue,” FactCheck.org notes.

“Neither fetal cells nor fetal tissue, however, are present in any of the vaccines, and no new abortions were involved in making any aspect of the vaccines possible. Numerous religious groups and anti-abortion organizations have said it is not morally objectionable to receive at least some of the available COVID-19 vaccines,” according to FactCheck.org.

Speaking of the left, Takeda Pharmaceuticals appears to be a leftist company that’s bought into “woke” nonsense about “diversity, inclusion, and equity.”

News of the latest lawsuit comes during the same week that Takeda Pharmaceuticals agreed to pay $22 million to settle a class action suit targeting the way it handles its employees’ 401(k) plans.

“The complaint originally filed in January 2021 alleged that the company maintained underperforming investment options and selected and retained as plan investment options higher-cost share classes of mutual funds and collective investment trusts,” according to Pensions & Investments magazine.

“Specifically, the suit faulted the company for using a suite of ‘unproven collective investment trust target-date funds as investment options in the plan, known as the Northern Trust Focus Funds,'” the magazine further notes.

In addition to paying out $22 million, Takeda Pharmaceuticals also “agreed to certain non-monetary terms, including, for example, annual training to plan fiduciaries regarding their fiduciary duties under ERISA.”

They did all this despite reportedly admitting no wrongdoing and claiming they were settling the suit to avoid litigation costs.

Vivek Saxena
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