Conservative members of the Supreme Court have sided against a group of healthcare workers in Maine who were fighting a vaccine mandate in the state.
The mandate took effect on Friday and the court rejected the emergency appeal of the workers, with Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett siding with the defendants, Fox News reported.
Now the workers at the state’s hospitals and nursing homes are at risk of becoming unemployed if they do not get the vaccine and there are no religious exemptions.
Three conservative justices, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented from the majority 6 – 3 decision, saying that they would have sided with the healthcare workers.
“This case presents an important constitutional question, a serious error, and an irreparable injury,” Justice Gorsuch said. “Where many other States have adopted religious exemptions, Maine has charted a different course. There, healthcare workers who have served on the front line of a pandemic for the last 18 months are now being fired and their practices shuttered. All for adhering to their constitutionally protected religious beliefs.”
“Their plight is worthy of our attention,” he said. “I would grant relief.”
In a statement agreeing with the court’s unwillingness to involve itself in the matter, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said the court has “discretionary judgment” on whether to take emergency appeals like this and claimed the court was being asked to “grant extraordinary relief.”
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills ordered Maine’s vaccine requirement. A federal judge in Maine declined to stop the mandate, concluding that a lawsuit was unlikely to succeed. The Oct. 13 decision prompted a flurry of appeals that landed, for a second time, in the Supreme Court.
The Liberty Counsel, which filed the lawsuit, claimed to be representing more than 2,000 health care workers who don’t want to be forcibly vaccinated.
In August, Barrett denied an appeal from students at Indiana University to block the school’s vaccine mandate.
Justice Barrett had jurisdiction over the appeals court in the case and made the decision on her own, Fox News reported.
Indiana University told students and employees that they are required to be vaccinated by the start of the fall term on August 23. Students who don’t comply will have their registration canceled, and employees who don’t comply will lose their jobs.
A three-judge federal appeals court panel, including two judges appointed by former President Donald Trump, was one of two lower courts to side with Indiana University and allow it to require vaccinations. The plan announced in May requires roughly 90,000 students and 40,000 employees on seven campuses to receive COVID-19 vaccinations for the fall semester.
In July, an Indiana district court judge sided with the university in declining to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the vaccine mandate. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit voted 3-0 to uphold the decision earlier this week. Two of the three appellate judges were appointed by Trump and the third by former President Ronald Reagan.
“Students are facing IU’s imminent demand that they relinquish their constitutional rights in order to start school this fall,” an attorney for the students, James Bopp, said. “IU is coercing students to give up their rights to bodily integrity, autonomy, and of medical treatment choice in exchange for the discretionary benefit of matriculating at IU.”
“The risk of serious morbidity and mortality from COVID for those under 30 is close to zero,” he said. “The known and unknown risks associated with COVID vaccines, particularly in those under 30, outweigh the risks to that population from the disease itself.”
“‘Protection of others’ does not relieve our society from the central canon of medical ethics requiring voluntary and informed consent,” he said.
Prior to the case reaching Justice Barrett, lower courts ruled against the students, citing a ruling from 1905 that said schools could require a smallpox vaccine.
A panel of Republican-appointed judges on the 7th Circuit court of appeals said that vaccination requirements “have been common in this nation” and said that the school’s policies have exemptions for those with religious reasons for not wanting the vaccines or who have medical issues.
“These plaintiffs just need to wear a mask and be tested, requirements that are not constitutionally problematic,” the judges said. They said that students who did not want to adhere to the vaccination requirements could “go elsewhere.”
“Each university may decide what is necessary to keep other students safe in a congregate setting,” Judge Frank Easterbrook of the 7th Circuit said. “Vaccinations protect not only the vaccinated persons but also those who come in contact with them, and at a university close contact is inevitable.”
“A university will have trouble operating when each student fears that everyone else may be spreading diseases,” the judges said. “Few people want to return to remote education – and we do not think that the Constitution forces the distance-learning approach on a university that believes vaccination (or masks and frequent testing of the unvaccinated) will make in-person operations safe enough.”