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Unredacted internal emails obtained after a three-year legal battle may reshape ongoing lawsuits over New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates, according to attorneys who spoke on “Good Morning, CHD” this week.
The records, obtained through New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), show top city officials and government lawyers working together behind the scenes to push back on religious exemption requests, privately dismissing workers’ beliefs while building arguments to help arbitrators deny them.
Attorney Jimmy Wagner, who led the records fight, said the documents expose a “smoking gun.”
In the lawsuits over the documents, the unredacted versions were visible to everyone in the courtroom except the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Wagner said. City lawyers knew exactly what the emails contained while making arguments that directly contradicted them.
“They’re literally arguing out of both sides of their mouth,” Wagner said.
The government attorneys claimed they were acting with integrity and protecting religious rights. Yet “in the same breath, they have this … smoking gun piece of evidence that shows the city from the beginning … believed that anyone making a religious accommodation request, especially as it was associated to abortion, it was BS. That’s their language — ‘BS,’ in capital letters,” he said.
‘It took three years to have the documents unredacted’
Wagner began filing FOIL requests in 2021. He targeted every “government agency in the city of New York who had anything to do with the imposition of the vaccine mandate,” he said.
The city produced “thousands and thousands of documents,” but key emails were heavily redacted — sometimes entirely.
“They left me the ‘to’ the ‘from’ and then everything — nine-page emails — redacted,” Wagner said.
In 2023, after nearly a year of unsuccessful negotiations, Wagner sued. A lower court upheld the redactions, even after privately reviewing the full, unredacted documents.
Wagner appealed and won. He obtained the full records two weeks ago. “It took three years to have the documents unredacted,” he told The Defender.
Emails refer to religious exemptions as ‘BS’
At the center of the dispute is a Sept. 20, 2021, email from Steven Banks, then first deputy commissioner and general counsel for the New York City Office of Labor Relations.
As religious exemption requests surged among United Federation of Teachers (UFT) members, Banks asked city health officials to help counter their claims.
“It would be very very helpful if we could get a document signed off on by a City Doctor that essentially makes the argument as to why this is BS,” he wrote.
Banks noted that “upwards of 2/3 of the exemption requests are religious not medical.” He requested a “point by point analysis” to rebut objections tied to abortion or animal products used in vaccine development.
He said the document would be used in arbitration and vetted with the UFT. Dr. Dave Chokshi, then the health commissioner of New York City, and Dr. Jay Varma, then the city’s COVID-19 response coordinator, were included in the email chain.
Officials pushed unverified claims into arbitration memo
Emails show officials moving quickly to produce the document for arbitration.
“We are moving fast here on negotiations and hearings on exemptions so wanting to wrap this up today,” Jackie Bray of the city’s COVID-19 Test & Trace Corps wrote on Sept. 21, 2021.
Bray also discussed requiring employees seeking religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine to prove they had consistently avoided all medications allegedly linked to fetal cell lines, citing an online blog.
Within days, officials circulated revisions and discussed who would sign the document.
At 10:19 p.m. on Sept. 21, 2021, Nellie Afshar of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene wrote, “Here is latest version of the memo – includes addition of the list of meds and animal products. For awareness, we have not been able to verify the list of meds.”
Despite that admission, Chokshi signed off on the memo at 8:13 a.m. on Sept. 22, 2021, writing, “Thanks — looks good.”
The finalized memo — formatted like a letter but never signed — listed common medications and claimed they were developed using fetal cell lines.
“Examples of over-the-counter pain medications that have used fetal cell lines include Tylenol, Advil, Aspirin, Aleve, Sudafed, Benadryl, Claritin, Tums, Mucinex, Ex-Lax, and Pepto Bismol,” it said.
The memo also cited religious authority.
“The Catholic Church has issued a clear statement that Roman Catholics can in good faith receive COVID-19 vaccines that use fetal cell lines in development,” according to the memo.
‘They fired thousands of people based on something they knew was a lie’
Wagner said the document was not an independent medical opinion.
It “wasn’t an honest document,” but one “created by lawyers … then presented to the arbitrator.” Opposing parties were not given a chance to submit their own expert evidence, Wagner said.
“It’s beyond shocking,” he added.
