Judge Rules Religious Exemptions Must Be Allowed in Mississippi for Children’s Vaccine Requirements in Public Schools

Mississippi Patriots for Vaccine Rights Rally in Jackson, Mississippi, in 2020. (Courtesy of MaryJo Perry)

A federal judge has ruled Mississippi must now provide religious exemptions to the state’s strict childhood vaccine requirements to be enrolled in public schools.

U.S. District Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden granted a preliminary injunction on Monday following an evidentiary hearing and handed down a full order on Tuesday.

Several families filed the lawsuit last fall arguing that the health policy refusing religious exemptions violates their constitutional rights under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

Mississippi is one of six states without a religious exemption for students to attend public school, the others being California, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and West Virginia.

Ozerden’s order takes effect on July 15, 2023. By then, the Mississippi State Department of Health must allow religious exemptions.

Walker Moller, an attorney with Siri & Glimstad, the law firm that represented the families, told The Epoch Times the ruling “represents a significant breakthrough for Mississippi families who have been praying and fighting for a religious exemption option for many years.”

“Forty-four states have religious or philosophical exemption options to childhood vaccination requirements, but those exemptions are only available by way of legislative enactment,” Moller said. “In other words, exemptions in other states are legal privileges that can be taken away if elected officials deem necessary. The ruling in Mississippi is significant because it signals that Mississippians possess the inalienable constitutional right to freely exercise their religious beliefs, and that right exists independent of legislative action or inaction.”

The immunization requirements—which don’t apply to school staff—are Diphtheria; Tetanus and Pertussis; Polio; Hepatitis B; Measles, Mumps, Rubella; and Varicella, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health, which says on its website that it has “one of the most successful childhood immunization programs in the nation, and as a result one of the lowest rates of childhood diseases.”

The state allows people to apply for some medical exemptions, and it has no mandate for the COVID-19 vaccination.

The state formerly had a religious exemption that was removed in 1979 after a state court judge declared it invalid in Brown v. Stone, arguing that vaccinated children had a 14th Amendment right to be protected from their unvaccinated peers. However, the lawsuit argues that the court decision failed to consider vaccinated children’s association with unvaccinated children at other gatherings such as church and camp.

Exclusion of Families With Religious Beliefs

The lawsuit equated the medical exemption with a secular value judgment and argues that the rejection of religious value judgment deprives the plaintiffs of their freedom of religion protected by the First Amendment.

“Critically, after stripping the state’s citizens’ rights to seek a religious exemption, Mississippi enacted a medical exemption system,“ the lawsuit states. ”Removing one exemption while enacting another confirmed that the exclusion of families with religious beliefs against vaccination was not the result of an absolute priority to ensure every single child is vaccinated, but rather a calculated choice to eliminate religious beliefs.”

Religious exemptions for vaccines center around the fact that they are derived from growing viruses in fetal embryo cells that originated from tissue harvested from two aborted fetuses in the early 1960s.

“Others depend on these fetal cells for testing, design, and/or manufacture,” the lawsuit states. “Most other vaccines, even if not directly associated with aborted fetal cells themselves, are made by manufacturers who profit from the use of these aborted fetal cells. These aborted fetal cells would be illegal to harvest in Mississippi today under the state’s abortion ban, and yet their continued use, and profit derived from an abortion, is condoned through the Compulsory Vaccination Law.”

The organization that funded the lawsuit—the Austin, Texas-based Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN)—said Mississippi’s allowing secular, medical exemptions show that the state could have always accommodated unvaccinated students.

“It has simply chosen to not accord an exemption when it is someone’s immortal soul that a parent believes would be at risk,” ICAN said in a press release. “The plaintiffs and all parents in Mississippi whose children have been excluded from school due to their religious beliefs are, no doubt, incredibly heartened that a federal court agreed that the State cannot afford a secular exemption without affording a religious exemption because doing so violated the First Amendment.”

Mississippi Patriots for Vaccine Rights

An organization that has advocated for medical freedom and informed medical consent in the state celebrated the ruling but expressed disappointment that it took a lawsuit to secure a basic constitutional right that has been dismissed by state legislators.

“We have worked tirelessly through the years in attempts to convince Mississippi lawmakers to create a religious exemption, legislatively,” the Mississippi Patriots for Vaccine Rights (MPVR) said in a press release.

However, state Republican leadership has “aggressively” blocked bills that would have allowed for religious exemptions, MPVR said.

“The facts and the U.S. Constitution demand a religious exemption to vaccines, yet each of them intentionally ensured that Mississippi maintained the most draconian vaccine laws in the nation,” MPVR said.

While other southern states have religious exemptions, MPVR said Mississippi has been a “radical outlier for over four decades” despite it being one of the most religious states in the country.

“Many parents have sincerely held religious beliefs which prevent them from vaccinating their children,” MPVR said. “Some have objections to using several of the vaccines which were developed using products of abortion.  If those parents want to send their children to school, they would be forced to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

In response to The Epoch Times’ request for comment, the Mississippi Department of Health said it continues to support strong immunization laws that protect our children.

“Beyond that, it is our long-standing policy that the Agency does not comment on pending litigation,” the department said.