The Supreme Court on June 29 declined to hear Doe v. Hochul, a case brought by New York healthcare workers who lost their jobs for refusing the COVID-19 shots.
Three justices — Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito — dissented from that decision, arguing the case raised a significant legal question the Court should have answered.
Background
When New York first introduced its vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, it included two exemptions: one for medical reasons, another for religious objections. That changed when Kathy Hochul became governor. She kept the medical exemption but eliminated the religious one.
One of the plaintiffs is a Christian Scientist who had worked at New York-Presbyterian for ten years. His religious beliefs prohibit vaccination, and he had specific objections to the COVID-19 shots tied to their use of fetal cell lines connected to abortion.
For years, his employer had granted him a religious exemption from its internal vaccine policy. Once the state eliminated that option, the hospital required him to get vaccinated. He proposed an alternative — regular testing and wearing a mask — but the hospital declined and fired him.
Doe and other plaintiffs sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law that protects employees from being fired over their religious beliefs unless accommodating those beliefs would cause their employer “undue hardship.”
What the Lower Courts Decided
The case worked its way up through the federal courts. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed the plaintiffs had a legitimate religious discrimination claim. But it ruled their employers still had a valid legal defense, because granting the religious accommodation would have required violating the state’s vaccine mandate — and that, the court found, counted as an “undue hardship” under Title VII.
The same court reinforced that position in a later case, ruling that this defense applies even when the state law being followed is unconstitutional as it’s applied to the employee.
The Dissent
In a dissent joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, Gorsuch argued the Court was passing up an important opportunity to resolve a real conflict in how federal civil rights law is applied.
His central argument is that a state law shouldn’t be able to override a federal civil rights protection. He pointed to language in the Civil Rights Act itself, which says state laws that conflict with the Act’s purposes should be treated as invalid, and which shields employers and employees from being penalized under state law for following federal anti-discrimination requirements. To Gorsuch, that shows Congress already anticipated conflicts like this one and intended for federal protections to win out.
He also drew on how courts have handled similar disputes under other civil rights laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Fair Housing Act. In those cases, courts — including the Second Circuit itself in earlier rulings — have generally rejected the idea that a state law can determine what counts as a “reasonable accommodation” under federal law.
Gorsuch’s question was: if state law doesn’t get the final say on what’s reasonable, why should it get the final say on what’s an “undue hardship,” which is essentially the other side of the same legal test?
His broader concern is about precedent. If a state law can automatically excuse an employer from federal civil rights obligations, Gorsuch warned, then states could effectively sidestep federal protections in any area — Title VII, the ADA, the Fair Housing Act — just by passing a law that conflicts with them.
“Put simply, addressing this case is well worth our time—and correcting its error should have been an easy business,” Gorsuch wrote.
AFLDS’s Role in the Case
On June 4, 2025, Dr. Simone Gold and the AFLDS legal team filed an amici curiae brief supporting the petitioners and urging the Supreme Court to take the case and reverse the Second Circuit.
The brief challenged not just how the lower courts handled the religious discrimination question, but how they handled the underlying facts.
Both the district court and the Second Circuit had treated the claim that the COVID-19 shots were “safe and effective” as established fact — something beyond reasonable dispute — and used that as part of the foundation for their rulings. AFLDS argued this was a serious legal error. The safety and effectiveness of the COVID shots are very much in dispute — pointing, among other things, to the CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which has logged millions of adverse reactions attributed to the shots.
They should have heard it! I agree with the 3 wise dissenters!
The Supremes declining to review Doe v. Hochul could not have been more anti-1A. How was using a mere EUA to force a chemical stew into a human being any more an “undue hardship” than weekly testing? What could violate a human right more than denying an American the right to follow religious convictions?
What are the odds the exemption would have been granted for the churches of Black Lives Matter and Islam?