New Jersey Issues Employer Vaccine Guidelines

With the increased availability of COVID-19 vaccines in New Jersey, the state Department of Health (“DOH”) recently issued Guidelines allowing employers to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for its employees. Nonetheless, even in the face of such state Guidelines, employers should still proceed cautiously in implementing such vaccine mandates for employees given the mere emergency use authorization granted to the currently available COVID-19 vaccines under federal law.

In announcing its Guidelines allowing for mandatory vaccinations, the state DOH adopted in large part the Guidelines previously outlined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) regarding COVID-19 employer vaccination mandates. The state DOH also announced three exceptions to this vaccine mandate rule:

1. The employee has a disability that would prevent them from getting the vaccine.
2. The employee’s doctor advised them not to get the vaccine while pregnant or breastfeeding
3. The employee has sincerely held religious beliefs, practices or observances that would prevent them from being inoculated.

If the employee can prove such exceptions, the employer must provide a reasonable accommodation, per the state DOH’s Guidelines. Moreover, on the other hand, employers can avoid providing an accommodation to an employee where doing so imposes an undue burden on the employer’s operations.

Some other important aspects of the state DOL Guidelines:

1. Employers generally may request medical documentation to confirm a disability.
2. Employers may request medical documentation to confirm that an employee who is pregnant or breastfeeding was advised by their doctor to seek such accommodation.
3. Employers must ensure that all information about an employee’s disability is kept confidential.
4. If a sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance precludes an employee from getting a COVID-19 vaccine, however, an employer generally may not question the employee’s sincerity. The exception to this requirement is if the employer has an “objective basis” of fact for questioning either the religious nature or the sincerity of a particular belief, practice, or observance. In that case, the employer may make a limited inquiry into the facts and circumstances supporting the employee’s request.
5. Safety also can be considered in evaluating whether a potential accommodation would be reasonable. In this regard, an employer must base its decisions regarding any potential safety hazard on objective, scientific evidence and not on unfounded assumptions or stereotypes.

Where an employer must provide a reasonable accommodation, such a measure may include:

1. Allowing the employee to continue to work remotely, or otherwise to work in a manner that would reduce or eliminate the risk of harm to other employees or to the public.
2. Providing the employee with personal protective equipment that sufficiently mitigates the employee’s risk of COVID-19 transmission and exposure.

Whether these Guidelines will result in an increased number of employer mandated vaccination programs is difficult to predict. So far, most employers have decided against mandating employee vaccinations because the vaccines have only been approved for emergency use and are not fully authorized and licensed vaccines.

Even with this New Jersey Guidelines directive, the Federal Food and Drug Law’s requirement that no one can be forced to take a vaccine that is only approved for emergency use still exists as a limitation and raises a possible legal risk for employers. Granted, its application in these situations raise novel issues. And, we do not have a definitive answer in the context of emergency use vaccines. Nevertheless, it presents enough of a concern that employers should proceed cautiously in mandating employee vaccines even with the recent state DOH Guidelines.

In that regard, here is one very real and significant legal risk for employers in New Jersey. Let’s say you as an employer want to mandate the vaccination, and one of your employees refuses to take it and they do not fall into one of the stated exceptions. Now, let’s also assume that you as the employer plan to take some type of adverse employment action against the employee-maybe you decide to fire them or put them on a forced unpaid leave of absence. That employee could potentially bring suit and claim that the refusal to get vaccinated constituted a form of whistleblowing and violates the New Jersey CEPA law, with the public policy cited to support the claim being the federal food and drug law. That is one risk that the employer faces in mandating COVID vaccinations when the vaccine is still authorized just for emergency use. This is an important reason why most employers have opted instead to recommend vaccination, with many also offering incentives to promote greater employee response. This later way of obtaining the wanted result of greater employee vaccinations in the workplace is the far safer approach to this issue rather than employer mandates.

No doubt, we can expect this situation on employee vaccinations to continue to evolve, and employers will likely receive further federal and state guidance on how best to proceed as the desire to return to some normalcy in the workplace continues to develop.

Tags: COVID-19