TLDR – In its first day of the 2026-2027 term, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a federal appeals court ruling that allowed a Washington fire protection district to deny religious accommodations to frontline firefighters during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight firefighters from Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue had asked the high court to clarify how courts evaluate employer hardship under Title VII following the 2023 landmark ruling in Groff v. DeJoy. The firefighters claimed lower courts split over whether an employer must prove an actual hardship or merely show a reasonable concern about potential operational and safety harms. Their employer argued that the requested accommodation would increase the risk of healthcare workers transmitting a highly transmissible, deadly virus to vulnerable patients and other workers during a pandemic.
By turning away the appeal, the justices left intact the Ninth Circuit’s judgment in favor of the fire district.
Case: Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue
Court: Supreme Court of the United States
Decision date: October 5, 2026
Case number: No. 25-1210 (Supreme Court Case Pleadings and Materials)
Original decision: Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue, 150 F.4th 1211 (9th Cir. 2025)
For Non-Lawyers
This case balances two vital interests: an employee’s religious freedom and the public’s health. Under federal civil rights law, employers must respect a worker’s religious beliefs. However, they can deny an exemption if it causes an “undue hardship” by creating heavy costs or real harm.
Here, the courts balanced religious rights against the safety of vulnerable patients in ambulances and coworkers sharing fire station living quarters. The firefighters who did not want to take the vaccine for personal religious reasons (this was 25% of the firefighters in the county) argued the department acted out of fear instead of proof. But the fire district presented medical experts who showed that unvaccinated responders increased the risk of spreading a dangerous virus.
The Ninth Circuit, which is the regional Federal court for the area that covers Washington State and other western states, said that the fire district was correct in its actions. The Supreme Court can decide what appeals to hear, and decided not to hear this case, and in this case the Ninth Circuit gets the final word.
The Supreme Court was silent on why it declined to hear the case. Sometimes the Supreme Court decides not to hear a case because it thinks the lower court was right, other times the Supreme Court justices want a “better case” to come up. The stakes may have been too high in a case where there is a clear risk of life with firefighters coming into close contact with each other and with the people who they are called out to help, especially if the fire department was acting with the best knowledge that it had at the time.
In contrast, a “better” case could be where somebody had a remote job and did not have to meet people and got fired because they didn’t want to take the COVID-19 vaccine but was willing to take other precautions. The Court wouldn’t have to decide if an employer that sincerely believed that taking a vaccine would prevent the spread of a deadly disease was wrong for refusing to accommodate the 1/4 of its workers who refused to take that step.
Last week, we talked about the Detwiler case that has just been appealed to the Supreme Court involving a hospital worker who refused to be vaccinated. The employer agreed to accommodate her if she tested regularly for COVID but she argued that the nasal swab had been disinfected using “carcinogenic” chemicals, and when asked for proof of this theory she claimed it was her religion right not to introduce a cotton swab into her nose because her body was a temple. Seeing that the Supreme Court has denied the firefighters case, it is probable that the Court will also decline to hear the double-bounced accommodation of no vaccine and no rapid testing case will survive.
Analysis
The US Supreme Court issued an order on October 5, 2026, denying the firefighters’ petition for a writ of certiorari without recorded dissent. The denial ends a nearly four-year legal dispute between Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue and eight frontline responders who objected on religious grounds to Washington’s state-mandated COVID-19 vaccination policy in late 2021.
The denial leaves in place a September 2025 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. That court held that the municipal fire district did not violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it placed unvaccinated firefighters on leave rather than permitting them to continue emergency medical runs while masking and testing.
What prompted the lawsuit?
Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue operates across rural and suburban Snohomish County, Washington, employing dual-role firefighters and emergency medical technicians. Approximately 85 percent of the department’s calls involve emergency medical care, and firefighters live in communal station quarters during 24-hour shifts.
In August 2021, Washington Governor Jay Inslee issued an emergency proclamation requiring healthcare workers, including emergency responders, to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The state mandate permitted religious exemptions unless an accommodation caused an employer undue hardship. Nearly 25 percent of the district’s 192 firefighters requested religious exemptions.
The district met individually with the firefighters but determined it could not safely allow one-fourth of its workforce to provide patient care without vaccination during the Delta variant surge. The district cited the risk of transmitting the virus to vulnerable patients and station house coworkers, testing inaccuracies, potential loss of an emergency medical service contract with the Monroe Correctional Complex, and uninsured legal liability.
