Judge temporarily stops NYC anti-vaxxer parents from sending kids to school during measles outbreak

A judge has ruled against 22 New York parents who had challenged the Rockland County Health Department’s decision to keep their unvaccinated children out of school. According to area news outlet Lohud, U.S. District Court Judge Vincent Briccetti refused to issue “a temporary injunction that would have allowed 44 unvaccinated children to go back to class at the Green Meadow Waldorf School” in the town of Chestnut Ridge.

While this is not the end of the case, it does strike a blow against anti-vaxxer advocates, who had hoped that they could use the same religious objections to vaccines to immunize them from health officials’ obligations to the community at large. One school parent in favor of the decision told CBS News that she felt Judge Briccetti’s decision showed “that he’s trying to mitigate a potential further outbreak and he’s trying to keep everybody safe.” 

When the motion was filed by parents, Rockland County Attorney Thomas Humbach came out very hard against the anti-vaxxers, saying that the Supreme Court does not “import an absolute right in each person to be, at all time and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint; and, the right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.”