On June 30, 2026, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a group of Amish families for the second time upholding New York state’s elimination of the religious exemption to school vaccine requirements. The families now face more than $118,000 in fines for noncompliance with the state’s mandate.1
New York legislatures voted to eliminate the religious exemption in 2019 after an alleged measles outbreak centered in Rockland County among the Orthodox Jewish community. New York is now one of five states that does not permit religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements. The other states are California, Connecticut, Maine and West Virginia.
The Amish Families Filed Suit in 2023
On June 2, 2023, Amish parents and school leaders filed a lawsuit, Miller v. McDonald, against the New York State Department of Health and the New York State Education Department, alleging that the elimination of the religious exemption violated the U.S. Constitution.2
The Supreme Court Sent the Case Back in December 2025
This was not the first time the Second Circuit addressed this case. In December 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Second Circuit’s earlier ruling and directed the court to reconsider the case in light of its decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor.3 4
Attorney Sujata Gibson, who partners with Children’s Health Defense,5 optimistically said:
It means we’re almost certainly getting the religious exemption back, not only in New York, but across the country.6
Mahmoud v. Taylor arose from a school district in Montgomery County, Maryland that required students to use books depicting same-sex relationships without allowing parents the opportunity to opt their children out of this lesson. The Supreme Court held that denying parents the option of opting out violated the free exercise of religion as set forth in the First Amendment.7 The decision broadly expanded the exception to the standard set out in Employment Division v. Smith,8 that the Court first recognized in Wisconsin v. Yoder.9
Yoder held that even a neutral and generally applicable compulsory education law could not override Amish parents’ religious objection to sending their children to high school. After Mahmoud, that exception applies broadly to any school policy that interferes with parental religious exercise.
The Second Circuit found the New York vaccine law to be a different kind of burden than set forth in Yoder. The court wrote that the law “does not regulate what children are taught, does not require them to affirm any belief, does not expose them to state-selected instruction contrary to their parents’ faith, and does not enlist school officials to displace parental religious formation.” The burden, the court held, “may be serious, but it is not the kind of state interference with a child’s religious development that triggered strict scrutiny in Yoder or Mahmoud.”10
Court Finds Vaccine Mandate Does Not Trigger Strict Scrutiny
On remand, the Second Circuit again found in favor of New York. The panel held that New York’s school vaccine law is neutral and generally applicable and that Mahmoud v. Taylor did not change that outcome. Under Employment Division v. Smith, a law that is neutral in its purpose and applies equally to everyone does not violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment even if it incidentally burdens religion. Such a law need only satisfy rational basis review, the lowest constitutional standard. The rational basis test is lenient and permits any conceivable rational based decision to survive. The court held that the law “is neutral on its face” and “does not target or affirmatively prohibit religious practices.”11
The Amish families argued the law is not neutral because New York still permits medical exemptions while refusing religious ones. The court rejected that argument. It found the medical exemption “meaningfully different” because it requires specific documentation, must be renewed annually, and applies only to certain vaccines.12
Attorneys Call for Supreme Court Review
Leslie Manookian, president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF), and other attorneys have argued for taking state cases denying the religious exemption to the U.S. Supreme Court. Manookian said,
If the court does rule in favor of religious exemptions to vaccines, unless there is some caveat to the ruling, a Supreme Court ruling would be binding nationwide and thereby eliminate state action to remove religious exemptions.13
The issue with this argument is that a negative ruling would also be binding nationwide and there is a risk that it could effectively lead to the elimination of religious vaccine exemption in many—or all—states. Until there is an end to vaccine mandates, using the court system in an attempt to preserve the human right to medical risk-taking comes with real risk.
