Federal Judge Sides With Health Care Workers Seeking Religious Exemption Against COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, October 12, preventing the enforcement of New York State’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers in the state who are seeking religious-based exemptions.

The ruling by a Utica judge Tuesday means the state will be, at least temporarily, barred from enforcing any requirement that employers deny religious exemptions.

“There is no adequate explanation from defendants about why the ‘reasonable accommodation’ that must be extended to a medically exempt health care worker under 2.61 could not similarly be extended to a health care worker with a sincere religious objection,” Judge David Hurd wrote. “The public interest lies with enforcing the guarantees enshrined in the Constitution and federal anti-discrimination law” and not the wider public health.

Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration had required hospital and nursing home workers to receive at least the first dose of a vaccine by September 27, or lose their jobs. That mandate has since been expanded to workers at assisted living homes, hospice care, treatment centers and home health aides. It prodded about 55,000 workers to get the shot, but left the fate of at least 35,600 others refusing shots — who had been placed on suspensions pending the outcome of the court battle — uncertain. These workers can now return to their jobs as some hospitals and nursing homes face staffing shortages, according to health leaders.

Hochul said in a statement released October 12 she will continue to fight the matter in court.

“My responsibility as governor is to protect the people of this state, and requiring health care workers to get vaccinated accomplishes that,” she said. “I stand behind this mandate, and I will fight this decision in court to keep New Yorkers safe.”

The judge’s order comes after he issued a temporary restraining order September 15 blocking enforcement of the mandate in relation to religious beliefs, citing the lawsuit filed by 17 Catholic and Baptist medical workers that claimed the removal of a religious exemption was unconstitutional.

At the time, the governor said the state was hoping to make “overwhelming persuasive arguments in support of allowing the state of New York to do what is necessary to protect the public health.”

“It’s the smart thing to do and we have to continue the mandates,” she said then. “This is not intended to be dictatorial; this is intended to save lives.”

Hurd still asserts that the health care workers suing the state are likely to succeed on the merits of their constitutional claim.

“The question presented by this case is not whether plaintiffs and other individuals are entitled to a religious exemption from the state’s workplace vaccination requirement,” he wrote. “Instead, the question is whether the state’s summary imposition of 2.61 conflicts with plaintiffs’ and other individuals’ federally protected right to seek a religious accommodation from their individual employers. The answer to this question is clearly yes. Plaintiffs have established that 2.61 conflicts with longstanding federal protections for religious beliefs and that they and others will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.”

According to the plaintiffs, the COVID-19 vaccines that are currently available violate these religious beliefs “because they all employ fetal cell lines derived from procured abortion in testing, development or production.”

None of the three available vaccines contain fetal cell tissue, though the Johnson&Johnson vaccine used laboratory grown cells that have roots dating back to fetal cells from decades ago, according to the UCLA Health system. Pfizer and Moderna used similar lab-grown cells while testing their vaccines.

On September 24, a federal appeals court had issued a temporary injunction against a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for New York City educators that was also set to go into effect September 27, but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejected the request to block New York City’s vaccination mandate for all Department of Education employees on October 1.

In a 12-page petition to Sotomayor, who is the circuit justice for the 2nd Circuit, lawyers argued that the teachers’ rights to due process and equal protection were violated by the mandate.

Sotomayor denied the emergency request without comment.