NY vax mandate beats religious challenge

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The US Supreme Court has rejected challenges brought by Christian doctors and nurses to New York’s refusal to allow religious exemptions to the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.

Elsewhere, nearly 30 members of the US Air Force have been stood down for receiving a vaccine.

Acting in two cases, the justices denied emergency requests for an injunction requiring the state to allow religious exemptions while litigation over the mandate’s legality continues in lower courts. 

Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted the injunction.

The Supreme Court previously rejected other challenges to vaccine mandates including one focusing upon Maine’s lack of a religious exemption for healthcare workers.

The New York challengers said the mandate, which allows a narrow medical exemption but no religious one, violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition on religious discrimination by the government, or a federal civil rights law requiring employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious beliefs.

A lower court rejected their bid for an injunction.

New York’s Department of Health on August 26 ordered healthcare professionals who come in contact with patients or other employees to be vaccinated by September 27. 

That deadline was later delayed to November 22.

The state has said that under the policy employers can consider religious accommodation requests and employees can be reassigned to jobs such as remote work.

The state said medical exceptions are meant for the small number of people who have had a serious allergic reaction to the COVID-19 vaccines and that longstanding healthcare worker vaccine mandates for measles and rubella have no religious exemptions.

Meanwhile, the US Air Force said on Monday 27 service members had been discharged for refusing to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, the first active-duty troops believed to have been removed for declining the jab.

The Pentagon made the vaccine mandatory for all service members in August and the vast majority of active-duty troops have received at least one dose.

Ann Stefanek, a spokeswoman for the air force, said the troops were given a chance to explain why they had refused to get vaccinated, but none of them were given exemptions.

About 97 per cent of air force personnel are vaccinated against the virus, a number far higher than the general US population.