ADF to US Supreme Court: Protect NY’s religious health care workers from discriminatory COVID-19 vaccine mandate

The following quote may be attributed to Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch regarding a friend-of-the-court brief ADF attorneys, along with counsel at Wiley Rein, LLP, filed at the U.S. Supreme Court Friday on behalf of the Catholic Medical Association in Dr. A. v. Hochul, a case in which 16 medical professionals are challenging New York’s mandate that forces health care workers to receive a COVID-19 vaccine over their sincere religious opposition to it:

“Health care workers, like every other member of the American workforce, are free to live and work according to their religious beliefs. Yet by removing the religious exemption to its vaccine mandate, the state of New York is discriminating against people of faith—firing many skilled medical professionals and vindictively barring them and their families from unemployment benefits. With such a move, New York is not only severely weakening its already strained health care system, but also directly violating the constitutionally protected freedoms of its religious health care workers. We urge the Supreme Court to hear this important case so that New York’s religious medical professionals can return to helping meet the state’s growing health care needs.”

The state’s original mandate provided both medical and religious exemptions, but a week later, the state erased the religious one. Gov. Kathy Hochul then defended this erasure by suggesting that religious opposition to currently available COVID-19 vaccines are illegitimate because, in her view, no organized religion supports a religious exemption, and everyone “from the Pope on down” backs the vaccine. The governor even appeared in two church’s pulpits recruiting “apostles” to proselytize this message.

All that alone violates free exercise. But as the brief explains, assuming the state’s public interest in vaccination is legitimate, “Allowing a healthcare worker to remain unvaccinated undermines New York’s health goals equally whether that worker is unvaccinated for religious or medical reasons. Worse, to ease a worker shortage that this mandate helped fuel, New York now allows vaccinated workers with an active infection and not fully vaccinated workers to remain on the job, yet it will not mobilize healthy workers fired for their faith.”

Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.

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