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By: Matthew Vadum
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this week urged the Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit over the state’s COVID-19-era vaccination mandate for health care workers.
The New York State Department of Health issued an emergency rule in August 2021 requiring employers in the health care field to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for their workers.
The department rescinded the mandate in October 2023, while a lawsuit filed by health care workers to challenge it was pending in the courts.
Before the repeal, three health care workers, who were not identified by name in court papers, sued over the rule. They argued it was illegal because it did not allow workers with good-faith religious objections to the vaccine to receive an exemption from the vaccination requirement. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dismissed their legal complaint in December 2024 in an unpublished nonprecedential summary order.
Hochul said in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on July 21 that the workers’ petition should be denied because the Second Circuit threw out the case, and the mandate no longer exists.
There is “no reasonable expectation” of the vaccination mandate being revived. Granting the petition would lead the court to engage in a “hypothetical exercise” in which it would “wade into questions concerning the meaning and validity of the same repealed state rule,” she said.
The workers had filed with the Supreme Court a petition seeking review of the Second Circuit ruling on March 20.
New York “forced health care workers to choose between their livelihoods and their religious convictions without any consideration for accommodation,” Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, the public interest law firm representing the workers who brought the case, said in a statement at the time.
“Those responsible for unlawful religious exemption denials and firings can undergo appropriate judicial scrutiny for their actions and the fired health care workers can receive long overdue justice.”
According to the petition, the state violated Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires employers to provide religious accommodations. The state also violated the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, which provides that federal law takes precedence over state law when there is a conflict between the two, the petition states.
Initially, the state followed federal law and allowed health care workers to opt out of the vaccination if it violated their sincerely held religious beliefs. Days later, the state rescinded the religious accommodation and forbade employers from approving a religion-based exemption from the mandate, the petition said.
The three health care workers say they were fired because they declined to take the COVID-19 shot. They say their religious convictions prevented them from accepting the vaccination.
All three of the COVID-19 vaccines available at the time the mandate was imposed were connected to aborted fetal cell lines in “origination, production, development, or testing,” according to the petition. The workers believe abortion takes an innocent life and is a sin, the petition said.
The case worked its way through the courts for years.
The federal district court in the Eastern District of New York, where the workers filed their lawsuit, declined to halt the mandate. That court reasoned a block was unnecessary because a court in the Northern District of New York had already halted the mandate.
