"Federal and state laws offer protections for workers who want to decline a vaccine due to their reli-gious or philosophical beliefs, which can be broadly defined. Beliefs based on an organized religion’s teachings are protected, but so are other “sincerely held” beliefs or observances that are important to an individual, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at UC Hastings. The most an employer can do to contest waiver requests is to probe the consistency of employees’ beliefs – if they oppose the vaccine because they oppose the use of fetal cells in research, do they also refuse to take Tylenol, Tums and other medi-cations developed using fetal cells? But the tactic is “rife with legal pitfalls”, Reiss said. Ultimately, a sincerely held belief may not have to be rational or consistent in order to be protected by the law. These laws are strong because they “were created to protect people from real discrimination, in situations where, for example, a Jewish employee might be forced to work on a Saturday, or a Sikh employ-ee is asked to remove his turban”, said Reiss. But they weren’t designed for situations in which one employee’s belief system puts others’ lives at risk, she said."