A federal appeals court found complying with a federal civil rights law was ‘an undue hardship’ for the state.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this week urged the Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit over the state’s COVID-19-era vaccination mandate for health care workers.
The New York State Department of Health issued an emergency rule in August 2021 requiring employers in the health care field to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for their workers.
The department rescinded the mandate in October 2023, while a lawsuit filed by health care workers to challenge it was pending in the courts.
Before the repeal, three health care workers, who were not identified by name in court papers, sued over the rule. They argued it was illegal because it did not allow workers with good-faith religious objections to the vaccine to receive an exemption from the vaccination requirement. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dismissed their legal complaint in December 2024 in an unpublished nonprecedential summary order.
Hochul said in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on July 21 that the workers’ petition should be denied because the Second Circuit threw out the case, and the mandate no longer exists.
There is “no reasonable expectation” of the vaccination mandate being revived. Granting the petition would lead the court to engage in a “hypothetical exercise” in which it would “wade into questions concerning the meaning and validity of the same repealed state rule,” she said.
The workers had filed with the Supreme Court a petition seeking review of the Second Circuit ruling on March 20.
New York “forced health care workers to choose between their livelihoods and their religious convictions without any consideration for accommodation,” Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, the public interest law firm representing the workers who brought the case, said in a statement at the time.
“Those responsible for unlawful religious exemption denials and firings can undergo appropriate judicial scrutiny for their actions and the fired health care workers can receive long overdue justice.”
