A recent court ruling on Maine’s COVID vaccine mandate for healthcare workers is seen by some vaccine choice advocates as the latest sign that medical freedom is becoming a sanctified constitutional right in America.
“Based on the plaintiffs’ allegations and in the absence of further factual development,” the Court wrote in its unanimous decision, “the Mandate treats comparable secular and religious activity dissimilarly without adequate justification.”
New York’s announcement earlier this week that it was voluntarily ending its vaccine mandate for healthcare workers left Maine as the only state with the requirement.
Maine’s vaccine mandate was considered to be one of the strictest in the United States, with Maine Gov. Janet Mills implementing an unconditional no-religious-exemption policy.
When healthcare workers refused to take the vaccine, they were fired. A critical shortage of first responders in the vast rural New England state wouldn’t even dissuade Mills, who instead brought in national guard and traveling nurses to replace the state’s unvaccinated healthcare workers.
Danna Hayes, a spokesperson for the Maine Attorney General’s office, told The Epoch Times that the state would not be commenting on the appellate court’s ruling because it was “pending litigation.”
Courts have issued similar rulings in other cases in which government administrations or healthcare facilities granted medical exemptions while rejecting requests for religious ones.
Daniel Schmid, an attorney with Liberty Counsel, which represents the Maine healthcare workers in the case against the state, told The Epoch Times that the ruling reaffirms the argument he has made in similar cases in other states that the virus “doesn’t know the difference between a medical exemption and a religious one.”
“It’s at least a warning shot that, if this happens again, treating religious exemption to a vaccine differently than medical exemptions isn’t going to fly,” said Schmid, who has successfully argued several landmark Supreme Court cases against COVID mandates.
Schmid said he also believes that states like Maine may have created “unintended consequences” by eliminating religious exemptions from the COVID jab because it invites a similar test of all other mandatory vaccines, such as required child immunizations for school attendance.
Like New York, Maine eliminated religious exemptions from required school immunizations in addition to the COVID vaccine.
Connecticut, California, Mississippi, and West Virginia also eliminated religious exemptions for all vaccines.
Schmid said that in addition to religious-based objections to vaccines on the grounds they were made with tissue and cells from aborted babies, some have also raised religious objections to the use of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) in vaccines because it alters the human body’s genetic makeup.
“The constitution protects religious beliefs and protects against discrimination,” he said, “those are both protected rights that vaccine choices fall into.”
According to Penn Medicine, which led the development of the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines for Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, it is working on a litany of mRNA vaccines for a litany of diseases.
In its latest report on the development, Penn Medicine, the vaccine development arm of the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN), lists genital herpes, HIV, Hepatitis C, malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and influenza—required in some states for healthcare workers and students—among some of the diseases it is working to develop an mRNA-based vaccine against.
“We’re working on every imaginable infectious disease,” said Dr. Drew Weissman, director of vaccine research at UPENN, in celebrating the development of more mRNA vaccines. Weisman helped develop the COVID vaccine.
Tiffany Kreck, a cofounder of Health Choice Maine, told The Epoch Times that the recent ruling against Maine’s denial of religious exemptions is “the moment we’ve been waiting for.”
The mother of two helped found the group in direct response to the elimination of the religious exemption from school-required vaccines by Maine lawmakers in 2021.
The measures have since remained under heavy scrutiny in the New England state, which despite its large population of blue-collar workers, fishermen, tradesmen, and elderly, has a peculiarly Democrat-dominated government.
In this last legislative session alone, at least three different bills aimed at repealing the elimination of religious exemptions for vaccines were introduced in Maine. All three were swiftly defeated.
Kreck is hopeful that the Mill Administration has “inadvertently opened up a Pandora’s Box” that will incite legal remedies to government overreach when it comes to mandating vaccines.
“By the very least, I hope the people of Maine see this as more of a power play than concern over public safety,” she said.
Kreck said that her organization, which has a pending lawsuit it filed on behalf of EMT workers against the state’s COVID vaccine mandate, knows of several traveling nurses hired out of state by Mills to replace in-state healthcare workers who are not vaccinated against COVID.
