WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to take up a challenge to a vaccine mandate for health workers in New York that does not include a religious exemption, the latest decision in which the high court has allowed state health requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic to stand.
As is often the case, the court did not explain its decision not to hear the appeal. Three conservative justices dissented from that decision.
New York state imposed the vaccine mandate for health care workers last year. The policy allows for medical exemptions but not those based on religious objections. An earlier religious exemption from the requirement expired.
“The New York mandate includes a medical exemption but no religious exemption, even though ‘allowing a healthcare worker to remain unvaccinated undermines the state’s asserted public health goals equally whether that worker happens to remain unvaccinated for religious reasons or medical ones,'” Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a dissent joined by Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. “The court could give much-needed guidance by simply deciding whether that single secular exemption renders the state law not neutral and generally applicable.”
The lawsuit, filed by an anonymous group of doctors and nurses, arrived at the court once before on its emergency docket. The justices declined to hear it at that time, though three of the court’s conservatives – Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch – disagreed with that decision.
This time, the challenge was back at the court on the merits of the case, rather than the largely procedural issues presented earlier.
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Nurses, doctors and other health care workers asserted in the lawsuit that the lack of a religious exemption violated their First Amendment right to practice religion free from government interference. The objections centered on the use fetal cells from abortions in the vaccines’ development.
The Supreme Court has so far avoided the issue of COVID-19 vaccine mandates imposed by states, turning away several appeals challenging requirements. The justices declined in October to block a vaccine mandate for health care workers in Maine over similar objections, for example.
Earlier this year, the justices halted enforcement of one of President Joe Biden’s signature efforts to combat COVID-19, ruling that his administration didn’t have the authority to impose vaccine-or-testing requirements on large employers.
In a second, unsigned opinion issued the same day, the court did permit a vaccine mandate on people employed at health care facilities that receive federal funding through Medicare and Medicaid. That measure affects about 10 million workers.
