Your legal reading for the day

On Wednesday, January 7, a US Second Circuit Court decision affirmed that New York students have to be vaccinated within two weeks of entering public school.

The plaintiffs “argued that the statutory vaccination requirement, which is subject to medical and religious exemptions, violates their substantive due process rights, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Ninth Amendment, and both state and municipal law.”

One of the plaintiffs, Dina Check, testified that she is Catholic and stated, “How I treat my daughter’s health and her well-being is strictly by the word of God.” I don’t know a single Catholic who would say this; Catholics typically aren’t anti-medicine (with a few notable exceptions, like contraception). She even said this herself – she “testified that she did not know of any tenets of Catholicism that prohibited vaccinations.” She claimed that her child had had adverse reactions to vaccinations before, and that she asked God for guidance and protection. (The Almighty was unavailable for comment.)

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