U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice says Washington State University was within its rights to fire Catholic head football coach Nick Rolovich over his refusal to take a COVID-19 vaccine, and even agreeing the school was right to question the sincerity of his religious objections.
(LifeSiteNews) – U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice says that Washington State University (WSU) was within its rights to fire Catholic head football coach Nick Rolovich over his refusal to take a COVID-19 vaccine, rejecting his claim that he was wrongly denied a religious exemption.
The public university terminated Rolovich’s contract on October 18, 2021, the deadline Washington Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee had set for public employees to get vaccinated. He did not initially offer public elaboration on his reasons for refusing, but his attorney, Brian Fahling, lambasted athletic director Pat Chun’s “animus towards Coach Rolovich’s sincerely held religious beliefs.” Four assistant coaches were also let go for the same reason.
Rolovich’s lawsuit maintains that he was fired without just cause, entitling him to 60% of the remaining base salary of his $2 million contract, and that the university should have granted him a religious exemption. WSU maintains that Rolovich had failed to make his religious objections known until after the deadline drew near and that it had “skepticism about the sincerity of his beliefs.”
The College Fix reported that Rice dismissed Rolovich’s suit, claiming that the lawsuit failed to produce evidence that his motives for objecting were religious in nature but rather that he “frequently expressed secular concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine to friends, family members and coworkers.” The judge also agreed that accommodating Rolovich would have imposed significant logistical burdens on the university as well as harming its reputation.
Rolovich, who last month was hired by the University of California as a senior offensive assistant, has yet to comment on the ruling, but there are abundant secular and religious reasons alike to object to the jab.
According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used aborted fetal cells during their vaccines’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design & development and production phases. The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science has admitted the same, and even the left-wing fact-checking outlet Snopes acknowledges the statement “that such cell lines were used in the development of COVID-19 vaccines is accurate.”
Further, a large body of evidence identifies significant risks to the COVID vaccines, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.
The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 38,190 deaths, 219,170 hospitalizations, 22,082 heart attacks, and 28,769 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of November 29, among other ailments. CDC researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published February in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID vaccines, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines and offered several theories for a causal link.
