Federal Court Strikes Down Mississippi Prohibition on Religious Vaccine Exemptions
The State of Mississippi must now afford its residents a religious exemption against having to vaccinate their children as a requirement to attend school.
On April 17, 2023, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) secured a historic ruling from a federal court. The court ruled a Mississippi law mandating childhood vaccines for enrolling school children unconstitutional. The law disallowed religious exemptions for childhood vaccinations. Children in Mississippi must obtain childhood vaccines before school enrollment. Violation of the vaccine requirement carried criminal penalties. The state statute allowed for medical exemptions but disallowed religious exemptions for the vaccine requirement. The federal district court issued an injunction preventing the enforcement of the law. The State of Mississippi must now afford its residents a religious exemption against having to vaccinate their children as a requirement to attend school.
The State of Mississippi statute made an unconstitutional value judgment that secular (i.e., medical) motivations for opting out of compulsory immunization are permitted but that religious grounds are not. That distinction unconstitutionally discriminates against a citizen's sincerely held religious beliefs. The state must have a compelling reason to discriminate against someone based on his religious beliefs. The state could not make that showing.
The state argued that it had an interest in stopping the spread of infectious diseases, but it cannot discriminate against one’s religious beliefs to accomplish that goal. The state argues that it wants to prevent the exposure of its vaccinated children to unvaccinated children. But the law does not do that because unvaccinated children with medical exemptions are not excluded from school. Those unvaccinated children would be mingling with the vaccinated children. Furthermore, teachers, administrators, and other adults in the schools are not required to be vaccinated; they have regular contact with the vaccinated children. Only those unvaccinated children with religious objections to vaccination are prohibited from entering the schools. That is unconstitutional religious discrimination.
Finally, the argument that unvaccinated children threaten vaccinated children with infection implicitly acknowledges that the vaccines do not work. If the vaccines worked to protect the vaccinated person, he should not care whether another is vaccinated.
For more information about religious vaccine exemptions, read: Vaccine Danger Quackery and Sin