West Virginia courts and public policy leaders continue to haggle over the state’s mandatory vaccination law. State Code 16-3-4 requires that children be immunized before admission to public, private and parochial schools. The law allows for a medical exemption, but not a religious one.
Earlier this year, the state Legislature failed to pass a bill that would have significantly expanded the exemptions to include religious or philosophical reasons. Governor Morrisey continues to try to block the vaccine requirement by use of executive order, but the state Board of Education has told schools to follow the existing law mandating immunizations.
In Raleigh County, three parents have won a temporary court order preventing their children from the compulsory school vaccinations with the religious argument that “God’s perfect design” trumps a man-made vaccine requirement. One parent said that “through prayer she does not believe God wants her to vaccinate her children with the required booster vaccine.”
Chris Wiest, an attorney representing the parents, said on MetroNews Talkline that the parents’ religious objections are protected by the state’s Equal Protection for Religion Act. “They’ve got sincerely held beliefs against vaccination,” he said.
This is a complicated issue. So what happens when man’s law and the people’s courts try to strike a balance? Well, then you’ve got a tangle like West Virginia now faces.
Religion is deeply personal and cloaked in mystery. Who can know God’s desires but through faith? A 2022 Gallup poll found that 81 percent of adults believe in God or a higher power, and about half of them believe God hears prayers and intervenes.
The argument by the Raleigh County families is based on the idea that West Virginia’s religious protection law is all-powerful, that a religious belief should outweigh other laws that individuals believe violate their faith.
This is flawed reasoning.
Disease is communicable. It spreads from mouth to mouth and hand to hand, sometimes with results that end lives. What if a parent refused all medical care for a sick child for religious reasons, arguing that God would do the healing? Laws vary from state to state, but there are lots of examples where parents have been convicted of child neglect or even manslaughter when they attempted to use religion as a defense for denying medical care to a child.
The parents may have had sincerely held religious beliefs, but sincerity does not outweigh legality. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1990 case of Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, the court said, “We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the state is free to regulate.”
West Virginia’s religious freedom law says the state cannot “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless that burden is “essential to further a compelling government interest” and “is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling government interest.”
Those are key points since it is self-evident and court-affirmed that the government has a responsibility to protect its citizens, particularly in cases of public health. That responsibility can trump or modify an individual right. In the case of vaccines, the government has a compelling interest to prevent the spread of harmful diseases. Herd immunity is an overriding interest.
The West Virginia Legislature passed the Equal Protection for Religion Act in 2023, and it was modeled after the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act that was passed by Congress in 1993. Individuals have used the federal law successfully to protect the exercise of their faith.
But those practices associated with their First Amendment right of religious freedom are different from sincere, but overly broad, arguments of “God told me.” The West Virginia Legislature may one day include a religious exemption to mandatory childhood vaccines, but it will have to show how the immunization requirement infringes on religious practices and why that practice is more important that the compelling government interest of protecting its citizens.