Employment: Employee’s refusal to participate in interactive dialogue dooms ADA claim

Where an employee prevented her employer from learning why her condition required the accommodations that she asked for, she failed to show the employer had a duty to accommodate.

Background

In the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab directed its employees to vaccinate themselves against the disease. Sally Tarquinio, who suffers from “Lyme-induced immune dysregulation,” asked for a medical exemption to accommodate her asserted disability.

Medically speaking, it wasn’t clear why Tarquinio’s condition prevented her from getting vaccinated. The lab asked to speak with Tarquinio’s doctors. Tarquinio refused, so the lab denied Tarquinio’s request as insufficiently supported. Still, Tarquinio was sure that her immune system would respond poorly to the vaccine, and she declined to take it. Because Tarquinio had neither a vaccine nor an exemption, the lab fired her.

Tarquinio sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, and the district court entered summary judgment for the lab.

Analysis

An employer’s obligation to engage in the interactive process is closely tied to its duty to accommodate. That’s why this court has said that an employer who does not engage in good faith with the interactive process violates the ADA so long as a reasonable accommodation was possible. An employer who disrupts or sabotages the process by which accommodations are determined isn’t providing its disabled employees with the equal opportunity the ADA mandates.

But the interactive process also gives the employer a chance to confirm that it has a duty to accommodate to begin with. If an employee has a disability which causes limitations that interfere with work, and the employer knows it, then the employer must try to accommodate. But if any link in that logical chain is missing, no duty arises, and there’s no liability.

The interactive process helps employers to make that threshold call. Employers “need not take the employee’s word for it that the employee has [a disability] that may require special accommodation.” Rather, they have the right “to confirm whether a need for . . . accommodation exists.” That’s why the ADA’s implementing regulations specify that a goal of the interactive process is to “identify the precise limitations resulting from the disability.”

Sometimes, the connection between disability, limitation and need for accommodation is obvious. “A blind employee would not have to furnish medical records to establish that he needed some accommodation to be able to review written reports.” When the need for accommodation is clear, and a reasonable accommodation is evident, the onus is on the employer to act.

The interactive process is a means, not an end. Neither the employer nor the employee can rest on a breakdown in the interactive process without connecting that breakdown to an element of failure-to-accommodate liability. If the employer, for example, sabotages the interactive process to avoid discharging its duty, then the employee can use that sabotage to show that the employer refused an accommodation. But if the employee prevents the employer from understanding her disability, then the employer’s duty never arises, and the employee’s claim fails.

Here, Tarquinio disclosed her disability (Lyme-induced immune dysregulation) and her requested accommodation (an exemption from the lab’s COVID vaccination requirement). She described many of her symptoms. But she never explained, beyond opaque references to “immune dysregulation,” why her disability made COVID vaccination risky.

Maybe if the lab had been able to contact Tarquinio’s medical providers, those providers could have explained that Tarquinio had an autoimmune disease so severe that, in their judgment, Tarquinio was more likely to be harmed by the COVID vaccine than by COVID. But Tarquinio refused to let that conversation happen.

No reasonable jury could conclude that the lab knew enough to be on proper notice of Tarquinio’s needs. Faced with Tarquinio’s unusual medical profile, the lab had the right to ask for more objective evidence. Because Tarquinio prevented the lab from learning why her condition required the accommodations that she asked for, she can’t show that the lab had a duty to accommodate.

Affirmed.

Tarquinio v. Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab, Case No. 24-1432, June 25, 2025. 4th Cir. (Diaz), from DMD at Baltimore (Bennett). Francis J. Collins for Appellant. Jeremy Steven Schneider for Appellee. VLW 025-2-234. 13 pp.