Religious vaccine exemption stays for New York healthcare workers

New York healthcare workers will be able to seek religious exemptions from a statewide COVID-19 vaccine mandate as a lawsuit challenging the requirement proceeds, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

Judge David Hurd in Utica had issued a temporary restraining order a month ago after 17 doctors, nurses and other health professionals claimed in a lawsuit that their rights would be violated with a vaccine mandate that disallowed the exemptions.

Hurd's preliminary injunction Tuesday means New York will continue to be barred from enforcing any requirement that employers deny religious exemptions. 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she will fight the decision in court "to keep New Yorkers safe."

"My responsibility as governor is to protect the people of this state, and requiring healthcare workers to get vaccinated accomplishes that," she said in a prepared statement.

The state has not provided information on the total number of workers who have sought religious exemptions.

Hurd wrote that the healthcare workers suing the state were likely to succeed on the merits of their constitutional claim. The question presented in this case, Hurd wrote, is whether the mandate "conflicts with plaintiffs' and other individuals' federally protected right to seek a religious accommodation from their individual employers. The answer to this question is clearly yes."

"This is clearly just a ridiculous government overreach," said Christopher Ferrara, the Thomas More Society special counsel who represented the plaintiffs. "You can't do this to people. You can't call them heroes one day and then throw them out on the sidewalk the next day."

Hochul's administration began requiring workers at hospitals and nursing homes to be vaccinated on Sept. 27 and more recently expanded the requirement to include workers at assisted living homes, hospice care, treatment centers and home health aides.

The plaintiffs, all Christians, oppose as a matter of religious conviction any medical cooperation in abortion, including the use of vaccines linked to fetal cell lines in testing, development or production, according to court papers.

Several types of cell lines created decades ago using fetal tissue exist and are widely used in medical manufacturing, but the cells in them today are clones of the early cells, not the original tissue.

The COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is produced by using an adenovirus that is grown using retinal cells that trace to a fetus from 1985, according to the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a January statement that "abortion-derived" cell lines were used to test the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines but not in their development or production.

Hurd also allowed the plaintiffs to keep their identities private by using pseudonyms such as "Dr. A." and "Nurse J." The plaintiffs said they wanted to proceed anonymously because they feared the risk of ostracization or retaliation.