Supreme Court Orders Re-Review Of Vaccine-Exemption Case — Could Parents Win A Right To Send Unvaccinated Children To School?

The Supreme Court on Monday vacated a lower-court ruling and instructed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to reconsider Miller v. McDonald in light of last term's decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor. The short, cryptic order raises the prospect that the Court may apply Mahmoud's broad free-exercise reasoning to school immunization mandates — a development with major implications for public health and education policy.

Background

New York abolished its religious exemption to the school vaccine mandate in 2019 after a rapid rise in claimed exemptions and a measles outbreak that the state described as its worst in 25 years. Lawmakers required routine childhood immunizations for all schoolchildren, retaining only a narrow medical exemption. Three Amish schools refused to comply and were fined a total of $118,000, prompting the suit now known as Miller v. McDonald.

The Legal Fight

The schools and Amish parents argued the elimination of the religious exemption violates the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause. A federal district court rejected that claim, and a politically mixed panel of the Second Circuit affirmed. The appeals court found that isolated statements by two lawmakers denying that any major religion opposes vaccination were outliers and that the legislative record otherwise respected religious freedom. It also held that medical exemptions and religious exemptions are not comparable: medical exemptions are rarer and can be verified by physicians, while widespread religious exemptions risk undermining herd immunity.

"The legislative record is full of respectful statements in support of religious freedoms," the Second Circuit wrote.

Why The Supreme Court Remanded

The plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court, supported by conservative religious groups, vaccine skeptics, and 22 Republican state attorneys general. After conference, the justices vacated the Second Circuit's judgment and directed it to give "further consideration" in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor — the recent 6–3 ruling that expanded parental free-exercise claims in the school context.

Mahmoud, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, held that the Free Exercise Clause protects against policies that substantially interfere with parents' ability to direct their children's religious upbringing. That decision gave parents new leverage to challenge school policies they say interfere with religious upbringing, most notably curricular choices. The Supreme Court's order in Miller suggests the Court may be considering whether that same logic extends to immunization rules.

Public-Health Stakes

Public-health experts and the Second Circuit emphasized that religious exemptions have been linked to outbreaks such as New York's measles epidemic, whereas medical exemptions—being rarer and subject to physician verification—have not shown the same association. If Mahmoud is applied broadly to immunization mandates, parents might gain a constitutional route to keep children unvaccinated in both public and private schools, potentially increasing the risk of vaccine-preventable disease.

Broader Implications

The Supreme Court also asked the Justice Department to weigh in on a separate New York requirement that all health-care workers receive the COVID-19 vaccine; that policy likewise contains a medical but not a religious exemption. The Court's interest suggests it may scrutinize whether allowing medical exemptions while denying religious ones is constitutionally permissible.

Forty-six states currently allow some form of religious exemption to school vaccine mandates, though rules and verification standards vary widely. New York and California — the two large states without religious exemptions — together enroll roughly 9 million students. A broad Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Miller plaintiffs could therefore have nationwide public-health consequences.

What Comes Next

The Second Circuit will reconsider the case in light of Mahmoud. If it again upholds New York's law, the plaintiffs are likely to return to the Supreme Court. The key question now is whether a majority of justices will extend Mahmoud's protections to immunization mandates — a decision that could reshape the balance between parental religious liberty and state efforts to protect community health.