In a split decision, a federal appeals court on Friday upheld a controversial pandemic-era law in Connecticut that ended decades-old religious exemptions for vaccination requirements for children.
In a 2-1 decision (pdf), the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan rejected a legal challenge to Connecticut’s Public Act 21-6 (pdf), a hotly contested law adopted in 2021 that repealed non-medical exemptions from immunization requirements for children in schools, colleges, and daycare facilities.
In 2021, U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton dismissed a constitutional challenge to Public Act 21-6 brought by religious rights advocates, including We the Patriots USA Inc., the lead plaintiff.
The groups appealed Judge Arterton’s ruling, culminating in the Manhattan appeals court’s Aug. 4 decision.
The key argument put forward by We the Patriots USA Inc. was that a ban on religious vaccine exemptions violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
Passage of Public Act 21-6 in April 2021 drew protests at the Connecticut state Capitol, with several thousand demonstrators attending, some holding or chanting slogans like “Defend religious liberty” and “Coercion is not consent.”
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The appeals court’s majority opinion focused on the argument that ending religious exemptions for vaccines was a reasonable way to protect public health and safety, citing as justification a decline in the proportion of schoolchildren immunized against contagious diseases in Connecticut, especially measles.
Judges in the majority said that it was exceedingly rare for a court to object to a state’s school vaccination requirement and they didn’t want to “disturb this nearly unanimous consensus.”
“Only one court—state or federal, trial or appellate—has ever found plausible a claim of a constitutional defect in a state’s school vaccination mandate on account of the absence or repeal of a religious exemption,” wrote Judge Denny Chin on behalf of the majority.
The reference to “only one court” relates to a recent decision by U.S. District Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden, who ruled that Mississippi must provide religious exemptions to the state’s childhood vaccine requirement after a lawsuit alleged that health authorities violated the First Amendment.
