NY Lawsuit to Repeal Denial of Religious Exemptions to Vaccines Starts – 26,000 Families Wait to See if Children Can Start School

n July 10, attorneys Sussman and Kennedy filed a lawsuit in New York State (NYS) Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the legislature’s repeal of the religious exemption to vaccination. Suing on behalf of 55 NYS families who held lawful religious exemptions, Sussman and Kennedy requested that the court enjoin the repeal temporarily, preliminarily and permanently. The Honorable Denise Hartman, Supreme Court judge, will hear oral argument Wednesday, August 14th. With school only three weeks away, plaintiffs present their case that on June 13, 2019, NYS halted more than fifty years of lawful religious exemptions from vaccination for those with genuine and sincerely-held religious beliefs. The law, which became effective immediately, threw more than 26,000 NYS families into chaos, barring their children from school and daycare.

Families Sue New York State to Stop the Repeal of the Religious Exemption to Vaccines

Attorneys Sussman and Kennedy filed a lawsuit in New York State (NYS) Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the NYS legislature’s June 13, 2019 repeal of the religious exemption to vaccination, Public Health Law Section 2164(9). The plaintiffs, 55 NYS families who held lawful religious exemptions, request that the court enjoin the enactment of the repeal temporarily, preliminarily and permanently. The plaintiffs are of diverse religious faiths, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As a result of the repeal, these families can no longer educate their children in any schools or camps in New York without violating their religious faith. The parents who bring the suit seek to represent thousands of other families likewise affected by the repeal. Kennedy, Chief Legal Counsel for Children’s Health Defense, stated, “Religious rights are fundamental. It is unconstitutional for the state to deprive people of such important rights when religious animus has played a key role. To enact such harsh legislation without any legislative fact-finding, and with the legislators’ open display of prejudice towards religious beliefs different than their own, is simply un-American; it is essential that we fight this.”

FBI Called Upon to Investigate NY Corruption in Removing Vaccine Religious Exemptions

Kevin Barry of First Freedoms is calling upon the FBI to investigate potential fraud committed in the New York Assembly Committee on Health meeting that considered whether or not to bring a bill to the full Assembly Floor that would remove religious exemptions for childhood vaccines. He has published a video filmed during the meeting that shows the committee did not have enough votes to bring the bill to the full Assembly Floor, and that Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who is not part of the Committee on Health, called over one Assemblyman who voted "no," Nader Sayegh, and convinced him to change his vote. Without this change of vote, the bill would have died and never come to the full Assembly Floor for a vote. As a result, the bill did make it to the floor, and 20 million New Yorkers who had a religious exemption to vaccines lost that exemption.

Parents Risk Losing Children to CPS in NY if They Fail to Comply with Mandatory Vaccines

As we reported last week, on June 13, 2019, the New York legislature quickly pushed a bill (A2371) to repeal the religious exemption to vaccination through both the Assembly and Senate in one day with no public hearings. The unprecedented legislative coup, which cut the citizens of New York out of participating in the law making process, culminated in the Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo immediately signing the bill into law. Soon after this bill passed in New York, some parents apparently received letters from their children's school districts informing them of the new law, and that any child who previously had a religious exemption to vaccines now needed to comply and get caught up on their vaccinations. One of these letters, from Deer Park, New York, was posted on Facebook and quickly circulated, where James Cummings, the Assistant Superintendent for Pupil Personnel Services, let parents know that failure to comply and vaccinate their children would result in being reported to Child Protective Services (CPS). CPS workers routinely seize children from parents who do not comply with medical directives. Today, you can lose your children to CPS for simply wanting to obtain a second opinion from a different doctor for medical treatments for your children. These children are very often taken out of their homes and put into foster care, where the vast majority of them are abused. Foster care is a billion dollar industry, and it is the main source of the United States' very large, and very real, problem of child sex trafficking. We have documented these cases of "medical kidnapping" for almost 5 years now on our MedicalKidnap.com website. It would appear that State Legislators and governors imposing strict mandatory vaccination laws have now found another pipeline of putting children into this very lucrative foster care system to access federal funds, where corruption is the norm.

New York Quickly Removes Religious Vaccine Exemptions with No Public Hearings

On June 13, 2019, the New York legislature quickly pushed a bill (A2371) to repeal the religious exemption to vaccination through both the Assembly and Senate in one day with no public hearings. The unprecedented legislative coup, which cut the citizens of New York out of participating in the law making process, culminated in the Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo immediately signing the bill into law. “This new law, which was rammed through the New York legislature in one day without public participation in the democratic process violates the human right to hold religious and spiritual beliefs that honor and protect bodily integrity,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, Co-founder and President of the National Vaccine Information Center. “When a government has to resort to forcing parents to choose between violating their religious beliefs and conscience or giving their children a school education, that government has chosen to rule by fear and coercion and will lose the respect and trust of the people.” About 24,000 children in New York currently attend school with a religious exemption to vaccination (0.8 percent of all students). Those children now will have to immediately get all state mandate vaccines according to the schedule published by the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices or be home schooled next school year. Some families have said they will have to move out of the state because their children are already vaccine injured or have brain and immune system disorders that do not qualify for medical exemptions under narrow federal vaccine use guidelines.

