NEW YORK (CN) — Three appellate judges illuminated the reasoning behind their recent decision defeating two challenges to New York’s Covid-19 vaccine requirement for healthcare workers.
Nurses and doctors who sued the state saying they should be able to opt out of vaccination on religious grounds failed to show their argument would hold water in court, the Second Circuit panel explained, defending the Empire State's order.
“Faced with an especially contagious variant of the virus in the midst of a pandemic that has now claimed the lives of over 750,000 in the United States and some 55,000 in New York, the State decided as an emergency measure to require vaccination for all employees at healthcare facilities who might become infected and expose others to the virus, to the extent they can be safely vaccinated,” the judges wrote in the 50-page opinion published Thursday.
“This was a reasonable exercise of the State’s power to enact rules to protect the public health,” the ruling stated.
The ruling vacated a previous injunction of the vaccine mandate granted to a group of healthcare workers who filed suit in the Northern District of New York.
Three nurses who filed the other lawsuit in the Eastern District of New York lost their bid for an injunction in the lower court, but the Second Circuit later ordered the state to grant religious vaccine exemptions during the plaintiffs’ appeal. That order was also vacated in the appellate ruling, published on Oct. 29.
New York's vaccine mandate, enacted in September by Governor Kathy Hochul, allows for medical exemptions, but not religious ones.
The plaintiffs argued that the vaccine mandate violated the free exercise clause of the Constitution; was preempted by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act; and contravenes the Fourteenth Amendment, violating the rights to privacy, medical freedom and bodily autonomy.
Those arguments were not likely to succeed, the judges ruled.
“Both this Court and the Supreme Court have consistently recognized that the Constitution embodies no fundamental right that in and of itself would render vaccine requirements imposed in the public interest, in the face of a public health emergency, unconstitutional,” the opinion reads.
In the unsigned opinion, the judges point out that the vaccine mandate doesn’t bar employers from providing reasonable accommodations to employees that remove them from positions covered under the scope of the requirement — practicing telemedicine, for instance.
Plaintiff attorneys argued that telemedicine wasn’t a good enough accommodation in some cases, as in performing surgery or completing a medical residency. But those were not enough to convince the appeals court that the vaccine mandate isn’t in line with discrimination laws.
“Title VII does not require covered entities to provide the accommodation that Plaintiffs prefer — in this case, a blanket religious exemption allowing them to continue working at their current positions unvaccinated,” the opinion reads.
Those claiming religious objection point to the remote connection that the vaccines have to laboratory use of a fetal cell line harvested from aborted fetuses acquired in the 1970s and 1980s.
As attorneys for the state noted in oral arguments, however, the same cell lines were used to develop dozens of common medicines, from Tums and Benadryl to Tylenol and Pepto-Bismol, which stoke little controversy.
U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Sack said he could understand that some people’s religious beliefs would mean they feel they can’t get vaccinated.
“That’s what we're supposed to protect,” he said.
But the Clinton appointee pushed back on the idea that those beliefs may never get in the way of one’s life decisions.
“If you're going to be a martyr, that means, ‘I can’t take this medicine, and therefore I can no longer be a nurse in a New York City hospital,’” Sack said.
Sack, a Bill Clinton appointee, was joined on the panel by U.S. Circuit Judges John Walker Jr., a George H.W. Bush appointee, and Susan Carney, a Barack Obama appointee.
Cameron Atkinson, an attorney for the Long Island-based nurses with the New Haven, Connecticut, firm Pattis & Smith, told Courthouse News following the Second Circuit ruling that he believes the country’s highest court will have the final say, and will come out in favor of his three clients.
“New York’s mandate forces an abominable choice on New York healthcare workers: abandon their faith or lose their careers,” Atkinson wrote. “Diane Bono, Michelle Melendez, and Michelle Synakowski have refused to buy one-way tickets to hell on the hysteria express. They have committed their futures to God’s hands, and we remain optimistic that the United States Supreme Court will strike down New York’s discriminatory mandate as violating the First Amendment.”
Both the Northern and Eastern District cases are remanded to their respective lower courts for further proceedings.
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