religious exemption letter for influenza vaccine

#Religious exemption letter for influenza vaccine trial#

Having a policy that requires health-care workers to be vaccinated helps protect employees themselves but also the patients they take care of, who are often at high risk of serious complications from influenza. This is good policy: influenza is a serious disease and voluntary programs have had disappointing results. Mello: More and more hospitals are mandating their employees get vaccinated against influenza. Q: What prompted you to undertake this research and write about the subject? Stanford Health Policy asked Mello and Sonne questions about their research and findings. Yet antibodies made in response to vaccination with a certain set of influenza viruses can sometimes provide protection against different but related viruses.

Preliminary estimates suggest that this season’s influenza vaccine is about 40 percent effective. So far this season, an influenza A virus called H3N2 has been the most common form of influenza. The CDC estimates that 34 million Americans got the flu that season more than 700,000 were hospitalized and about 56,000 people died. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that this influenza season has claimed the lives of 37 children and is on track to rival the 2014-2015 flu season. The paper comes during what could be the worst flu season since the 2009 swine flu pandemic. In particular, when and how must health-care workers’ religious objections be accommodated to conform to the law?” “But they create thorny problems when it comes to exemptions. “These policies are an important public-health strategy since vaccination rates for health-care workers continue to fall short of the Healthy People 2020 target of 90 percent,” the authors write. Opel, MD, MPH, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington.

Their article is co-authored with Douglas J. Sonne, JD, an associate professor of law and director of Stanford Law School’s Religious Liberty Clinic, write in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine that the EEOC litigation “is cause for unease” among the growing number of hospitals with mandatory influenza-vaccination policies. Michelle Mello, PhD, JD, a professor of health research and policy and professor of law, and her colleague James A.

#Religious exemption letter for influenza vaccine trial#

Facing a full-blown trial in February, the hospital agreed to settle the case on January 12, compensating the employees and revising its vaccination mandate policy. The lawsuit, which alleges that the hospital violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is one of a trio of lawsuits in the past two years in which the EEOC has intervened to challenge vaccination mandates for health-care workers. In April 2016 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sued Mission Hospital, a large North Carolina health system, after it denied employee requests for religious exemptions from an influenza-vaccination requirement.