“It’s formatted like a letter. But at the end, there’s no signature,” Wagner said. “So even this lawyer-litigated, created document they presented as a letter from a doctor, the doctors that work for the city wouldn’t even sign off on it.”
The lack of a signature provided “intentional plausible deniability,” he told The Defender.
“How many of the people were denied their religious accommodations for what I believe were totally unconstitutional religious reasons?” he asked.
Attorney Sujata Gibson said the claims about medications were not only unverified internally but also later contradicted.
Other attorneys contacted pharmaceutical companies and asked, “‘Did you bring them to market with any kind of fetal cell line testing?’ And they said, ‘No, absolutely not,’” Gibson said.
“They fired thousands of people … for failing to say that they also didn’t take Tylenol. … This email chain shows they had no basis for that,” Gibson said. “Just let that sink in. … They fired thousands of people based on something they knew was a lie.”
‘The highest level officials’ were involved
Attorneys said the emails could undercut prior rulings that treated the city’s exemption process as neutral.
The neutrality issue was central in Kane v. City of New York, filed in 2021 after then-Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed vaccine mandates on city employees.
At the time, courts found little evidence of citywide bias beyond public statements.
As Children’s Health Defense Director of Advocacy Michael Kane recounted, de Blasio said in September 2021 that only certain groups — Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with “a history” of religious opposition — would receive exemptions.
Judge Valerie Caproni later characterized that as only de Blasio’s opinion, saying there was no evidence of “even a whiff” of animus toward religion.
Gibson said the newly unredacted emails change that analysis.
“In First Amendment law, you have to show that there was a lack of neutrality,” she said. “Now we get this smoking gun chain … the highest level officials … calling people’s religious beliefs BS [and] scheming ways to get information to the arbitrators to get them denied.”
The emails show direct involvement by top officials, including the health commissioner, in shaping exemption outcomes, according to Gibson.
“There’s no neutrality here,” she said. “The commissioner himself was involved, the one who issued the mandate. This is not a neutral mandate.”
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Emails expose ‘huge constitutional problem’
Gibson also raised Establishment Clause concerns, saying government officials crossed a constitutional line by weighing in on religious questions.
“Government officials … cannot lend their power to a religious dispute,” she said.
She pointed to divisions within the Catholic Church as an example of why such matters must be left to individual conscience. She said:
“There’s this split in the Catholic Church. Many Catholics, including Pope Francis, felt, ‘Yes, there’s this connection to abortion. But, you know, I feel like other concerns override it. I’ve consulted my religious conscience. I prayed, and I feel like I can take it.’ … Other Catholics said, ‘We don’t feel the same way.’ And everybody agreed that Catholics needed to consult their own religious conscience over the issue.”
Gibson said the city’s involvement went beyond policy guidance, directly influencing how religious questions were resolved.
“When you have the commissioner of health … say there is no religious conflict and telling arbitrators to say that to people, that’s a huge constitutional problem,” she said.
“I think this is the biggest Establishment Clause violation that we have seen in modern decades,” she added.
‘The cover-up is just as bad as the crime’
The revelations come after the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2025 declined to hear an appeal from fired unvaccinated New York City educators, leaving lower court rulings in place.
Gibson said the new evidence could reopen litigation.
“The Kane case isn’t done. … I do think this is grounds to reopen that,” she said, noting that “hundreds of cases” remain pending.
Wagner, who credited FOIL attorney Joseph Aron for helping secure the documents, said the emails highlight how little access attorneys had to evidence at the time.
“In 2021, 2022, they were not letting us, as attorneys, get any discovery,” he said. “Now, in 2026, it’s clear in my mind the cover-up is just as bad as the crime.”
Watch the ‘Good Morning, CHD’ episode here:
Related articles in The Defender
- New York Teachers Vow to Keep Fighting After Supreme Court Turns Down Religious Exemptions Case
- Two Judges Step Down From New York COVID Vaccine Mandates Lawsuit Over Financial Conflicts of Interest, Third Judge Will Stay
- Unvaccinated Teachers, Still Out of Work, File New Lawsuit Against New York City
- Fingerprints of Unvaccinated NYC Teachers Sent to FBI, Affidavit Says
