Court OK’s N.Y. Repeal of Religious Exemptions from Vaccination Requirement – Reason

Court OK’s N.Y. Repeal of Religious Exemptions from Vaccination Requirement – Reason
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Excerpt:

An excerpt from the Second Circuit’s long (and, I think, generally correct) decision yesterday in Miller v. McDonald (Judges José Cabranes, Richard Wesley, and Eunice Lee):

In 2019, New York repealed the religious beliefs exemption to its school immunization law. The law now applies to all students attending public, private, or parochial schools, except those who qualify for the law’s medical exemption. Two parents of Amish students, three Amish “community schools,” and an elected representative of all Amish schools in New York sued New York officials … claiming that the school immunization law infringes on their free exercise rights ….

New York maintained [health and religious] exemptions until 2019. During 2018 and 2019, the United States experienced the worst measles outbreak in over twenty-five years; New York was the epicenter. Most cases occurred in communities with clusters of unvaccinated individuals. Following that outbreak, the legislature repealed the religious beliefs exemption while retaining the medical exemption….

A neutral and generally applicable law’s burden on religion is constitutional if the law passes the relatively low hurdle of rational basis review—that the state has chosen a means for addressing a legitimate government interest rationally related to achieving that goal. If a law is not neutral or generally applicable, however, the government must demonstrate that the law satisfies strict scrutiny, which requires the law “to further ‘interests of the highest order’ by means ‘narrowly tailored in pursuit of those interests.'”