(Source: MIRS.news, Published 03/11/2024) Michigan State University (MSU) employees are taking their fight against the university's COVID-19 vaccine mandate to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) petitioned the court Monday to hear Norris et al. v. Stanley et al. regarding MSU's mandate, which led to two of the three plaintiffs being fired for refusing the vaccine.
NCLA's petition asks the Court to hold that the 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision requires states to satisfy at least "intermediate scrutiny" before mandating their employees receive an unnecessary vaccine. NCLA urges the Court to hold that MSU's policy failed to meet that standard.
"During the COVID pandemic various governmental entities ran roughshod over not just constitutional law, but also the basic scientific principles which they claimed to be following," said Dr. Gregory DOLIN, a senior litigation counsel for NCLA. "Now that the country mostly has returned to normal, the Court has an opportunity to clarify once and for all that while government has broad powers to protect public health, it still must act with due regard to people's civil liberties."
The plaintiffs, who say they have naturally acquired immunity to COVID, alleged an "unaccountable administrator" imposed MSU's mandate on all employees and students without an approved medical or religious exemption.
They alleged that despite claiming to rely on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance, MSU permitted individuals to satisfy the standard by taking any World Health Organization (WHO)-approved vaccine, including those that are not Food and Drug Administration-approved.
At the same time, and contrary to all scientific evidence and basic principles of immunology, MSU refused to recognize naturally acquired immunity to the virus, Dolin noted.
A federal judge denied the plaintiffs' request for a temporary restraining order in August 2021, holding their claim that the mandate violated their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments rights to privacy is contradicted by the Jacobson ruling, which upheld the state's law allowing cities to require residents to be vaccinated against smallpox based on its valid exercise of police power to protect the health and safety of residents.
The NCLA said lower courts have been overreading the Jacobson case and "treating it as an unlimited license for government authorities to impose dissimilar mandates under wildly different circumstances and in the face of modern scientific advances."
