In a leaked phone call from September reported by Human Events senior editor Jack Posobiec, DOJ attorney Marty Lederman can be heard strategizing with the Biden administration on how to combat religious exemption requests to get around the vaccine mandate.

According to Lederman, there are "cases, for instance in the New York case that's currently going on against the State of New York, the Thomas More Society is representing a bunch of doctors and nurses who claim that they would sin gravely in cooperation with the evil of abortion. How would they be doing so? The claim is that all three of the current vaccines, either have fetal cells that were obtained by abortions in the vaccine itself, or in the case of Pfizer and Moderna that those vaccines were tested using fetal cells that had been aborted, and even the connection to the previous testing, makes them cooperative with evil in a way that their religion prohibits."