The district offered the objecting firefighters an alternative accommodation negotiated with their union: exhausting paid leave and taking up to one year of unpaid leave with preserved seniority. Eight firefighters sued in federal district court in November 2022, seeking back pay and damages for the roughly seven months they spent off duty before the district permitted them to return under enhanced protocols in May 2022.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington granted summary judgment to the fire district. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, relying on unrebutted expert testimony that unvaccinated healthcare personnel posed a higher transmission risk that non-pharmaceutical interventions could not fully mitigate in close-contact and communal environments.
What did the parties argue before the Supreme Court?
In their petition for certiorari filed in April 2026, the firefighters argued that the Ninth Circuit distorted the standard established in Groff v. DeJoy. In Groff, the Supreme Court held that Title VII requires an employer to prove that a religious accommodation would result in “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.”
Counsel for the firefighters argued that the Ninth Circuit watered down Groff into a subjective “reasonable concern” test. Under that approach, the petition asserted, employers receive a form of qualified immunity whenever they can articulate a plausible fear of disruption, effectively cutting juries out of evaluating whether the hardship was real. The firefighters pointed to evidence that the district had operated safely before the mandate, that neighboring fire agencies accommodated unvaccinated firefighters, and that the district later reinstated the firefighters under alternative protocols without incident.
The firefighters asserted that a 3-3 split existed across federal appeals courts. They cited decisions from the Third, Seventh, and Eighth Circuits as requiring proof of actual, definitive hardship, while contrasting them with rulings from the First, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits that deferred to an employer’s contemporaneous assessment of risk.
The fire district urged the Supreme Court to reject the petition, denying that any circuit split existed. The district argued that the Ninth Circuit explicitly applied an actual-hardship standard supported by undisputed, objective medical evidence.
The district contended that the petitioners’ counter-evidence consisted of lay assertions and hearsay from non-experts that failed to create a genuine dispute of material fact. Furthermore, the district argued that public safety agencies managing disease transmission in healthcare settings present distinct factual questions from ordinary scheduling or dress-code disputes.
Legal Commentary
The Supreme Court’s refusal to review Petersen leaves undisturbed a growing body of federal appellate authority granting public health and emergency services employers substantial leeway to manage biological risks. Although the petitioners framed the case as a fundamental division over whether Title VII requires “actual hardship” versus a “reasonable concern,” the lower-court records suggest that the claimed split was more rhetorical than operational. In disease-transmission cases, courts across several circuits have treated unrebutted epidemiological data as concrete proof of actual risk, rather than speculative fear.
The core difficulty for employees challenging emergency health mandates remains the evidentiary burden at the summary judgment stage. When an employer introduces qualified expert testimony establishing that an accommodation increases infection risk to patients, an employee cannot survive summary judgment merely by asserting personal work experience or noting that other jurisdictions adopted different administrative policies. The Ninth Circuit treated the medical risk itself as the substantial cost under Groff, not just the administrative inconvenience of granting the exemption.
This outcome demonstrates the practical boundaries of Groff. While Groff repudiated the decades-old de minimis cost standard and required employers to show substantial burdens, it did not transform Title VII into a strict-liability statute where an employer must suffer catastrophic operational failure or an actual disease outbreak before denying an accommodation. Where public safety and direct patient care intersect with communal living quarters, the threshold for demonstrating substantial cost remains comparatively low for public employers armed with scientific evidence.
The order also signals the Court’s apparent desire to let pandemic-era workplace litigation conclude in the lower courts. Most municipal COVID-19 mandates have ended, and the factual conditions surrounding the 2021 Delta variant surge are unlikely to recur in identical form. Unless a lower court applies Groff in a manner that excuses non-medical employers from proving tangible business costs in routine commercial settings, the justices appear content to let regional circuits manage fact-specific religious accommodation claims.
What happens next?
The Supreme Court’s order of denial brings finality to the lawsuit. The Ninth Circuit’s judgment in favor of Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue is permanent, and the district court’s dismissal of the firefighters’ claims stands. No further appeals remain available to the petitioners.
Sources
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Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue, 150 F.4th 1211 (9th Cir. 2025).
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Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue, No. 25-1210 (U.S. filed Apr. 16, 2026).
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Brief in Opposition, Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue, No. 25-1210 (U.S. filed Aug. 3, 2026).
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Groff v. DeJoy, 600 U.S. 447 (2023).
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Order List, Supreme Court of the United States (Oct. 5, 2026).
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This article was assisted by AI.
This does not constitute legal advice. Readers are encouraged to talk to licensed attorneys about their particular situations.
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