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The U.S. Supreme Court, without comment, refused to hear an appeal by parents who sued the state of New York in an effort to overturn stricter vaccine medical exemption requirements for children attending the state’s schools, Bloomberg reported Monday.
The parents filed a class-action complaint on July 23, 2020, after lawmakers on June 13, 2019, tightened the requirements for medical exemptions and empowered school principals to overrule treating physicians on whether to grant a medical exemption.
The new law also repealed all religious exemptions for vaccination.
The plaintiffs included parents from seven households, representing eight children ranging in age from 6 to 17, and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) on behalf of its active members and all others similarly situated.
All of the children were “medically fragile” and had received medical exemptions since a very young age for a host of often rare medical conditions.
One 15-year-old girl represented in the lawsuit had “multiple diagnosed autoimmune syndromes and health challenges, including autoimmune encephalitis, which causes progressive neurological injury and attacks the brain.”
She and her siblings “all had severe adverse reactions to immunization” and her eldest brother “died of complications from immunization.”
Another household with two children reported “a family history of severe reaction to immunization, including two deaths,” and genetic testing that revealed vulnerability to vaccine injury.
An 11-year-old boy also represented in the lawsuit suffered from Hirschsprung’s disease, “a rare and serious genetic condition,” which made him “so medically fragile and sensitive to chemicals and many medications that if he needs to take antibiotics, he must be hospitalized first so that medical care can be given to treat the cascade of severe reactions that ensure.”
And a 6-year-old boy named in the lawsuit “suffered severe anaphylaxis to his hepatitis B vaccine as a baby” and has received medical exemptions from immunization ever since.
The children were unable to attend public school in New York following the implementation of New York’s updated medical exemption requirements.
Defendants named in the lawsuit included New York State Commissioner of Health Howard Zucker, medical director of New York state’s Bureau of Immunization Dr. Elizabeth Rausch-Phung, the New York State Department of Health, and the superintendents and principals of several New York state school districts.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York on Feb. 17, 2021, dismissed the case, as did the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, on July 29, 2022.
The plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court on Oct. 27, 2022.
In the original lawsuit, the plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of New York’s “unreasonable burdens on the availability of medical exemptions to the mandatory school immunization requirements for medically fragile children who need them.”
“As a result, hundreds of medically fragile children across New York State have been expelled from school and denied vital services and programming after their medical exemptions written by licensed treating physicians are overruled by school administrators with no medical training,” the lawsuit argued.
“The new regulations give school principals, who do not generally have any medical or legal training, authority to overrule treating physicians” and “do not require that the school principal consult with any medical professionals before overruling treating physicians and denying a medical exemption,” the lawsuit added.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly turned away challenges to state and local vaccine mandates for schoolchildren and government workers, according to Bloomberg, which reported that the “new rules require exemptions to be based on a nationally recognized standard of care, such as those contained in guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC].”
The lawsuit stated that under New York’s new regulations, recognized “allowable reasons” for the issuance of a medical exemption are matched with guidance provided by the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices” (ACIP).
However, the plaintiffs argued in their lawsuit that, “The CDC itself has clearly stated that the ACIP guidance is not meant to replace the clinical judgment of a treating physician.”
“The new regulations contain overburdensome requirements for doctors and are being implemented in a manner that deters physicians from writing medical exemptions after they have concluded that an immunization is unsafe for the child,” the lawsuit also argued.
New York-based attorney Sujata Gibson, who represented the plaintiffs in this case, called the Supreme Court’s decision not to review the case “disappointing.”
She told The Defender:
“The New York Department of Health arbitrarily imposed an extremely narrow definition of what qualifies for medical exemption.
“Worse, they deputized school principals to overrule treating physicians about whether a medically fragile child needs an exemption.”
Also remarking on the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case, Michael Kane, national grassroots organizer for CHD and founder of Teachers For Choice, told The Defender:
“This ruling ignores New York State statutory law and allows the governor to legislate through bureaucratic healthcare administrators.
“Allowing a ‘national standard of care’ from the CDC to trump New York State law is an affront to democracy and ironically does not reflect what is best for the health of individual children.”
Gibson noted how several of the families that were parties to the lawsuit were affected by vaccine injuries:
“Some of the children in the lawsuit have already lost a family member (or in one case multiple family members) to proven vaccine death. Others have already suffered severe vaccine injuries themselves.
“All the children have been advised by their licensed physicians to avoid one or more vaccines in the future. Now, unelected bureaucrats are making them get vaccinated again against medical advice if they want to attend any public or private school in the state.”
According to Gibson, the lives of many of the plaintiffs and their families were upended as a result of the state’s new law. She told The Defender:
“These children have been barred from school and services — even online — for almost four years now. Many families had to uproot their lives and move out of state so that their children could get an education.
“I’ve been contacted by other families who could not hold out, and whose disabled children were severely injured when subjected to vaccination against medical advice just to stay in school.”
The New York state legislature changed the rules for vaccination following a measles outbreak in Rockland County in late 2018 and early 2019.
At the start of the outbreak in October 2018, Rockland County Executive Ed Day and Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, the county’s health commissioner, worked with the New York State Department of Health to implement progressively stricter measures to contain the spread.
Day and Ruppert ordered students who had not received measles vaccines and who attended schools that had confirmed measles cases or vaccination rates below a certain threshold to stay home. Those children were later barred from entering public places.
On March 26, 2019, Day issued the Local State of Emergency banning unvaccinated children ages 18 and younger from all places of public assembly, including schools, unless they had a medical exemption or documented serological immunity.
Day then successfully lobbied state lawmakers to repeal what was then New York’s statutory religious exemption for schoolchildren. He said at the time:
“There’s no such thing as a religious exemption. The bottom line here now is that in addition to the fear factor we have, we’ve had babies in ICUs. We’ve had a baby born with measles.
“Let’s do something that was done willingly years ago until people got in the middle, raised approaches and thoughts that were debunked years ago, and now to the direct detriment to the health of other people in the state. It makes no sense. We need this legislation passed . . . to wait is a recipe for medical disaster.”
Day characterized “anti-vaxxers” as “loud, very vocal, also very ignorant,” implying that this included the parents who were invoking religious exemptions for their children in response to the emergency order.
According to Reuters, this is not the first time the Supreme Court has rejected challenges to New York’s tightened rules regarding vaccine exemptions. Last year, it rejected a separate challenge filed on the basis of religious rights violations.
And in November 2022, the Supreme Court refused to strike down New York City’s vaccine mandate for municipal workers.
Gibson told The Defender that while the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case is a setback, further legal actions are planned. She said:
“We will continue to bring legal challenges, but in the meantime, we hope that people will contact their lawmakers and urge them to provide clear guidance to put an end to the Department of Health’s reckless and inhuman policies.
“Our most fundamental right is to protect ourselves and to protect our children from harm. None of us should take these alarming policies lying down.”
