19-year BART employee, Albert Roth, who is an unvaccinated ordained minister and had requested religious exemption to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, is reacting to this email he received Wednesday morning, one day before Thanksgiving, that said, "After careful review and consideration of the information provided, your request is denied."
"Yeah, Jay, I'm not giving in and there's a number of us that have the same opinion, we're not giving in. We're holding ground, we're holding firm on what our beliefs are."
The agency's vaccine mandate goes into effect on December 13th.
BART tells us that as of right now about 600 employees are unvaccinated.
Board Director, Rebecca Saltzman, said this last month, "We need to protect the health and safety of BART workers and BART riders."
In a statement just released, BART says "We are working with our labor partners to deliver safe and reliable service now and in the future."
Roth though believes a loss of hundreds of workers could impact safety and so does Community Service Officer 14-year BART employee, Rhiannon Doyle, who received her religious exemption denial Wednesday too.
In my department alone, I believe there's 60 of us. I'd say a good handful are civilians, maybe 5 or 10, but the rest are officers. That is really going to impact the response time for emergencies.
Doyle says she's not an anti-vaxxer, but had COVID-19 in September and believes taking the vaccine would be an attempt to fix something that's not broken.
Doyle and Roth are against being told what to put in their bodies, and say that they're ready to walk if need be if daily text testing isn't allowed.
I've been homeless before and this is what I told the BART board. I'm not afraid to be homeless again. Now they're tapping into people's rights, and I'm not going to stand for that, not on my watch.
BART says riders are depending on a healthy workforce. They plan to hold additional vaccine clinics for unvaccinated employees next week.
JR Stone, ABC7 News
