“Faced with a highly contagious strain of the virus amid a pandemic that has now claimed the lives of more than 750,000 in the United States and some 55,000 in New York, the state has decided as an emergency measure to require vaccination for all workers at healthcare facilities who could become infected and expose others to the virus, as long as they can be safely vaccinated,” a unanimous three-member 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 public health.”
In an emergency filing asking the Supreme Court to intervene, health professionals’ lawyers wrote that the demand imposes “an unscrupulous choice on New York’s health professionals: give up their faith or lose their careers and their best resources to provide for their families. ”
Barbara D. Underwood, the New York Attorney General, responded that the state did not allow a religious exemption from its long-standing measles and rubella requirements. The medical exemption from the vaccination requirement, she added, was “severely limited in both scope and duration,” leaving very few people eligible for it.
In general, she wrote, “Achieving high vaccination rates in particularly vulnerable environments is paramount.”
In his dissenting opinion, Judge Gorsuch wrote that protecting religious freedom warranted a different approach.
“Today we are not just abandoning applicants,” he wrote. “We fail ourselves.”
“We are allowing the state to push for the firing of thousands of medical workers — the same individuals New York has relied on and praised for the past 21 months for their services on the frontlines of the pandemic,” the judge wrote. “To add insult to injury, we allow the state to deny these individuals unemployment benefits as well. We can only hope that today’s ruling will not be the final chapter in this grim tale.”
Judge Gorsuch had invoked a similar line of reasoning in the Maine case.
“Where many other states have adopted religious exemptions, Maine has charted a different course,” he wrote at the time. “There, health workers who have served on the front lines of a pandemic for the past 18 months are now being fired and their practices closed. All because of their adherence to their constitutionally protected religious beliefs. Their condition deserves our attention.”
Sharon Otterman contributed reporting from New York.
