Second Circuit eradicates Amish fight over NY school vaccination mandate

MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York State law requiring Amish students to receive vaccinations does not violate those students’ constitutional rights, a Second Circuit panel ruled Monday.

The case, which the panel heard this past November, had been brought by three Amish community schools that were fined in 2019 for failing to comply with state-mandated school vaccinations.

The schools and Amish parents argued their First and 14th Amendment rights had been violated, as many Amish seek to live separately from the modern world and abhor vaccines.

New York had since 1966 allowed exemptions from mandatory school immunization for medical reasons or sincerely held religious objections. However, following a nationwide measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019, the Legislature removed those exemptions, joining four other states to prohibit any kind of nonmedical exemption.

Shortly after the new rule was passed, the Dygert Road School, Pleasant View school, and Shady Lane school were fined tens of thousands of dollars each for violating state law after they refused to comply with the law. The schools and several board members sued the state for an injunction.

In 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Wolford, a Barack Obama appointee, dismissed the complaint. She found the facts of the New York case were similar to another complaint heard in Connecticut that also had been thrown out on a finding of no constitutional violations.

In a 28-page ruling, the trio of Second Circuit judges upheld Wolford’s dismissal, citing the Connecticut case and also finding the New York law did not run afoul of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling from the 1970s that prohibited compulsory education of Amish children past middle school.

The court found the analogy to the Wisconsin v. Yoder case incongruous, noting New York’s vaccine rule would not “forcibly remove Amish children from their community at the expense of the Amish faith or the Amish way of life.”

The court noted that medical exemptions are typically tailored to a specific immunization, while religious exemptions apply to all vaccines. “The religious exemption’s sweep had a far greater ability to undermine the State’s interest in preventing the spready of disease,” the court said in its per curiam opinion.

Further, allowing religious exemptions caused “clusters of low vaccination rates and an inability to achieve herd immunity in certain communities,” the court wrote.

Attorney Shannon Denmark of Lehotsky Keller Cohn, who represented the Amish schools and families, did not respond to an email seeking comment by press time. An email seeking comment from the New York State solicitor general attorney who argued before the Second Circuit also was not immediately returned.

The panel included U.S. Circuit Judges Jose Cabranes, a Bill Clinton appointee, Eunice Lee, a Joe Biden appointee, and Richard Wesley, a George W. Bush appointee.

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