Friends,
Some vaccine mandates come with one or more exemptions and some don’t. But we needn’t assume that lack of an exemption law means there’s no legal right to refuse a required vaccine. Please allow me to explain.
While most vaccine mandates come from laws—statutes and agency regulations in either state or federal laws, depending on the specific context—some mandates don’t come from laws. Furthermore, not all mandates come with an explicit exemption right. But there are always one or more ways to legally refuse mandatory vaccines whether the mandate comes with an exemption right or not.
All vaccine mandates for daycare, school, and college enrollment come from statutes and/or agency regulations. In each instance, one or more exemptions are provided in the same section of statutes and/or regulations. Medical exemptions are Constitutionally required, and philosophical exemptions are optional for the enacting legislature or agency. Whether religious exemptions are required is arguably an unresolved matter legally (there are arguments on both sides and the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to ever take up the matter), but the current consensus in the legal community is that religious exemptions are optional. This is consistent with the half-dozen or so states that offer only medical exemptions to vaccine requirements for daycare, school, and college enrollment.
EMPLOYMENT:
Most employee vaccine mandates are employer-mandated as an employer policy matter (if generally in response to government pressure). Employers aren’t legally required to mandate vaccines, but as a general matter, they can lawfully require them as a condition of employment. There have been lawsuits where employees claimed the right to bodily autonomy—the right to decide what we put into their bodies—but those lawsuits failed on the theory that each employee’s vaccine status potentially affects others. (Yes, fake science drives vaccine policy to maximize pharma profits and advance totalitarian control. But until the Big Lie no longer drives the corrupt political and legal systems, we’re stuck with the current corrupt, fake-science policies.)
Most state exemption laws apply only to daycare, school, and college enrollment. About a half dozen states have a statutory medical exemption that applies either to healthcare workers specifically or employees generally. Only one or two states have a statutory religious exemption that applies to employees, and none currently offer a philosophical exemption. This has been a point of some confusion. Employees have complained, “my state has religious and philosophical exemptions, but my employer doesn’t allow them,” not realizing that the exemptions they’re referring to apply to daycare, school, and college, but not to employees. We must be careful with our assumptions in this arena.
But while most employees have no statutory exemption law they can point to giving them the right to refuse vaccines required for employment, there are rights to refuse those vaccines on both medical and religious grounds in federal laws that are not vaccine exemption laws. For example, federal civil rights laws prohibit religious discrimination in the workplace. So, those employees with legally qualifying religious objections to immunizations may be able to refuse workplace vaccines on religious grounds. Federal civil rights law (specifically, Title VII) isn’t a vaccine religious exemption law, it’s an anti-discrimination law, but it can function like a religious exemption law. As an anti-discrimination law, it protects employees’ religious beliefs and practices with respect to just about any workplace requirement that conflicts with an employee’s religious beliefs and practices, where the employee has a legally qualifying religious conflict with an employer policy, and the employer has no compelling reason to refuse accommodating the employee’s religious beliefs and practices. Religious freedom isn’t an absolutely right, but it is a powerful right one, nonetheless. I’ve used Title VII to help employees avoid tuberculosis tests (which are not vaccines) required for some jobs, for example, but the scope of this law is considerably beyond religious conflicts with medical procedures.
As to medical objections, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provides a potential “out” to workplace vaccines on medical grounds. While the scope of the ADA is considerably beyond vaccine refusal, it may enable employees with a qualifying disability to refuse vaccines when the employee has a legally qualifying disability that contraindicates taking vaccines. The ADA is not the only way to get a workplace medical exemption, but as a practical matter, it may be easier for some people to get a medical exemption when they have a qualifying medical condition. Otherwise, the law is unclear about what medical conditions do or don’t qualify, and who gets to decide. For this reason, some employers defer to CDC recommendations, which pretty much require being dead for two weeks to qualify. Please forgive my dark humor, but you get the idea. Whenever a person’s vaccine fate is in the hands of any of our corrupt state or federal health agencies, the odds of success go down dramatically. After all, if medical exemptions were determined by real science, everyone on the planet would qualify for a medical exemption by default. Vaccines come with a risk of injury and death, and there are other far safer and more effective ways to address infectious disease concerns (they just don’t profit big pharma or help the elite advance control).
