‘We Fail Ourselves’: Justice Gorsuch Dissent Skewers SCOTUS for Rejecting N.Y. Healthcare Workers Who Say Cell Lines for COVID-19 Vaccines Are ‘Abortion-Derived’ – By Colin Kalmbacher (Law & Crime) / December 13, 2021
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in a lengthy dissent from an order on Monday favorably compared minority Catholics who currently refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine (because they believe “abortion-derived fetal cell lines” are used in “production or testing”) to Jehovah’s Witnesses who, in decades past, declined to pledge their allegiance to the U.S. flag.
In the case stylized as Dr. A v. Kathy Hochul, a majority of the court upheld New York State’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers–even though the regime explicitly lacks a religious exemption.
Three members of the nation’s high court would have enjoined those rules. Justice Samuel Alito joined Gorsuch in dissent. Justice Clarence Thomas silently dissented on presumably separate grounds.
Originally, issued by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) with a religious exemption in mid-late August, the vaccine mandate was revised in the final days of August without such an exemption.
