The Biden Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sat on its hands as it was flooded with thousands of discrimination charges related to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, acting Chair Andrea Lucas said in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Major new settlements and lawsuits over the mandates, which Lucas called one of the “greatest civil rights violations” of the past few decades, signal a substantial shift in priorities since President Donald Trump selected her to lead the agency in January.
“During fiscal year 2022 alone, we got almost 13,000 religious accommodation requests,” she told the DCNF, noting the requests made up 20% of the agency’s discrimination charges.
Even this number is “only a fraction” of the thousands of other people pushed out of jobs or refused accommodations during the mandates, Lucas said, yet Biden-appointees chose not to “spotlight” concerns.
“The agency was doing some work, but it was always doing it quietly,” Lucas said. “It was shoving it under the rug … It didn’t want to push it because it wasn’t the right narrative, apparently, for the Biden administration.”
One health care system with clinics in Illinois and Wisconsin, Mercyhealth, agreed to a $1 million settlement on Wednesday, which will provide financial compensation to employees wrongfully terminated for refusing to comply with its vaccine mandate for religious reasons. The settlement includes an offer to reinstate fired employees.