For details about the application of federal civil rights law and the ADA to workplace vaccine mandates, please see these past articles:
Employee Exemptions: Part I, Part II, Part III
BIRTH:
Vaccines required for newborn babies are mandated by law, but don’t always come with statutory exemptions. Where there are exemption laws, sometimes they apply to all newborn procedures—eyedrops, vitamin K shot, hepatitis B vaccine, etc.—and sometimes only to the vaccine. I’ve seen laws worded in such a way as to require an “all or none” position with respect to newborn procedures a to those parents with religious objections, but that’s legally incorrect. If a parent’s religious beliefs are only opposed to some of these procedures, they could lawfully request an exemption to only those procedures. But the larger point here is that sometimes, Constitutional rights apply whether there’s a state law spelling that out or not. For more on this, see Birth Vaccine Exemptions.
COLLEGE CLINICAL ROTATIONS AND INTERNSHIPS
In recent years, college students doing clinical rotations and internships have been increasingly required to get vaccines to participate in those programs. These vaccines are not required by law, but by the facility providing the student work experience. I see no reason that there couldn’t be laws providing vaccine exemptions for these situations, but I’ve never heard of one (the relevant state exemptions laws apply to college enrollment, only). Once again, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t other laws that may provide a legal “out” to the required vaccines. The above-referenced federal civil rights law and ADA may have application here. While the relevant sections of those laws apply to employment, and not students, clinical rotations and internships involve working for an employer, and so the student may qualify as an employee for purposes of the application of these laws. For more on this, see Exemptions: Clinical Rotations and Internships and the Employee exemption articles : Part I, Part II, Part III.
EMERGENCIES:
There are few exemption laws that apply to vaccines ordered during a government-declared emergency. The Kentucky legislature recently passes a law allowing religious exemption during epidemics, but the law’s use of the word “epidemic” is suspect. We’re likely to see mostly pandemics from this point forward, because that’s what serves the advancing totalitarian control agenda here in the U.S. and internationally. (Pandemics will be created, whether only in the media or in the lab to actually infect our bodies). The new Kentucky law was passed more than a year into a declared international pandemic (so the use of the word “epidemic” was clearly deliberate), and the proper application of law depends on the precise meaning of words. So, this law may be a red herring to give us a false sense of security. See this article for more about this: The New Kentucky Law: Victory or Deception? However, even if this new law was deemed to apply to pandemics, the pharma elite will find other ways to coerce immunization. For example, it may be required to get access to your money once the new all-digital financial system is fully implemented. In 1933, President Roosevelt issued an executive order making the possession of gold illegal and punishable by up to ten years in federal prison. The elite can make anything illegal at any time with the stroke of a pen. So, there’s no way, ultimately, to “opt out” of the control. This is why we have to all come together to fix this.
Once an emergency is declared, non-medical exemptions can be overridden to “protect” the community. This is a discretionary call on the part of government health officials. But remember: The majority of the world’s health officials are either 1) witting supporters of the corrupt pharma agenda, 2) awake but coerced into supporting the agenda, or 3) well-meaning but brilliantly manipulated (psychologically) into believing and thus supporting the fake-science agenda. So, we can always count on government health authorities to exercise their “discretion” in favor of pharma profits and advancing totalitarian control, until we change the underlying condition driving all of this.
With gratitude,
Alan Phillips, J.D.
Vaccine Rights Legal Expert
Have an exemption question? Contact Alan at vaccinerights.com. Some questions may be addressed in future articles (with anonymity).
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Alan Phillips, J.D., is the nation’s leading vaccine rights legal expert, the only person who’s ever been a fulltime attorney with exemptions; who’s worked in all 6 dozen exemption contexts and sub-contexts; and who’s worked with clients, attorneys, legislators, and activists nationally for over two decades. For exemption help, see vaccinerights.com.