MANHATTAN (CN) — Days after it dissolved an injunction that would let them skirt New York's vaccination rules on the basis of religious objection, the Second Circuit heard arguments Wednesday on whether the First Amendment is on their side.
More than 650,000 workers at hospitals and nursing homes in the Empire State had until Monday to get their first vaccine dose as part of a mandate that is among the strictest in the country, providing no option to test weekly rather than get vaccinated and contemplating no special religious dispensation.
The mandate applies to not just medical professionals like doctors and nurses but all employees of a given health care institutions, including food service workers, administrators and cleaners. Employees who refuse the Covid vaccine shots face suspensions and termination. Workers fired for their refusal to be vaccinated are not eligible for unemployment insurance without a doctor-approved request for medical accommodation.
Among several court challenges to the mandate, the Second Circuit held a 26-minute hearing Wednesday in a case led by a group called We The Patriots USA on behalf of two Long Island nurses and a health care worker in Syracuse who say the vaccine against Covid-19 goes against their Christian faith.
Across the religious spectrum, there is near unanimity among major churches and denominations that every person eligible should immunize themselves against the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 4.7 million people around the world as of Wednesday.
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. The Long Island plaintiffs in the case at hand have lobbed the same objection but were denied an injunction in the Eastern District of New York.
As they appeal for a reversal, they are among thousands of unvaccinated health care workers still hanging on to their jobs because of an injunction secured through a separate federal lawsuit in Utica. These cases are unrelated to yet another class of challenges that erupted from New York City's mandate governing municipal workers. The city's mandate is set to take effect on Oct. 4 after the Second Circuit dissolved an injunction initially awarded to a group of vaccine-averse teachers.
For the nurses and others involved in the Long Island case, their attorney told the federal appeals court Wednesday, “it’s only a matter of time” until they are fired on a rolling basis for refusing to get the Covid-19 vaccine.
“My hope would be that if it this court issued an injunction, that it would carry the necessary weight to curb the damage that governor Hochul is doing by her public comments,” said Cameron Atkinson, who is with the New Haven, Connecticut, firm Pattis & Smith.
The statements by Governor Kathy Hochul that Atkinson described occurred last weekend while Hochul told a crowd at Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn to treat the Covid jab as a gift “from God to us.”
“We are not through this pandemic,” Hochul said on Sunday, wearing a gold necklace spelling out the word “Vaxed.” “I wished we were but I prayed a lot to God during this time and you know what — God did answer our prayers. He made the smartest men and women, the scientists, the doctors, the researchers — he made them come up with a vaccine."
Deputy New York Solicitor General Steven Wu defended the state’s vaccine mandate on public interest grounds at Wednesday’s hearing.
“What this department was responding to was the very serious concern raised by the delta variant, which is far more transmissible than previous variants, has really swamped the diagnoses that are taking place across the state,” Wu told the appeals panel. “And this order was issued to ensure the health care workers in these facilities who are dealing with particularly vulnerable populations will be protected themselves and will not themselves be a vector for further spread in these facilities.”
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