Connecticut federal appeals court is latest to uphold vaccine mandate without religious exemption

Judges find no evidence that lawmakers acted out of hostility to believers

Photo by Markus Spiske; licensed by Unsplash.

Alarmed by the increasing number of unvaccinated children attending schools, health officials in Connecticut convinced the Legislature in 2021 to end religious exemptions to the state’s law mandating vaccinations for students. An Idaho-based “patriot” organization and others quickly filed a lawsuit to retain the religious exemption. After losing in federal courts twice — once each at the trial and appellate levels — the vaccine opponents now say they’ll take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Their fight is probably an uphill one, however: The high court typically doesn’t rule on constitutional questions unless there are disagreements among federal courts in how to interpret the law. And so far, federal courts have been unanimous in ruling that the First Amendment doesn’t require religious exceptions to school vaccination mandates.

In fact, of all the court cases on this specific issue, only one court at any level has found that state religious exemptions are required for a school vaccine mandate. A low-level state court in Mississippi made that ruling earlier this year.

Because nearly all states provide a religious exemption, and some of those without an exemption have made allowances for students who were unvaccinated when the mandate laws were changed, the specific issue hasn’t been litigated in court all that often. Only one state, West Virginia, has never had a religious exemption for vaccine mandates. The only states other than Connecticut that used to offer a religious exemption but no longer do are Mississippi, California, Maine and New York. The remaining 44 states provide a exemptions for religious belief or for personal beliefs that can include religion.

The most recent court decision was made by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit earlier this month in the case of We The Patriots USA, Inc. et al. v. Conn. Office of Early Childhood Dev. et al. Judges Pierre Leval and Denny Chin sided with Connecticut in upholding the vaccine mandate, while Joseph Bianco sided with the plaintiffs on the main constitutional question. Leval and Chin were appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively, while Bianco was appointed by President Trump.

According to the majority opinion, during the 2012-13 school year, 97.1 percent of the Connecticut’s kindergartners had received the full course of vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). By the 2019 school year, however, that percentage had fallen to 96.2 percent. That may not sound like a significant decline, but the Centers for Disease Control recommends an MMR vaccination rate of at least 95 percent to provide community immunity, meaning that even those who are not vaccinated receive protection because of the vaccines limit spread of the disease.

Although the statewide average was above 95 percent, the unvaccinated students were unevenly distributed. In the 2019-20 school year, 22 percent of the schools had vaccination rates below the threshold, and the number of religious vaccinations has been increasing.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include We The Patriots USA and CT Freedom Alliance, both organizations that object to what they see are government overreach. Three individual plaintiffs also joined in the lawsuit; the court said that while the three objected to the vaccine mandate for different reasons, all of them objected to the use of vaccines that used cell lines from aborted fetuses during research and development. The three come from different religions: Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and Islam. (None of the three reject vaccines for their adherents, so presumably the plaintiffs’ objections were based on their personal intepretation of their religious traditions.)

In upholding Connecticut’s repeal of the religious exemption, the appeals court pointed to a series of decisions that upheld vaccine mandates in general as well as a variety of court decisions that have upheld restrictions against religious practice that were applied in a neutral manner.

The appeals court also pointed out that the Legislature had made some allowances for those affected by the change, such as including a grandfathering provision that would allow students enrolled while the exemption was in place to continue attending. The Legislature also made it slightly easier to get a medical exemption.

“The record contains no indication the legislature rejected [proposals of religious objectors] out of hostility to religion, rather than for reasons of health and safety,” the court said.

In his dissent, Bianco called for sending the dispute back to the lower court for further review. He said more facts are needed to determine whether the exemption repeal met constitutional standards.