NY City Council Asks Why Parents are Being Accused of Child Abuse for Simply Using Marijuana

As New York considers legalizing marijuana, attention is also turning to how the drug plays a role in the city’s child welfare system—one that has the power to remove children from their parents and that investigates, almost exclusively, low-income families of color. Parents and advocates have reported that recreational marijuana use can lead to investigations of child maltreatment by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services. Many times these investigations stem from testing pregnant women and their newborns at the city’s public hospitals, according to testimony at a City Council hearing on Wednesday. Queens Councilwoman Adrienne Adams called the practice “the systemic criminalization of women of color,” which comes with the threat of separating children and parents. “We are absolutely tearing families apart, needlessly,” Adams said.

NYC Sends “Disease Detectives” In Jewish Neighborhoods Looking for Unvaccinated – Attorneys Prepare Lawsuits

A day after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency over measles outbreaks in Jewish communities of Brooklyn, and ordered forced vaccinations of everyone not yet vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, the Washington Post is reporting that the Health Department has sent "disease detectives" into the community to force compliance: "On Wednesday, the city sent 15 to 20 disease detectives into the community, some with Yiddish interpreters, a day after Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vow to quash the outbreak with $1,000 fines and misdemeanor charges for anyone in certain areas who refuses to be immunized. The workers, wearing blue Health Department jackets, conducted interviews in the homes of people who may have been exposed to the dangerous, highly contagious virus and checked the immunization records of all those they may have had contact with. Others pored over records for the same information at a federally funded health clinic in the heart of the community." John Marshall, chairman of emergency medicine at Maimonides Medical Center, is reportedly threatening to call the police on parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. The Washington Post reported: "Marshall said he threatened to call police on parents who were refusing to send a feverish child to the hospital in an ambulance for fear the authorities would learn all their children were unvaccinated. 'The ones who are so vehemently anti-vaccination, I don’t know how to convince them,' said Edward Chapnick, director of Maimonides’s infectious disease division." The Mayor and the Health Department are assuming that by declaring a state of emergency over recent measles "outbreaks," that they have the legal authority to suspend certain laws in place protecting the rights of residents of NYC to opt out of vaccines due to religious beliefs, and HIPAA privacy laws which would prevent them from pulling up medical records of children to see if they have been vaccinated or not. In the meantime, attorneys are saying that they will file a lawsuit challenging the emergency order by Friday. Attorney Michael Sussman, who successfully represented parents in Rockland County, New York last week and convinced the state Supreme Court to overturn the County's ban on unvaccinated children, is one of the attorneys planning to file a lawsuit in New York City.

BREAKING: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Orders Forced Vaccinations in Brooklyn

Just days after the New York Supreme Court struck down a ban on unvaccinated children in Rockland County, New York, after declaring a state of emergency over a measles outbreak, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken even more drastic actions in certain Jewish populated neighborhoods in Brooklyn, ordering forced vaccinations for measles. “There’s no question that vaccines are safe, effective and life-saving,” de Blasio said. “I urge everyone, especially those in affected areas, to get their MMR vaccines to protect their children, families and communities.” There have been no reported deaths due to measles anywhere in the United States this year. The Mayor's order goes beyond what Rockland County Supervisor Ed Day ordered, and includes EVERYONE who is unvaccinated within zip codes 11205, 11206, 11221 and 11249 which are part of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to be vaccinated within 48 hours.

BREAKING: Rockland County NY Becomes America’s First Vaccine Police State – Bans Unvaccinated Children from Public Places – Health Dept. Goes Door to Door

Rockland County Executive Ed Day held a press conference earlier today to announce that he had declared a "state of emergency" regarding the New York state county's 153 cases of measles over a 6-month period, and placed a ban on all children under the age of 18 from appearing in any public area, which includes schools, malls and places of worship. Mr. Day said that this was the "first such effort of this kind nationally." The emergency ban is clearly targeted towards parents of unvaccinated children, as Mr. Day stated: "Parents will be held accountable if they are found to be in violation of this state of emergency act. And the focus of this effort is on the parents of these children. We are urging them once again, now with the authority of law, to get your children vaccinated." Mr. Day tried to downplay fears of police checkpoints and random checks for vaccination status, but he also stated that any parent found to be not in compliance with the emergency order would be referred to the district attorney's office for possible prosecution. "If we have a situation where it comes to our attention that a parent is willingly, knowingly, not allowing a child to be vaccinated, under the emergency order, it will be referred into the district attorney." The Rockland County Health Department, who recommended the emergency ban, has reportedly been going door to door and calling homes within the community in an effort to deal with the measles "epidemic."

Is New York Becoming a Vaccine Police State?

New York City has mandated that all preschool children must receive a flu shot. The National Vaccine Information Center is tracking this mandate as well as other proposed vaccine legislation in New York, which includes a proposed law to mandate the Gardasil HPV vaccine. Stay in touch through the NVIC Advocacy Portal on the progress of these bills, or other bills in your home state.