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News about the latest
covid-19 epidemic in the US
WASHINGTON — The Supreme
Court on Monday refused to block New York’s requirement that health care
workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus even when they cite religious
objections.
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| News about vaccination in the US |
As is often the court’s
practice in rulings on emergency applications, its unsigned order included no
reasoning. But Justice Neil M. Gorsuch filed a 14-page dissent saying that the
majority had betrayed the court’s commitment to religious liberty.
Justice Samuel A. Alito
Jr. joined Justice Gorsuch’s dissent. Justice Clarence Thomas also said he
would have blocked the vaccine requirement, but he gave no reasons.
The Supreme Court in
October refused to provide relief to health care workers in Maine who had made
an essentially identical request in a challenge to a similar state requirement,
over the dissents of the same three justices.
The court has also
rejected challenges to vaccination requirements at Indiana University, for
personnel in New York City’s school system and for workers at a Massachusetts
hospital. The court also rejected a challenge to a federal mandate requiring
masks for air travel.
All of those rulings were
issued by just one justice, which can be a sign that the legal questions
involved were not considered substantial. But those one-justice rulings did not
involve religion.
In his dissent on Monday
in the case from New York, Justice Gorsuch wrote that the practical
consequences of the court’s decision would be grave.
“Thousands of New York
health care workers face the loss of their jobs and eligibility for unemployment
benefits,” he wrote.
“These applicants are not
‘anti-vaxxers’ who object to all vaccines,” Justice Gorsuch added. “Instead,
the applicants explain, they cannot receive a Covid-19 vaccine because their
religion teaches them to oppose abortion in any form, and because each of the
currently available vaccines has depended upon abortion-derived fetal cell
lines in its production or testing.”
“The Free Exercise Clause
protects not only the right to hold unpopular religious beliefs inwardly and
secretly,” he wrote. “It protects the right to live out those beliefs
publicly.”
The ruling came in a pair
of challenges brought by doctors, nurses and other health care workers who said
the requirement violated their right to the free exercise of religion. They
argued that the availability of a medical exemption meant that the state was
discriminating against religious practice, citing decisions of the Supreme
Court striking down limits on religious gatherings that the justices in the
majority said were more restrictive than ones imposed on secular gatherings.
A federal judge in
Brooklyn ruled against the challengers in the case before him, but another
federal judge, in Utica, ruled for the challengers in a second case.
In a consolidated appeal
in the two cases, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in
New York, refused to block the requirement.
“Faced with an especially
contagious variant of the virus in the midst of a pandemic that has now claimed
the lives of over 750,000 in the United States and some 55,000 in New York, the
state decided as an emergency measure to require vaccination for all employees
at health care facilities who might become infected and expose others to the
virus, to the extent they can be safely vaccinated,” a unanimous three-judge
panel of the appeals court wrote in an unsigned opinion. “This was a reasonable
exercise of the State’s power to enact rules to protect the public health.”
In an emergency
application asking the Supreme Court to intercede, the health care workers’
lawyers wrote that the requirement “imposes an unconscionable choice on New
York health care workers: abandon their faith or lose their careers and their
best means to provide for their families.”
Barbara D. Underwood, New
York’s solicitor general, responded that the state does not allow a religious
exemption for its longstanding requirements for measles and rubella. The
medical exemption for the vaccination requirement, she added, “is tightly
constrained in both scope and duration,” making very few people eligible for
it.
As a general matter, she
wrote, “achieving high vaccination rates in particularly vulnerable settings is
of the utmost importance.”
In his dissent, Justice
Gorsuch wrote protecting religious freedom warranted a different approach.
“Today, we do not just fail
the applicants,” he wrote. “We fail ourselves.”
“We allow the state to
insist on the dismissal of thousands of medical workers — the very same
individuals New York has depended on and praised for their service on the
pandemic’s front lines over the last 21 months,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “To add
insult to injury, we allow the state to deny these individuals unemployment
benefits too. One can only hope today’s ruling will not be the final chapter in
this grim story.”
Justice Gorsuch invoked
similar reasoning in the Maine case.
“Where many other states
have adopted religious exemptions, Maine has charted a different course,”
Justice Gorsuch wrote at the time. “There, health care workers who have served
on the front line of a pandemic for the last 18 months are now being fired and
their practices shuttered. All for adhering to their constitutionally protected
religious beliefs. Their plight is worthy of our attention.”
Shared source: nytime.com
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