A federal appeals court has upheld the religious-exemption ban pertaining to New York’sCOVID-19 vaccine mandate for medical workers.
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals late Friday issued a ruling that allowed enforcement of the vaccine mandate against medical workers claiming a religious exemption.
The order has had far-reaching implications for thousands of health care workers who requested religious exemptions to avoid getting shots. Many of them have been placed on suspension or allowed to keep working with various safety measures, such as testing and mask wearing, pending the outcome of the court battle.
The appeals panel overturned a prior order by U.S. District Judge David Hurd of Utica, who granted a preliminary injunction temporarily barring enforcement of the vaccine mandate for those claiming religious exemptions.
Hurd’s order was in response to a lawsuit filed by 17 Catholic and Baptist medical workers that claimed removal of the religious exemptions was unconstitutional.
The lawsuit argued in part that the vaccine mandate violated federal laws that require employers to provide reasonable accommodations to workers’ religious beliefs. It noted the workers in the case opposed taking the shots due to the vaccines’ connections to aborted fetal cells, court records show.
None of the three available vaccines contain fetal cell tissue, though the Johnson & Johnson vaccine used laboratory grown cells that have roots dating back to fetal cells from decades ago, according to the UCLA Health system. Pfizer and Moderna used similar lab-grown cells while testing their vaccines.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who implemented the vaccine mandate she inherited from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, described the appeals court ruling as an affirmation of her pandemic battle plan.
Hochul noted she “pledged as governor to battle this pandemic and take bold action to protect the health of all New Yorkers.”
“I commend the Second Circuit’s findings affirming our first-in-the-nation vaccine mandate, and I will continue to do everything in my power to keep New Yorkers safe,” she added in a statement.