Supreme Court declines to block New York vaccine mandate for health care workers

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Supreme Court declines to block New York vaccine mandate for health care workers

The Supreme Court declined to take up a legal challenge brought by health care workers in New York who oppose the state's vaccine mandate on religious grounds.

Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas said the court should have taken the case.

When the requirement was first imposed in August as a way to prevent the spread of the latest Covid variant, it allowed exceptions based on medical reasons or religious objections. The religious exemption was removed later.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is a Roman Catholic, said she was not aware of any sanctioned religious objections from any organized religion and that religious leaders, including the Pope, were encouraging people to get vaccinated.

Sixteen health care workers were sued, saying they had religious objections because fetal cell lines were involved in the testing, development or production of Covid vaccines. They said the mandate allowed others who were unvaccinated to continue working because it violated their religious freedom.

The state's lawyers said the mandate of Covid was similar to the longstanding rules requiring health care workers to be vaccinated against measles and rubella. There are requirements that allow exemptions for medical reasons. The state said laboratory-grown stem cells, which derive from cells collected from a fetus nearly 50 years ago, were also used for testing the rubella vaccine.

The State doesn't have to provide a blanket religious exemption from vaccination because of the existence of a single, limited medical exemption to a vaccine requirement, they said in their written submissions.

Thomas said that confusion remains about a mandate such as New York s that provides no religious exemption. He said the court should have taken the case now to avoid confusion in the future.

The Supreme Court voted not to temporarily block the vaccine requirement in the case last December. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said that the court should have granted the request to put the mandate on hold.

Since the fall of last fall, the court has refused to block other vaccine mandates that don't provide religious exemptions. Applications were made to New York teachers, Navy sailors, health care workers in Maine and Massachusetts, and college students in Indiana.