WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court Tuesday dealt a blow to a nurse seeking to skirt a New Mexico Covid-19 vaccine mandate after doing her own research on the mRNA vaccines.
Jennifer Blackford asked the high court for an injunction to block a New Mexico public health order that requires health care, congregate, and penal facility workers to be vaccinated.
Justice Neil Gorsuch denied the application without comment. Gorsuch recently wrote a scathing dissent when the court denied relief to health care workers in New York seeking religious exemptions.
Evoking comparisons to the Revolutionary War and Japanese internment camps, Blackford’s brief claims the order violates bodily integrity and contributes to the destruction of liberty.
“Not since the Japanese internment camps that so darkly cloud our modern history, set out by President Franklin Roosevelt and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States does anything resembling the punitive tyrannical efforts contained in the public health orders at issue in this case even remotely arrive on the horizon of our American Liberty,” the brief states.
New Mexico issued its vaccine mandate for health care workers in August. The order required workers to receive their first dose within 10 days of the mandate’s effective date or be fired. Blackford refused the vaccine based on her experience as a nurse and her own independent research.
“Jennifer Blackford, as well as many others similarly situated is a nurse, who with 10 years of medical training, along with her own independent research, is opposed to receiving the mRNA covid shots and was required to be terminated from her employment in order for her employer to be lawfully compliant with orders that are based off arbitrary and capacious data,” the brief states.
Blackford was previously denied relief from a district court and the Tenth Circuit.
The court has denied similar applications that have come before it seeking relief against vaccine mandates from health care workers. This week, the court received an onslaught of applications fighting President Joe Biden’s vaccine or test mandate for large companies.
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