Pac-12 football coach Nick Rolovich seeking religious exemption from vaccine mandate, according to mentor
has declined to explain his vaccine status after announcing in July that he had elected not to get vaccinated for private reasons.
WSU spokesman Phil Weiler also declined to comment.
“Legally, we cannot comment on an individual employee’s medical status,” he said.
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At WSU, applications for religious exemptions are reviewed by a committee and are “blinded” so that the reviewers don’t know who the applicant is, according to Weiler, who explained the process generally.
“The religious exemption questions ask requestors to explain specifically what tenets of their religious practice prevent them from being vaccinated or from receiving other types of medical care,” Weiler said. In addition, they are asked to explain why they consider this to be a “sincerely held belief.”
exemption from a vaccine mandate there was denied.have supported COVID-19 vaccines, a number of conservative Catholics have opposed them on religious grounds, believing it is tied to abortion, which they oppose.
No aborted fetal cells are in those vaccines, and the cell lines that were used to develop or test them were derived from elective abortions decades ago. In the case of the Johnson Johnson vaccine, a fetal cell line was used to produce it. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines used a fetal cell line in early testing but not in production.
This is not new or unusual in medicine or in the development of other vaccines. A wide array of common household medications also used fetal cell lines in their development process but generally don’t draw the same resistance, including Tylenol, Tums, Maalox and Pepto Bismol.
That is why an Arkansas hospital asked those who requested a religious exemption to attest that they also don’t use those common products either for the same reason.
“A concern about the possible use of fetal cells to develop vaccines is not, by itself, sufficient grounds to grant an exemption,” Weiler said.
Rolovich has indicated he is not an anti-vaxxer in general but has an issue with these vaccines in particular. “I’m not against vaccinations,” Rolovich said in July.
He is the only head coach in major college football to publicly say he won’t get vaccinated, even as the vaccines have proven to be safe and effective against a disease that has claimed more than 700,000 lives in the U.S.
“It’s a personal decision for him, but it doesn’t display the person he is as a coach, the passion he has for the game, the passion he has for his players, and his ability to stand up for his players,” said George Rush, Rolovich’s former coach at the City College of San Francisco. “Although it’s not the decision I personally would make, when everybody is just beating you to death (with criticism about his decision), I think it takes a lot of courage to stand in there knowing his job is on the line.”
Rush said he himself is vaccinated. So is Jones, who said he initially didn’t want to get the shot until it got to be too problematic for him to travel without it.
“Rolo is Rolo, and he is who he is because of the person he was,” Jones said. “He was a quarterback, kind of his own guy, a leader. He’s been that way as a coach. He believes that he doesn’t need to take it and doesn’t want to take it, and he doesn’t want somebody telling him what to do. But like I said, to me, there’s just too much at stake.”
Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. E-mail: bschrotenb@usatoday.com