The US Supreme Court has rejected challenges to the New York state mandate that healthcare workers be vaccinated against COVID-19. The legal challenge was issued by a group of Christian doctors and nurses and an organisation promoting vaccine scepticism to New York’s refusal to allow religious exemptions to the compulsory vaccine mandate.
Acting in two cases, the judges denied emergency requests for an injunction requiring the state to permit religious exemptions while litigation over the mandate’s legality continues in lower courts.
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted the injunction, reports Reuters.
The Supreme Court previously rejected other challenges to vaccine mandates including one focusing on Maine’s lack of a religious exemption for healthcare workers.
The New York challengers said the mandate violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition on religious discrimination by the government, or a federal civil rights law requiring employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious beliefs. A lower court rejected their bid for an injunction.
On 26 August, New York’s Department of Health had ordered healthcare professionals to be vaccinated by 27 September: that deadline was extended to 22 November.
The state has said that under the policy employers can consider religious accommodation requests and employees can be reassigned to jobs such as remote work. It added that it allows a “narrow medical exemption for the small number of people with a serious allergic reaction to the COVID-19 vaccines”. It said longstanding healthcare worker vaccine mandates for measles and rubella also had no religious exemptions.
One lawsuit was brought by a group of 17 doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers, mostly Catholic, who sued under pseudonyms, denouncing “medical dictatorship”. Sixteen said they were fired or suspended under the policy, while one nurse agreed to be vaccinated to keep her job.
The other case involved a challenge by three Christian nurses, members of We the Patriots USA, a Connecticut-based group that is also a plaintiff. The group opposes vaccine mandates and advocates for various causes including what it calls “medical freedom”.
In a video on the group’s website, co-founder Brian Festa said, “We were fighting against vaccine mandates. We were fighting to reveal the truth about what’s in these shots, long before COVID was even a thing.”
These plaintiffs are represented by Norman Pattis, a lawyer known for defending conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, founder of the right-wing website Infowars, against defamation lawsuits after he falsely called a 2012 Connecticut school mass shooting a “hoax”.
About 84% of American adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 72% are fully vaccinated, adds Reuters. A minority has declined to get the shots.
In legal filings, the New York challengers said that they believe abortion is “evil” and object to any COVID-19 vaccine whose development relied on cell lines from aborted foetuses.
The three COVID-19 vaccines authorised for US use do not contain aborted foetal cells. Laboratory-grown cells that descended from the cells of an aborted foetus obtained decades ago were employed in testing during the vaccine development process. Drug efficacy and safety testing using such cell lines is routine. The Vatican issued guidance to Roman Catholics last year that it is morally acceptable to use COVID-19 vaccines.
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