In Miller v. McDonald, (2d Cir., June 30, 2026), the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed its earlier decision that New York's repeal of its religious belief exemption from required school immunizations, while keeping medical exemptions, does not violate either Amish parents' free exercise rights or their parental rights to control their children's religious upbringing. Last year, the Supreme Court had remanded the case to the Second Circuit for reconsideration in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor. In reaffirming its earlier decision, the Second Circuit said in part:
New York Public Health Law § 2164 is neutral on its face. It does not target or affirmatively prohibit religious practices.... Moreover, the act of repealing the religious exemption did not “in and of itself transmute” this otherwise neutral law into one “that targets religious beliefs.”...
Nor does the legislative history reveal an anti-religious bias....
... [T]he motives of a small number of legislators cannot be attributed to the legislative body as a whole.
Plaintiffs contend that exempting students for medical reasons treats comparable secular conduct more favorably than religious beliefs....
Repealing the religious exemption decreases “to the greatest extent medically possible” the number of unvaccinated students and thus the risk of disease; maintaining the medical exemption allows “the small proportion of students” who medically “cannot be vaccinated” to avoid the health consequences that “taking a particular vaccine would inflict.” ... Exempting religious objectors, however, detracts from that interest. Religious exemptions increase “the risk of transmission of vaccine-preventable diseases among vaccinated and unvaccinated students alike.”...
New York passed § 2164 in response to the 2018 to 2019 measles outbreak. Legislators felt particularly concerned about the concentration of unvaccinated children with religious exemptions in the same schools....
Plaintiffs’ remaining argument is that, even if § 2164 is neutral and generally applicable, it burdens the parental free-exercise right recognized in Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), and clarified in Mahmoud v. Taylor. We conclude that it does not....
Section 2164 does not regulate what children are taught, does not require them to affirm any belief, does not expose them to state-selected instruction contrary to their parents’ faith, and does not enlist school officials to displace parental religious formation. It imposes a health-and-safety condition on in-person school attendance to reduce the spread of communicable disease.... The burden may be serious, but it is not the kind of state interference with a child’s religious development that triggered strict scrutiny in Yoder or Mahmoud....
Mahmoud asks whether a burden is “of the same character” as the burden in Yoder, not whether it is more or less serious.... A greater burden in degree is not necessarily the same burden in kind....