The Supreme Court Is Not the Answer
One doesn’t have to look far to see the dangers of relying on the court system when fighting for medical freedom. In 1905 when Pastor Henning Jacobson and his son refused the smallpox vaccine after suffering previous severe reactions, their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court for the right to decline the vaccine and not be required to pay a small fine led to a seminal ruling that has been called “the most important judicial decision in public health.”14
Since then, the Supreme Court decision in Jacobson v Massachusetts has been invoked in more than a century of court cases to justify enforcement of state mandatory vaccine laws across the country. Many of the cases challenging vaccine mandates have been lost in lower courts citing this seminal high court ruling at the turn of the 20th century, which found that the state’s interest in protecting the public health and safety can override individual liberty, including religious freedom.15
In Jacobson, the Supreme Court majority set forth that it is…
“the duty of the constituted authorities to keep in view the welfare, comfort, and safety of the many, and not permit the interest of the many to be subordinated to the wishes or convenience of the few.”16
As Barabra Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center has astutely pointed out, the utilitarian rationale used in the Jacobson ruling justified violating autonomy and religious liberty for what the court defined as “the greater good,” a precedent that led to disastrous consequences:
What the U.S. Supreme Court did in Jacobson v. Massachusetts was to codify the utilitarian rationale into U.S. law so government officials could use it to make public health policy. But the morally bankrupt core of utilitarianism was revealed in 1927, when Chief Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and his colleagues used Jacobson v. Massachusetts to endorse the practice eugenics, an idea that Hitler took and ran with during the Holocaust.17
The current and past justices serving on the U.S. Supreme Court have given very little indication that they would be willing to overturn the pivotal 1905 Jacobson decision that has underpinned U.S. public health law for more than century. To have the utilitarian Jacobson decision reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in the 21st century could deal a fatal blow to medical freedom in America with repercussions that could last another 120 years.
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Click here to view References:1 Miller v. McDonald, No. 24-681 (2d Cir. June 30, 2026).
2 Ibid.
3 U.S. Supreme Court. Order, Miller v. McDonald, No. 25-133. Dec. 8, 2025.
4 Hendler C. Supreme Court Revives Religious Exemption in NY Amish Student Case. The Vaccine Reaction Dec. 22, 2025.
5 Children’s Health Defense. Sujata Gibson.
6 Burdick S. ‘Checkmate’: U.S. Supreme Court Delivers Huge Win for Religious Exemptions. The Defender, Children’s Health Defense Dec. 8, 2025.
7 Mahmoud v. Taylor, 145 S.Ct. 2332 (2025).
8 Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
9 Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).
10 Miller v. McDonald, No. 24-681 (2d Cir. June 30, 2026).
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Nevradakis M. Federal Court Rules Against Amish Families in Religious Exemption Case — Will Supreme Court Have the Last Word?. Children’s Health Defense July 6, 2026.
14 Gostin LO. Jacobson v. Massachusetts at 100 Years: Police Power and Civil Liberties in Tension. Am J Public Health 2005; 95(4): 576-581.
15 Fisher BL. Repeal Mandatory Vaccination Laws: There Are No Exemptions to Informed Consent. National Vaccine Information Center. Aug. 7, 2025.
16 Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905)
17 Fisher BL. Forced Vaccination: The Tragic Legacy of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. The National Vaccine Information Center Nov. 2, 2016.
21 Responses
Lucifer’s accursed pharma’s autism coming to NY Amish.
The Amish need to not only stand up together in civil disobedience, but get more people outside their group to join them. Just because it’s the law does NOT make it legal when it violates religious rights under our Constitution!
Criminal action on the part of NY. Even worse than California if that is even possible.
Since I live in New York State near a lot of Amish, I have been covering this story in my Substack.
https://corrin.substack.com/p/amish-receive-another-setback-in
This is just criminal. We certainly can’t have healthy children running around can we? How anyone can think there is anything “for the greater good” about vaccines, must hope the greater good must mean chronically sick or dead. This is infuriating!
Land of the free. . .riiight.
This is SO wrong on many levels. We decried the unauthorized practice when the Nazis did it but now…..we’re doing it? In the name of “public health,” of course. There isn’t any “public health,” only individual health, in my opinion.
Does this mean that there is no way to get the religious exemptions back in NYS?
The only group that does not vaccinate and does not have children with autism. Well that is just acceptable to those kissing the ring of big pharma. It is the perfect example of how vaccines are making our kids sick and they grow up sick and they cannot allow that kind of proof exposed.
This is so wrong, and is all about money, power and control. Gonna have to home school.
Health freedom should be a federally protected right. New York’s vaccine policies are discriminatory and unconstitutional.
