Five Years Later, and Post Covid—The Final 3 Are Still Standing in Court Because of It
Editor’s Note: Maureen Steele is a widely published writer known nationally for exposing corruption in government, with a focus on the dysfunction of the court system. Her introduction to Boston Broadside was through her own complex case, which was covered in-depth in the April 2024 article entitled “The Family Court Fleecing of a John Doe” in April 2024. This is Steele’s second article on the David and Goliath story of the small cluster of healthcare workers who are still standing up against MGB. Her first article is included in the plaintiff’s Give Send Go story here: The Final 3.
The Last Three Standing
By Maureen Steele
Special to Boston Broadside
Boston, MA – Some lawsuits arrive dressed as simple employment disputes but carry the heavy weight of an entire era. Adams et al. vs. Mass General Brigham is one such case. They were called heroes in 2020. By 2021, many of them were discarded as threats. Essential one day—disposable the next.
One of thousands of healthcare workers who turned out for the Kuhner Country/Boston Broadside Medical Freedom Rally on September 26, 2021 (Boston Broadside image).
This is one of the most significant remaining reckonings from the COVID mandate era — a federal case five years in the making, that cuts to the heart of religious liberty, institutional power, corporate medicine, and whether the rule of law still applies when the stakes are high and the narrative is inconvenient.
Their David vs. Goliath Story
There were originally 267 plaintiffs. What remains today are The Final 3: Tyler Adams, Jamie Steverman, and Michelle Orfanos — three healthcare workers who refuse to disappear quietly after Mass General Brigham, the largest and most powerful hospital system in Massachusetts, stripped them of their careers.
Mass General Brigham is not some minor regional employer. It is the largest private employer in Massachusetts, a Harvard-affiliated medical empire with approximately 82,000–85,000 employees and annual revenue exceeding $22 billion. In June 2021, MGB announced that all employees would be required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine once the FDA granted approval. “The evidence of COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness is overwhelming,” CEO Anne Klibanski stated.
Employees were told they could request medical and religious exemptions.
That promise is where the real story begins.
More than 2,400 employees sought exemptions. MGB granted a mere 234. In a 2023 federal order, Judge F. Dennis Saylor arrogantly wrote that MGB had “effectively made a determination that some level of risk, eventually involving 234 unvaccinated individuals out of approximately 93,600 employees, was tolerable.”
For the Final 3 plaintiffs, the central issue is not that MGB granted no exemptions — but that it allegedly granted them through a secretive, arbitrary, and discriminatory process that favored certain religions and beliefs while systematically disfavoring others, particularly mainstream Christians.
The Final Three
Medical assistant Tyler Adams sought a medical exemption under the ADA based on a documented severe PEG (polyethylene glycol) allergy — a key ingredient in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Her allergy was formally acknowledged by her medical provider and is listed by the CDC as a contraindication. Despite clear medical documentation, MGB denied her request without any individualized assessment and terminated her.
The medical evaluation that led to Adams’s firing was not even conducted by employees with the necessary medical credentials to do that kind of evaluation.
Jamie Steverman, a registered nurse, was terminated by Mass General Brigham in 2021 for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine due to her sincerely held religious beliefs. Despite this, MGB later rehired her as a contract nurse in a patient-facing position, where she worked successfully for a period. This rehiring further undermines MGB’s claim that unvaccinated employees posed undue hardship or safety risk.
Michelle Orfanos, also a registered nurse who had worked for MGB since 2012, has become the most visible face of this fight. She worked unvaccinated throughout the pandemic — including as a homecare nurse and as a volunteer in the Boston COVID field hospital. She had received religious exemptions for flu vaccines for years, only to have her COVID-19 religious exemption denied in 2021, resulting in her termination.
For One Lightning Strikes Twice
Then came the second firing. Orfanos alleges that MGB rehired her in 2023 as a per diem emergency room nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Upon hiring, MGB approved her religious exemption for the flu vaccine, cleared her to work, and allowed her to begin patient care. Months later, the same institution placed her on leave, demanded she justify her religious objection to the COVID-19 vaccine, denied the request, and terminated her again in February 2024 for “non-compliance with Mass General Brigham’s COVID-19 Vaccination Policy.”
Despite having already recognized her sincerely held Christian beliefs by granting her a flu vaccine exemption, MGB, in an entirely contradictory move, apparently decided months later that Orfanos was no longer “religious enough” to receive the same accommodation for the COVID-19 vaccine.
“The gravity of this case is enormous. I’m a simple staff nurse fighting the largest healthcare institution in Massachusetts — the largest private employer in the state.” Michelle Orfanos, RN
That second termination is now the subject of a separate Massachusetts state-court action, Michelle M. Orfanos v. Mass General Brigham, Inc., recently filed in Suffolk Superior Court. There, Orfanos alleges religious discrimination, failure to accommodate, retaliation, coercion, fraudulent misrepresentation, and negligent misrepresentation.
Humanitarian/Legal Analysis
“Michelle Orfanos’s state court case shows what happened to many good people during the mandate era,” said the plaintiffs’ attorney, Gregory A. Hession (Boston Broadside photo).
