by Tom Hals
(Reuters) – A US judge ruled on Tuesday that the State of New York cannot make the vaccine mandatory for health professionals without allowing exception requests for religious reasons.
District Judge David Hurd’s decision in Albany, New York, prevents the state from interfering with religious requests for exceptions.
Seventeen workers sued the state for the requirement, alleging that their employer revoked a request for an exception or refused to consider it because of the state’s emergency request for vaccines, which was announced on 26 August.
The ruling offers a test run as vaccine opponents prepare to fight plans soon to be unveiled by the Biden administration to extend vaccine mandates to tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans.
On Aug. 26, the New York Department of Health ordered health workers to be vaccinated by Sept. 27, and the ordinance did not allow for the usual exceptions for religious reasons.
The plan was legally challenged by a group of industry workers who said they were opposed to Covid-19 vaccines as they would have been developed from cells from aborted fetuses. The workers sued using pseudonyms because they feared being defamed in the press and because of sensitive information shared in the process.
Officials argued that the state and healthcare companies were treating those with religious motives against vaccines less favorably, violating the equal protection clause of the US Constitution.
(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware and Nate Raymond in Boston)
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