So incredibly unbelievable, we should all have the right to what we put into our bodies and is our decision alone, no one else’s! How does being vaccinated protect others? that’s the same as , if I use a life jacket you won’t drown. Remember, my body my choice, period!
Let me quote the brilliant philosopher mathematician, logician Bertrand Russell, “the fact that an opinion is widely held is no evidence whatever that is not utterly absurd; in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind. a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible”
Picky point: in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the SCOTUS DID NOT rule that Jacobson had to get vaccinated (again); only that he had to pay the fine or go to jail for not getting vaxxed. So–what if everyone in Cambridge (which imposed that mandate) paid the fine or went to jail, instead of getting the vax? How do Public Health experts figure that paying fines quells a smallpox outbreak, their excuse for their mandates? How do we know the Cambridge Board of Health wasn’t simply running a Mafia-style protection racket? And, why wouldn’t the SCOTUS approve of that, as long as its members are way more than sufficiently well-paid to easily afford a small fine to protect their own bodily integrity?
This is totally disgusting and shows that the USA is becoming a communist country defined by the people having no rights in what they want and do not want to be put into their bodies.
No person should be forced to be injected with a vaccine that causes harmful side effects and in some cases, death.
It’s downright dangerous to give this much power to a government or court system.
The decisions made in support of vaccine mandates are based on the flawed assumption that vaccines are safe and effective. We all know there is no science to support that assertion. Based on that vaccines are as Siri proved in his book a religion. Vaccine mandates force people to practice a different religion. That is not freedom of religion as I see it.
IMHO “religious exemptions” is a highly ineffective way of defending bodily integrity–which may be why attorneys seem so fond of it, as keeping them arguing endlessly in courts pays for their living. The real attack on the First Amendment here is by the State, which has established the Religion of Contagious Disease, Germ Theory, & Virology, all of which are fraudulent anyway, as nobody yet has proven the existence of any pathogenic virus (see: https://archive.org/details/free-articles-from-wissenschafftplus-magazin-feat-stefan-lanka-virology-criticism/2015_Dismantling_The_Virus_Theory_The_measles_virus_as_an_example_Wissenschafftplus_Magazin-wissenschafftplus.de-Dismantling-the-Virus-Theory/). As for Contagion, we only get sick from malnutrition, parasites, &/or toxins; any epidemic is merely a lot of ppl suffering from those same stressor(s) in the same place at the same time, e.g., cholera epidemics resulting from the victims having drunk water from the same polluted well. But behold the usefulness of these theories to provide cushy jobs for bureaucrats while tormenting the less-well-heeled….
MORE Q’s: did the judges of NY’s 2nd Circuit get vaxxed? Do they vax THEIR kids? How is fining some Amish families $118,000 which they probably don’t have going to improve the health of the public?
Total abuse of power by the state. Just go bribe a sympathetic doctor for the medical exemption. Have a member of that community get a doctors license themselves and write everyone an opt out. Let’s talk plainly about the issue. The pharmasuetical industrial complex has paid mouth pieces with medical licenses to set their schemes up. They then use the fascist corporate government partnerships to impose vaccine mandates upon the people. Because this is clearly anti choice against constitutional principals and many other obvious contradictions to the informed consent principal, they tidy up the abuse with a medical exemption opt out. See we’re not actual authoritarians, if you have a doctors note you can skip the entire thing. Our hands are clean, like Pontus Pilate. If you choose to go against the state, you’re on your own don’t blame us.
It’s important to argue the legality and set legal prescient so these heavy handed policies of forcing people to do things against their will do not gain ground. But let’s be honest, they are heavy handed policies which do nothing but harm people. It is peoples own choice to manage their own personal health. The notion of public health is a fallacy. There is no public arm or public leg. No public mind. No public haircut or public boot. No such thing as public health. There is hygienic practice or lack there of in public, and private spaces, which effects individual health. If individuals have taken vaccines or not is of no consequence, the entire vaccine industry has been built on a lie for two centuries. HFDF health freedom defense force has some highly educational articles on the matter as they bring forth historical documents from the inception of this barbaric practice.