“Here was a dedicated nurse who worked on the front lines unvaccinated during the pandemic. MGB fired her in 2021 when she would not take a vaccine that violated her faith. It then rehired her in 2023, approved her religious exemption for the flu vaccine, and allowed her to care for patients again — only to fire her a second time in 2024 for the same reason. This was retaliation, and we have alleged it is a violation of Massachusetts law. They punished a nurse for standing on her Christian beliefs.”
The state complaint alleges that MGB did not evaluate religious exemption requests individually, as the law requires, but instead created internal criteria that divided religious beliefs into approved and disapproved categories. According to the complaint, Christian Scientists, Dutch Reformed Christians, Rastafarians, and employees citing “Mark of the Beast” concerns from the New Testament Book of Revelation were treated more favorably, while Catholics, mainstream Protestant Christians, and employees citing conscience or fetal-cell-line objections were placed into a disfavored category.
Inside Baseball?
One alleged policy excerpt is particularly striking. The complaint states that MGB’s updated exemption guidance directed that requests based on Christian Scientists, Dutch Reformed Christians, Rastafarians, or “Mark of the Beast” concerns should be approved with a basic explanation, while requests based on religions that “support vaccination,” including Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, should be denied unless the employee could satisfy additional narrow criteria.
If true, that is not merely bureaucratic sloppiness. It is theological sorting by a corporate employer.
The most cinematic allegation involves a pseudonymous “Jane Doe,” an assistant to Dr. Dean Hashimoto, MGB’s Chief Medical Officer of Workplace Health. According to the complaint, Doe was initially denied an exemption based on a “Mark of the Beast” belief, became emotional after allegedly hearing committee members ridicule that belief, appealed through Dr. Hashimoto, and had her denial quickly reversed. Her husband’s denial was allegedly reversed as well, despite MGB telling employees there was no appeal process.
Soon after, “Mark of the Beast” objections were added to the approved criteria.
That allegation, if proven, cuts to the heart of the case: exemptions were indiscriminate and not necessarily about sincerity or safety. They may have been about access, categories, and who inside the institution took up your cause.
MGB denies the plaintiffs’ framing. Its lawyers at Seyfarth Shaw, a massive international law firm with a Boston office, portray the remaining plaintiffs and their counsel as attempting to restart a five-year-old case, pursue conspiracy theories, and turn a discrimination lawsuit into a broad anti-vaccine proceeding. In its May 18, 2026 opposition, MGB argues that plaintiffs have had years to obtain discovery, that the five year old case should move toward summary judgment and trial, and that Orfanos’s new state-court filing is filled with “baseless conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine misinformation, and bogus claims of ‘fraud.’”
Orfanos’s lawyer, Gregory Hession, disagrees. The public case record shows that Seyfarth lawyers requested a drastic “protective order” at the beginning of the case that kept much of the most important information about the who, what, when, where and why of these terminations from both the parties and their lawyers. Then, when the judge allowed a short window to obtain further case information from MGB this year, Seyfarth refused to participate, demanding that the plaintiffs re-ask the judge for it in a motion to the court.
Why was it essential for Orfanos to amend her state Superior Court case, which is far from “baseless” as claimed by defense counsel Seyfarth?
Not finding satisfaction in Federal Court for her second firing in 2024, Orfanos was left with no other option but to expand her existing state case. The judge made it clear that he would not allow her full claim to be brought on the federal level.
“The greatly expanded state court case was necessary because MGB’s lawyers themselves didn’t want to let her claims be heard in the existing federal case by amending it, as is usually done,” said Hession. “They argued hard in the federal case that Michelle Orfanos should not be allowed to get even the most basic information about her case, such as who actually decided that her religious beliefs were not sincere, which is always given to parties in such cases. Consequently, the only way to have all of her legal claims considered by a court and receive all the case information she is entitled to get about her second firing from MGB, we had to stay with and expand the state court lawsuit.”
Hession went on to explain that the, “The attorneys at Seyfarth are now complaining about this greatly expanded state complaint, but that’s on them for asking the federal judge to keep most of the claims involving Orfanos’s second firing out of the existing federal case.”
Two Cases Moving Forward
This is now a case about the case itself. Plaintiffs say critical evidence was withheld or obscured. MGB says discovery was extensive, burdensome, and complete. Plaintiffs say they were denied meaningful access to the people who judged them. MGB says the review process was collective and anonymized where possible.
The “Communicators” of the termination of hundreds of MGB employees, the institution itself, and its law firm have for five years refused to disclose who made that decision, and on what grounds. According to Hession, this is at the crux of the federal case, as well as the state case.
The “communicator” structure has become one of the most important legal and narrative battlegrounds.
During the March 26, 2026, status conference, where there were reportedly 85 watching by zoom, plaintiffs’ counsel Sujata Gibson told Judge Saylor that critical documents were only just surfacing.
Reviewer notes for Tyler Adams’s first denial had been produced for the first time on February 12, 2026. “We’re just getting initial documents now,” Gibson told the court. “I still have no reviewer notes or even knowledge of who reviewed Ms. Orfanos’ or Ms. Steverman’s claims.”
