A lawsuit against the Mayo Clinic must move forward, a federal court has ruled, reviving the suit after it was thrown out in 2023.

The five fired workers who sued the Minnesota-based health nonprofit have all plausibly pled that their religious beliefs conflict with the clinic’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled on May 24.

The workers in multiple suits, which have since been consolidated, argued that the Mayo Clinic illegally failed to accommodate their religious beliefs, violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Three of the workers applied for religious exemptions to the nonprofit’s mandate and were denied; the two others saw their applications accepted but protested against the requirement that they had to test for COVID-19 weekly.

U.S. District Judge John Tunheim in 2023 tossed the suit, finding that some of the plaintiffs did not prove they hold religious beliefs in opposition to the mandate or show how the testing requirement conflicts with their beliefs.

The Eighth Circuit’s new ruling, though, found the judge’s findings were erroneous.

Federal employment law makes it illegal for employers to fire or otherwise take action against employees over their religion. The three workers whose religious exemption requests were denied, Shelly Kiel, Kenneth Ringhofer, and Anita Miller, all said that their Christian beliefs prevented them from accepting COVID-19 vaccination, in part because they oppose abortion and aborted fetus cells were used in the production or testing of the COVID-19 vaccines.

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