(LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is backing a Washington State University coach’s appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals of his firing for refusing to submit to the controversial COVID-19 shot.

The public university terminated Catholic head football coach Nick Rolovich’s contract on October 18, 2021, the deadline that Washington Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee had set for public employees to get jabbed. His attorney, Brian Fahling, lambasted athletic director Pat Chun’s “animus towards Coach Rolovich’s sincerely held religious beliefs.” Four assistant coaches were also let go for the same reason.

Rolovich’s suit maintained that he was fired without just cause, entitling him to 60 percent of the remaining base salary of his $2 million contract, and that the university should have granted him a religious exemption. WSU countered that Rolovich had failed to make his religious objections known until after the deadline drew near and that it had “skepticism about the sincerity of his beliefs.”

In January 2025, U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice ruled that WSU was within its rights to fire Rolovich, claiming he failed to produce evidence that his motives for objecting were religious in nature but rather that he “frequently expressed secular concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine to friends, family members and coworkers.” The judge also agreed that accommodating Rolovich would have imposed significant logistical burdens on the university as well as harming its reputation.

Now, EWTN reports that Rolovich (who currently coaches for the University of California) has appealed to the Ninth Circuit. 

“Sidelining a coach for standing by his faith betrays the spirit of college athletics and religious freedom,” said Rolovich’s lead attorney Joseph Davis, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “The Ninth Circuit should throw the flag on WSU’s unnecessary roughness and protect every American’s right to live and work according to their faith.”

The Justice Department is also weighing in on the coach’s behalf, contending in an amicus brief that, contrary to Rice’s conclusion, the evidence that he asserted and demonstrated “sincere religious belief” was “voluminous.”

“That evidence attested to his sincere Catholic beliefs and articulated the conflict between that belief system and his objection to taking the vaccine,” DOJ argues.

A large body of evidence affirms both religious and medical grounds to refuse COVID shots. 

The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 39,099 deaths, 222,644 hospitalizations, 22,512 heart attacks, and 29,214 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of April 24, among other ailments. VAERS submission are not proven cases on their own, but in 2022 CDC researchers recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.

An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published in the journal Vaccine last year “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID shots, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April 2024, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 shots, and offered several theories for a causal link. Most recently, studies published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and International Journal of Medical Science raised the possibility of the shots carrying risks of not only respiratory diseases but even kidney injury.

On top of potential risks, many religious and pro-life Americans also object to the shots on moral grounds, due to ethical problems with how they were developed.

According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used fetal cells derived from aborted babies during their COVID shots’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design and development and production phases. The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science and even the left-wing “fact-checking” outlet Snopes have also admitted the shots’ abortion connection, which gives many a moral aversion to associating with them.