A federal appeals court has sided with Cook County in the case of a pharmacy technician who was fired from John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital in Chicago after she declined COVID-19 vaccination and was denied a religious exemption. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the judgment against Jetaime Flores on November 6, upholding a December 2025 ruling by a federal judge in Chicago that had already gone against her.
Flores worked as a pharmacy technician in the pharmacy at Stroger Hospital, which is operated by Cook County, according to Medical Daily. The hospital required on-site workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 while exempting employees who worked from home, the outlet reports. When Flores requested a religious exemption, Cook County denied it; she declined vaccination anyway and was fired, after which she sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the federal law that, per a U.S. Supreme Court decision, requires employers to accommodate religious practices unless doing so would cause undue hardship.
The GovInfo court record lists the case as Jetaime Flores v. Cook County, docketed as Seventh Circuit case number 26-1088 and dated November 6, 2026, per the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. A Law360 search-result snippet describing the same dispute says the Seventh Circuit refused to reopen a suit alleging that an Illinois county hospital fired a pharmacy technician for requesting a religious exemption from the COVID-19 vaccine.
A Precedent Set Weeks Earlier
The outcome in Flores’s case was shaped by a Seventh Circuit ruling issued just over a month earlier in a closely related dispute involving another Cook County health worker. Per the seed reporting, Flores v. Cook County was controlled by the court’s earlier ruling in Mason, and the Flores decision itself is nonprecedential, meaning it does not set new binding law beyond applying that earlier holding…