A lawsuit over the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s vaccine mandate will go on at least a little longer, now that a federal judge has allowed the plaintiffs until Dec. 22 to file a response to the lab prime contractor’s motion to dismiss the case.
UT-Battelle, a team of the University of Tennessee and Battelle, is trying to get the case thrown out after U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley in November refused to grant an injunction blocking the contractor’s vaccine mandate.
Just before Thanksgiving, on Nov. 22, Atchley agreed to give the roughly half-dozen vaccine refusers suing the lab until Dec. 22 to brief the court on why the case should continue.
At the outset of the case, Atchley issued a temporary injunction to prevent the plaintiffs’ dismissal so that he could be briefed on the case, which the lab employees filed in mid-October in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Tennessee.
But about a month ago, Atchley refused to issue a preliminary injunction to block the vaccine mandate for the duration of the case. In the ruling, he said the plaintiffs did not establish that they would be irreparably harmed by the mandate — one of many handed down after President Joe Biden’s executive orders this fall.
“Plaintiffs conflate the alleged irreparable harm arising from UT-Battelle’s challenged accommodation with the personal difficulty of choosing whether to decline the vaccine requirement,” Atchley wrote in a November decision. “Plaintiffs are not being forced to take the vaccine, thus depriving them of the right to exercise their religious beliefs, and the defendant has not terminated their positions.”
Shortly after the judge’s ruling on the injunction, the UT-Battelle asked that the entire case be dismissed, in part because plaintiffs had yet to exhaust their potential remedies before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That was expected to happen by Christmas.
After about a half-dozen vaccine holdouts filed suit Oct. 12, the judge initially issued a temporary restraining order holding up the DOE lab manager’s plans to place the unvaccinated staff, some with religious exemptions, on unpaid leave.
The plaintiffs have complained that the laboratory contractor’s vaccine order is “absolute” with little leeway for accommodations such as remote work or mask-wearing as an alternative to vaccination.
