Richard H. Hughes, IV, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in The Los Angeles Times, in “California Has a Strict Vaccine Mandate. Will It Survive the Trump Administration?” by Jenny Gold.
Following is an excerpt:
The volatile landscape for vaccine mandates
Since the COVID pandemic, states across the country have experienced a decline in the rate of kindergartners who are fully vaccinated, and an increase in parents seeking exemptions, according to a recent report from KFF, a nonprofit health research group.
Last week, Florida’s surgeon general announced the state would no longer require children to be vaccinated in order to attend public school, something that all 50 states currently require.
Threats are also mounting from Washington, D.C. The GRACE Act, which was introduced in Congress last month by Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL), would withhold federal education funding from any state that does not offer parents the right to opt out of vaccines for religious reasons.
The bill, if eventually approved and signed into law by President Trump, would also explicitly prevent states, including California, from requiring any documentation from parents to prove a sincere religious conviction against vaccines.
“Freedom of speech and religion is the most sacred right guaranteed under our Constitution,” Rep. Steube said in a statement to The Times. “No student or their family should ever be coerced into sacrificing their faith or jumping through loopholes to comply with a vaccine requirement.”
Last week, Kennedy weighed in on the issue. He said in a letter that if a state already has statutes on the books protecting religious freedom or personal conscience in any form, those laws must extend to vaccine opt-outs. If states with such laws do not comply with the directive, they could lose funding for the federal Vaccines for Children Program, which funds vaccines for low-income children.
California does not have religious freedom or personal conscience statues. But 29 other states have passed religious freedom laws, and 18 have parental rights laws, which legal experts said could be used by the federal government to compel states to offer vaccine opt-outs.
“States have the authority to balance public health goals with individual freedom, and honoring those decisions builds trust” Kennedy wrote. “Protecting both public health and personal liberty is how we restore faith in our institutions and Make America Healthy Again.”
Several legal experts said the approach was alarming.
“I’m very concerned that this is part of a playbook where they’re going on a state and federal level, to push on these laws,” said Richard Hughes, a lawyer with Epstein Becker Green in Washington, D.C., who has been working on vaccine law for two decades. “This is a massive federal overreach, and it’s incredibly inappropriate.”
