Supreme Court rejects legal battle over New York's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers

Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday turned away a legal battle involving New York's now-repealed mandate for healthcare workers to receive the COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic.

The dispute arose after the New York Department of Health issued an emergency rule in 2021 that required all licensed healthcare workers to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to address the spread of the virus in medical facilities and nursing homes. State officials said the rule allowed healthcare employers to accommodate religious exemptions in certain ways, but did not permit blanket exemptions from the vaccine mandate.

The vaccine requirement was repealed as of October 2023 after the Biden administration ended the federal COVID-19 public health emergency.

A group of employees at New York healthcare facilities sought religious exemptions from the vaccine mandate, arguing that their sincerely held religious beliefs prevented them from receiving the COVID-19 shots. But their employers rejected the workers' requests for religious accommodations and fired them.

They then filed a lawsuit against Gov. Kathy Hochul and other state officials, as well as their employers — New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System, Trinity Health and Westchester Medical Center Advanced Physician Services.

The workers, who are unnamed in court papers, argued that their employers' refusal to grant exemptions violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination because of religion and requires employers to make religious accommodations unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on their business.

They also said that Title VII trumps the state's vaccination mandate.

A federal district court tossed out the case, and an appeals court upheld that decision.

The workers appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit allows state rules to supersede Title VII's requirements that employers provide religious accommodations. 

"State laws that are contrary to federal nondiscrimination laws must yield to the demands of federal law," they wrote in a filing with the Supreme Court.

The former healthcare workers argued New York's COVID-19 vaccine mandate sanctioned the "blanket rejection" of all requests for religious accommodations under Title VII regarding the shots, regardless of whether they were reasonable or whether the accommodations could be provided without undue hardship.

The 2nd Circuit, they said, "permitted compliance with contrary state laws to excuse noncompliance with Title VII. This cannot be the law, and the Nation's Charter demands a different outcome."

But the healthcare facilities argued that state law did not forbid employers from providing any religious accommodation, only "complete exemptions" on religious grounds.

The rule "did not prohibit the healthcare respondents from granting any accommodation whatsoever to petitioners. It merely prohibited the particular accommodation on which petitioners insisted: namely, a complete exemption," they wrote in a Supreme Court filing.

Hochul and other state officials, meanwhile, told the high court that the state's vaccine rule doesn't prohibit all religious accommodations. Instead, it allowed employers to offer options that moved unvaccinated workers into roles that wouldn't expose personnel, patients or nursing home residents to COVID-19 if they were infected.

"The rule thus allowed religious accommodations, albeit not petitioners' preferred accommodation, in accordance with Title VII," they argued in a filing. "When the rule's scope is properly understood, this case does not present any question about the validity of a state law that, unlike the rule here, prohibits employers from providing any religious accommodations whatsoever."