Supreme Court Won’t Exempt California Schoolchild From Vaccination Mandate

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 17 rejected an advocacy group’s emergency application to allow a religious parent to opt her child out of California’s mandatory vaccination policy for schoolchildren.

The court’s decision in We The Patriots USA v. Ventura Unified School District took the form of an unsigned order.

No justices dissented. The court did not explain its ruling.

The applicant, We The Patriots, is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Caldwell, Idaho.

California’s position is that its vaccination mandate keeps children healthy and prevents the spread of dangerous illnesses.

The group filed an emergency application last month with the Supreme Court on behalf of a woman identified as Jane Doe, who is seeking an exemption for her son from the vaccination mandate based on his personal beliefs.

The school district initially granted the son an exemption based on his personal beliefs, but later revoked it. The school district has barred the son from attending school for the time being. His last full day of school attendance was in December 2024.

Doe applied for the exemption based on her understanding that the vaccines required by state law are “researched, developed, tested, and/or produced using cell lines artificially developed from aborted fetuses and contain products that could result in harm to a human recipient,” according to the application.

The Constitution’s First Amendment does not allow “California to exile children from public school because their parents seek to raise them in accordance with their religious beliefs,” the application states, citing the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor.

In that case, the high court ruled for parents in Maryland who, for religious reasons, wanted to opt their young children out of school storybooks that promote LGBT lifestyles.

“That principle protects parents’ right to opt their children out of LGBTQ+ school curricula. It also protects parents’ right to opt their children out of an act that would render them complicit in abortion,” the application reads.

On Sept. 9, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the group’s request to pause an Aug. 15 order by U.S. District Judge André Birotte. The district judge rejected the group’s request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to suspend the vaccination policy.

We The Patriots had filed with the district court on May 22, asking it to block the enforcement of section 120335 of the California Health and Safety Code against the plaintiffs and other parents and children whose sincere religious beliefs prevent them from receiving the required immunizations.

That state law states that school districts in California may “not unconditionally admit any person as a pupil” unless he or she has been immunized against diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, rubella, tetanus, hepatitis B, chickenpox, and “any other disease deemed appropriate” by the state public health department.

The district court previously rejected a prior application for a temporary restraining order on June 17, finding that the plaintiffs failed to show that they would face irreparable harm without such an order, according to Birotte.

The school district filed a brief Oct. 1, urging the Supreme Court to dismiss the emergency application.

The case is unusual in that the applicant asked the high court to halt California’s school immunization requirement and recognize a new constitutional entitlement to attend a specific school, not only for the child concerned, but “for an undefined set of ‘all similarly situated’” persons.

“They press that suite of extraordinary remedies on a thin paper record, without an evidentiary hearing or a developed preliminary injunction ruling. That is the litigation equivalent of pulling the fire alarm and asking the building to be emptied before anyone has confirmed there is smoke.”

The district court and Ninth Circuit were right to rule against the applicant, the brief said.

The Epoch Times reached out for comment to We The Patriots’s attorney, Cameron Atkinson of Harwinton, Connecticut, and the school district’s attorney, David Adida of Santa Monica, California.

No replies were received by publication time.