The amish have but three choices now; Submit to the tyranny of the state. Move somewhere else where such tyranny is not as prevalent. Or bribe or coerce a doctor into giving them the medical exemption (or get one of their own peoples a license to issue their own internal opt outs). Doctors are not priests or some special class person they can control our lives or tell us how we ought to live. They are susceptible to pressure and temptation like any other member of society. The fact the vaccine program has grown to epic levels of fascism and heavy handed mandates of this nature is proof positive that the doctoral class deserves no more respect than anyone else.
A good analogy here would be to imagine that plumbers and hvac people know best for everyone, and would therefore have a right to enter your home for periodic systems inspections and force everyone in the country to get updated equipment, fix every last detail, be up to date on a constantly changing code. Then the people would have no choice but to pay for their services, or be penalized, fined, jailed, and denied access to places like hospitals or grocery stores, education, if the home owners did not comply with the ‘mandatory upkeep of hvac and plumbing systems.’
Pick your person in society, why would we ever elevate anyone’s privilege in this manner? How about teachers; Everyone must take a yearly intelligence test and if they’re not keeping up, ‘mandatory continuing education’ for every last man woman and child in the country. You’re not allowed to be stupid or intellectually lazy, or you go to jail or are denied societal access. This is what the no taxation without representation principal is all about. Why we have a republic where no individuals individual rights are allowed to be violated. Same thing as saying you’re not allowed to be unvaccinated. Who in the hell gave these power hungry psychopaths agency over our lives?
We will not comply. Some things in life you can’t put a price tag on. There is no greater liberty, than the liberty to say no and leave. This is what freedom and liberty is all about, the ability to reject, discriminate, and do what is in your own best interest instead. To not be subjected to mob rule. In this regard, discrimination can and should run both directions for a more healthy free and functional society. Why would anyone want to stay in a community and state where they were treated this way? Where the politicians and wigs behave this way and use legalese to justify immoral behavior? Vote with your wallet, vote with your feet, they have always been the most important votes any of us have in our lifetimes.
In a free society people participate and support causes and activity which is beneficial to their lives. The voluntary principal. Good ideas do no require force, because they are voluntarily adopted by the people. This is the free market capitalist principal. The people themselves decide over time what new ideas, products, or sciences, are worth while and beneficial to their lives. They grow businesses or ideas organically because they find the effort to bring a positive result somehow. They are allowed to voluntarily reject whatever they feel is not beneficial to their lives, and those industries or ideas eventually fade away into memory, existing only in history and not the current present. In a communistic not free society, the people are demanded and coerced to comply under threat of penalty and harm. Because it’s the law! This is what Adam Smith talked about with the invisible hand of the market.
Remember this following simple slogan and live your life by this principal if you wish this to remain living in a free country and being a free individual yourself; ‘Good ideas do not require force.’ That is your line in the sand to simplify even the most complex decision making process. Do you have a choice? If you don’t have a choice, you’re not free and are being subjected to tyranny.
It’s your life, live it as you think is best for yourself. The only rule is you are not allowed to harm other people whom have done no wrong themselves. You are allowed to harm others in order to stop them from harming innocent people. That is the delivery of justice to stop evil doers. But you are not allowed to push around and bully people in ways which render them unable to defend themselves when they have done no wrong. We’re not vaccine hesitant. We said no to vaccines and we meant it. We will not comply. We don’t know where all this is going to end but if they want a fight they’ve got one! We’re taking this country back! They can have their fascist feelings hurt and throw tantrums as much as they feel fit. We’re not listening to what they are saying. There is no greater objection than absence and they’ve all destroyed their own credibility. Simply not trust worthy people.
Doctors ruined their own credibility in these matters. They failed to stand up for the informed consent principal. Over time they helped create a legal system which justified this egregious behavior of allegedly mandatory vaccination policies and then developed a moral code to glorify this fascist approach. They all were unduly enriched in the process too, which is really what drives the entire thing. The government does not care about the health of the plebes, especially obvious when they are so willing to bring harm if they don’t pay. But then again, if the people did not see this coming a mile down the tracks they were blind. What’s actually new? Know your history or be condemned to repeat it. Go bribe a doctor or fake the form, you certainly would not be the first person to engage in that kind of activity.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/89275.Fr_d_ric_Bastiat
Deplorable! Shame, shame!
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.