NEW YORK — Another legal challenge to New York City’s vaccination mandate for Education Department staffers has fallen flat.
Manhattan federal Judge Mary Kay Vyscokil denied a request Tuesday for a temporary restraining order to overturn the DOE’s vaccine requirement, which took effect Monday.
The request was filed by a group of DOE staffers who have opposed the mandate, and their lawsuit will get a full hearing later this month.
The staffers argued that the city’s process for granting exemptions to the vaccine mandate based on religious beliefs is too narrow and violated their First Amendment rights.
Vyscokil noted that the process for approving religious exemptions was decided by independent arbitrator overseeing a dispute between the city and the teachers union.
In her decision to deny the temporary restraining order, Vyscokil said that the plaintiffs had failed to show a likelihood that their case would succeed, noting there is substantial legal precedent supporting vaccine mandates.
She added that the staffers didn’t demonstrate that they would suffer “irreparable harm” from the DOE’s vaccine mandate. DOE staffers who refused to get vaccinated were placed on unpaid leave starting Friday, but Vyscokil ruled that the damages caused by going on unpaid leave don’t qualify as “irreparable.”
She added that the staffers’ decision to wait until after the mandate took effect to file for an injunction “undercut” their argument about the lasting harms of the inoculation order.
Attempts by municipal labor unions and a separate group of city educators to overturn the mandate in state and federal courts have already proven unsuccessful. Last week, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied an emergency appeal from a similar suit filed by a group of city teachers seeking to block the city’s mandate.
But Vyscokil conceded that the question of if, and how, to grant religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate “may well raise substantial constitutional issues” in future litigation.
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