Unvaxxed UVA Health Care Worker Who Clocked Overtime Covid Hours Was Denied Religious Exemption And Fired

In 2019, Chelsea Sheppard was saving lives and instructing medical students at the University of Virginia (UVA). When the pandemic hit, she would take on extra shifts and follow all the university’s health requirements. The university would reward her long hours and dedication to the Covid-19 response, then terminate her two years later, denying her religious exemption from a vaccine still considered a medical experiment.

Sheppard was a clinical pathologist specializing in transfusion medicine and blood banking and served as a regional medical director for the American Red Cross before being hired as an associate professor by UVA. She was named director of the university’s stem cell collection facility, overseeing transfusions and the education of medical students, residents, and fellows.

At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sheppard, who agreed to share her story with me, was “very concerned” and “cautious.” She and her husband, a practicing physician who works primarily with the elderly, carefully changed out of their work clothes and scrubs in the garage before entering their home and running laundry every night.

Sheppard gathered Covid studies from South Korea, Singapore, France, Germany, and other developed countries, translating when necessary, and reviewing as much international data as possible. By early fall of 2020, there was a growing body of data on infection fatality rate and case fatality rate.

But as other countries sent their children back to school and some countries and states embraced natural immunity strategies with successful or equivalent outcomes to heavily locked down locales, it became apparent that rational discussion of the virus was taboo.

In the United States specifically, “everything stopped making sense,” Sheppard said. “States were sending patients with positive tests and symptoms back into nursing homes with vulnerable patients. We had … bizarre testing data and strategies. There were models released showing asymptomatic transmission rates at around 50 percent, which made no sense. It seemed we were handling this in a very different way than we had ever done in ‘public health’ and there wasn’t a clear reason why.”

Questioning Vaccines

Then the vaccines began to be released.

“Suddenly, everything was completely upside down,” Sheppard said. “The speed alone of the release was unprecedented, along with the lack of transparency on the data.”

A licensed physician since 2007, Sheppard had always abided by informed consent — giving patients a full explanation of medication and procedural risks and providing information on alternative treatment options. Not only was transparent data unavailable in the U.S., ethical practices were quickly disappearing. But nothing, Sheppard said, could prepare her for the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

“The idea that we would coerce people to get vaccinated, to effectively force participation in a clinical trial with an experimental therapy with no long-term data, by threatening their livelihoods, their ability to care for and feed their children, and convince them that they were awful people not fit for medical care if they refused, was the complete annihilation of medical ethics,” she said.

UVA Mandate

In August of 2021, Sheppard’s employer,

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