(BDN) -- A federal judge on Wednesday refused to halt the implementation of Maine’s mandate that requires health care workers be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Oct. 29 or risk losing their jobs.
U.S. District Court Judge Jon Levy denied a motion for a preliminary injunction that argued the mandate violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it does not include a religious exemption. The mandate, however, does include a medical exemption from the vaccine requirement for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.
The judge found that the plaintiffs had not yet shown that they would prevail in the long run, one of the standards for granting the injunction. Another is that the preliminary injunction must be in the public interest.
“The medical exemption at issue here was adopted to protect persons whose health may be jeopardized by receiving a COVID-19 vaccination” Levy said. “The exemption is rightly viewed as an essential facet of the vaccine’s core purpose of protecting the health of patients and healthcare workers, including those who, for bona fide medical reasons, cannot be safely vaccinated.
“Because the medical exemption serves the core purpose of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, it does not reflect a value judgment prioritizing a purely secular interestover religious interests,” he said.
The decision is expected to be appealed to the appellate court in Boston.
At the hearing, Levy expressed concern that granting the injunction would overturn a 2019 law that ended religious and philosophical exemptions for all vaccines required for school children as well as other vaccination requirements for health care workers. His decision does not affect that law.
The Liberty Counsel, which filed the lawsuit in August in U.S. District Court in Bangor, claims it is representing more than 2,000 health care workers across the state. While employees may obtain medical exemptions to the vaccine requirement, there is no religious or philosophical exemption in the policy.
The Liberty Counsel also represents an Orrington church suing Gov. Janet Mills over state COVID-19 restrictions.
The religious organization argues that health care workers are protected from having to receive vaccinations they oppose for religious reasons under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The policy also violates the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, the Liberty Counsel said.
Attorneys for the state and hospitals pointed out that other vaccines have been required for health care workers since 2002 by the Maine Center for Disease Control. Since then, all health care facilities have been required to obtain and maintain their employees’ proof of immunization against a variety of communicable diseases, including but not limited to measles, mumps, chicken pox, and — more recently — influenza, according to lawyers representing the state and hospitals.
The Legislature in 2019 removed vaccine exemptions for all but medical reasons for school children. That law survived a people’s veto attempt at the ballot box in March 2020, and the new rules — which have been written to apply to the COVID-19 vaccine — took effect last month.
Government defendants in the lawsuit are Mills and officials at the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Some of Maine’s hospital systems, including Northern Light Health, MaineGeneral Health and MaineHealth, along with Genesis HealthCare, which runs a number of nursing homes in the state, also were sued.
A similar lawsuit over the health care worker vaccine requirement filed by the Alliance Against Health Care Mandates against the state’s top health officials is pending in Kennebec County Superior Court.