The plaintiffs’ Rule 37 motion, filed May 5, 2026, sharpened that claim, requesting fifteen Phase II depositions, identification of actual decision-makers, usable discovery production, and an extension of fact discovery.
Already Decided?
The judge, F. Dennis Saylor IV, has repeatedly tried to keep the case from becoming a referendum on COVID vaccines. Also at the March 26 hearing, he told plaintiffs’ counsel that he would not permit expert testimony “that the vaccines are ineffective or unsafe.” He stated that, “It’s not a trial about whether or not these vaccines are safe,” and went on to say that he “would not let this trial become a circus,” adding that “There’s overwhelming evidence, of course, that they are safe. We’re not going to put the CDC or the entire vaccination process on trial. This is not a MAHA (Make Americans Healthy Again) trial.” These statements smack of bias and suggest that the judge has already reached a decision to rule in favor of the institution over the people who have been harmed by it.
The Rub
Attorney Gibson pushed back by arguing that evidence about transmission and accommodation was directly relevant to the discrimination claims. If MGB knew in 2021 that both vaccinated and unvaccinated workers could transmit the virus, then its claim that unvaccinated religious objectors posed an unmanageable safety risk becomes far more vulnerable.
This case does not appear to require the court to decide every scientific question about the vaccines. It does require the court to decide whether MGB fairly applied religious accommodation law, engaged in individualized review, had a legitimate undue-hardship basis for its denials, and whether its internal criteria were neutral or discriminatory.
The state complaint further alleges that MGB instructed reviewers to deny requests challenging the experimental or EUA status of the vaccines by stating, “The Pfizer vaccine has been fully approved by the FDA and is readily available for employees.” Plaintiffs contend this was materially false at the time, as the fully licensed Comirnaty product did not ship into the United States until May 2022. The complaint also quotes Chief Human Resources Officer Rosemary Sheehan writing to peer institutions on August 2, 2021: “We are now moving forward without the FDA approval, please do not share this broadly.”
That last line may become one of the most important in this entire story.
There are human beings inside every one of these abstractions. Michelle Orfanos was not an internet pundit or a protester outside a hospital. She was a nurse who had cared for patients throughout the emergency, been granted religious vaccine exemptions before, been rehired after her first termination, and then fired again.
When asked why she continues this long fight, Michelle Orfanos replied:
“The gravity of this case is enormous. I’m not doing this just for myself. I’m fighting for every nurse, every healthcare worker, and everyone who was unlawfully terminated and persecuted for daring to stand on their faith. If we don’t hold institutions like MGB accountable now, we are handing them the blueprint to do it again.”
The COVID mandate years created a new American template: emergency power flowed through employers, hospitals, universities, licensing boards, and courts. Apparently, most remain drunk on that power, which was intended to be temporary. Rights were often buried under process — forms, deadlines, committees, checkboxes, and templates.
Hypocritical Hospital Policies
The question is whether the machinery of compliance became, in some places, machinery of discrimination. MGB will argue it was protecting patients during a pandemic and that courts should defer to medical judgment. Judge Saylor has recognized that such deference carries force. But deference is not immunity.
A hospital may make infection-control decisions, but it may not create religious categories that favor some faiths over others. It may not use secret criteria, deny appeals to some while granting them to insiders, or claim accommodation is impossible while accommodating hundreds of others.
This case is about the nurses, technicians, therapists, doctors, and staff who were told they were heroes in 2020 and liabilities in 2021. It is about whether religious liberty means anything when the belief is unpopular or inconvenient to a $22-billion institution. It is about whether courts will allow full discovery into what powerful institutions knew, said, concealed, and decided when the country was afraid.
The mandate era is already being rewritten in softer language. Mistakes become “policy evolution.” Coercion becomes “workplace safety.” Firings become “noncompliance.” Religious discrimination becomes “process.” But court records have a way of resisting euphemism.
They preserve emails, testimony, shifting explanations, and the people who refused to disappear quietly. History often turns not on the loudest battles, but on the records left behind.
And in Boston, inside the federal courthouse and the Massachusetts Superior Court, the record is still being written.
UPDATE:
During the last status conference for this MGB case on May 21, 2026, the plaintiffs asked the court for a limited amount of additional discovery. Pointing to a recently disclosed document that revealed some new names, the request is mainly to identify the specific people who reviewed and denied their religious and medical exemption requests. The defense strongly pushed back, arguing that plaintiffs already have all the information they need — and have had it since 2022 — and that it’s time to move on to summary judgment.
The judge took the discovery request under advisement and said he will issue a decision soon. Another status conference is set for June 8, with in-person hearings on the summary judgment motions expected in mid-July.
Maureen Steele is a writer, speaker, and activist known for her blunt, unfiltered style that mixes sharp commentary, patriotism, and raw honesty. She co-founded American-Made Foundation, which produced the powerful documentary, TAKEN: State Sanctioned Kidnapping, and co-wrote the book The CPS Pipeline: State Sanctioned Kidnapping.
