Penn Medicine to Require All Health System Employees to Receive Vaccine Many states align their vaccine requirements with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and PreventionsAdvisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Exempting Schoolchildren from Immunizations: States with Few Barriers Had Highest Rates of Nonmedical Exemptions. Find support for a specific problem in the support section of our website. Arbo, Matthew, Ben Mitchell, and Andrew Walker. At once, a radically individualistic account of choice and freedom in society is also a tribalist one, bereft of concession and compromise. Federal law protects employees religious beliefs, observances and practices, regardless of whether workplace administrators are familiar with them. by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource September 28, 2021, This article first appeared on The Journalist's Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.. All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. L. REV. It is very hard for judges to determine religious sincerity, and mostly they dont try. Since the advent of the COVID-19 vaccines early in 2021, potential religious exemptions to mandatory vaccine requirements have been a challenging legal issue and focus of debate. Because of that, policies vary considerably across the U.S. As of mid-September, 26 of the nations 50 biggest public university campuses did not require students to get inoculated against COVID-19, an analysis from The Associated Press finds. Sources: Chart adapted from Immunization Action Coalition, "Exemptions Permitted for State Immunization Requirements," 2017; LexisNexis; StateNet 2017. This is the state of affairs in which the current Supreme Court is presently poised to deliberate on the issue of how to interpret claimed religious exemptions. Faith-Based Approaches Can Positively Impact COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts: Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus (April 22). 1998.