The US Supreme Court has rejected a challenge to federal vaccine mandates imposed to cure the Covid-19 pandemic.
The nation’s highest court found insufficient grounds to take up the suit, dismissing arguments that vaccine mandates violate fundamental principles of medical ethics such as the right to bodily autonomy and informed consent.
Four New Jersey nurses had asked the Supreme Court to overturn the state’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccine requirement.
The justices will not review a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that rejected the nurses’ challenge as moot.
The justices will not review a decision by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that rejected the nurses’ challenge as moot. In the Supreme Court’s list of orders released Nov. 13, the court rejected an appeal in the case, Katie Sczesny, et al. v. Murphy, Governor of New Jersey, et al. The judges did not offer any justification for the case being dismissed.
In early 2022, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy issued an executive order mandating that “unvaccinated covered workers acquire their initial dose of the primary series of a COVID-19 vaccine by January 27 of 2022”.
Also, on February 28 of that year, workers must submit “sufficient evidence” that they have received all their vaccinations. Individuals who do not provide adequate evidence “must be regarded as non-compliant”.
The lawsuit was filed against the governor’s office by nurses Mariette Vitti, Debra Hagen, Jamie Rumfield and Katie Sczesny.
The nurses appealed to the high court on the grounds that the vaccination requirement violated their Fourth Amendment rights, which they claimed include the freedom to refuse a medical procedure and the right to privacy. They also claimed that the rule violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The plaintiffs alleged that while the order allowed religious or medical exemptions, the state “en masse denied religious exemptions to state institutions, claiming that accommodating individuals with religious exemptions would place an ‘undue burden’ on the ‘state because employees with religious objections to COVID-19 injections pose a “threat” to public safety.”
In addition, they asserted that the enforcement mandate “runs afoul of the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions,” which prohibits the government from demanding the relinquishment of a constitutional right in exchange for a privilege.
A U.S. district judge ruled against the nurses the previous year, finding that they “failed to establish probable cause to succeed on the merits of their claim that the executive orders violate their liberty rights under the due process of the Fourteenth Amendment” and “failed to demonstrate immediate and irreparable harm.”
The action was deemed irrelevant by an order issued by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals months after New Jersey’s mandate was struck down. The nurses, however, appealed to the Supreme Court.
In April of this year, Murphy issued an order to repeal the vaccination requirement for healthcare workers. The governor justified this action by arguing that it aligns the state “with recent updates to federal requirements and reflects our different circumstances now, compared to the last few years.”
The US Supreme Court has previously rejected an appeal against vaccination mandates. The court denied a challenge by Missouri and nine other states in 2022 to President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 mandate for federally funded health care facilities. The mandate was subsequently revoked in 2021, coinciding with the conclusion of the public health emergency.
In January 2022, by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court allowed the Biden administration to implement the health worker mandate while lower courts continued to deliberate on its legal merits. Meanwhile, the justices halted the administration’s rule mandating weekly COVID-19 testing or vaccinations for employees at companies with at least 100 workers by a 6-3 vote.
In September, a judge in a separate case in New York City ruled that ten New York City Department of Education employees who were fired for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine should be reinstated with pay. New York State Supreme Court Justice Ralph J. Porzio ruled at the time that the city’s denials of religious accommodations for employees were illegal, arbitrary and capricious.
“This Court sees no rational basis for not allowing unvaccinated classroom teachers to enter an admitted population of primarily unvaccinated students,” Judge Porzio wrote in the ruling. “As such, the decision to summarily deny the classroom teachers among the panel petitioners on the basis of undue hardship, without any further evidence of individualized analysis, is arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable. As such , every classroom teacher among the panel’s petitioners is entitled to a religious exemption from the vaccination mandate.”
Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed in Louisiana poses a major threat to Big Pharma’s “liability shield.” It comes amid growing vaccine injury claims.
“A lawsuit by recipients of the Covid-19 vaccine who allege they were injured by their injections may bring long-awaited changes to how the federal government handles immunization injuries,” writes Bloomberg Law’s Ian Lopez.
“People frustrated by the HHS program designed to compensate them for their injuries are taking their complaints to court,” he continues. “In a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, they say the program is unconstitutional, depriving them of their rights to due process and a jury trial.”
“Lawyers say the move could spur Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services to reform how they handle vaccine injuries, as well as push more people who allege injuries not only to sue the government, but pharmaceutical manufacturers targeted by the program. protects itself from litigation,” the article added.
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