New York State Bar Association Passes Resolution Urging Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccinations

The New York State Bar Association passed a resolution over the weekend urging the state to enforce mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations on all New Yorkers when a shot becomes available, even if people object to it for “religious, philosophical or personal reasons,” Law.com reports

The Bar Association is taking the positions that if a COVID-19 vaccine fails at producing needed levels of immunity in the population under voluntary measures, the state of New York should usher in a mandate that all New Yorkers take the vaccine.

Additionally, the resolution also supports assessing the health threat in specific communities to potentially have the mandate be targeted in its scope.

Resolutions within the bar groups are a way of adopting official positions.

Law.com notes:

Still, the vote Saturday by the bar association, which with 70,000 members is one of the nation’s largest state bar groups, is significant. The association is considered to be influential both with lawmakers in Albany and Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office.

In addition, the bar association’s vaccine-mandate recommendation, made public Saturday in a news release, appears to be unique. Both bar association representatives and certain lawyers focused on vaccine law, considered to be a small field of law, say they aren’t aware of other organizations, in or outside of the legal world, taking a stance on the notion of a mandatory COVID-19 vaccine.

In a statement Saturday, Mary Beth Morrissey, chair of the bar association’s Health Law Section’s Task Force on COVID-19, said, “the authority of the state to respond to a public health crisis is well-established in constitutional law.”

“In balancing the protection of the public’s health and civil liberties, the Public Health Law recognizes that a person’s health can and does affect others,” she added.

The resolution passed Saturday follows a more controversial position taken by the bar’s Health Law Task Force in a May report that recommended mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for all Americans with no exemption for “religious, philosophical or personal reasons.”

The May report included no language about a mandate being limited to New York state residents or that the states should “consider” the positions, making it appear more forceful on its face. It also did no include any of the considerations of the Saturday resolution, such as exploring a voluntary method before a mandate.

“Mandatory vaccinations are supported by the authority of the state police power when the vaccinations are necessary to protect the health of the community,” the group wrote in the report, citing the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Jacobson v. Massachusetts of 1905.

They also pointed towards constitutional law-focused cases, including the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, saying that “constitutional challenges under the religious freedom clause under the First Amendment and under the substantive due process clause of the 14th Amendment have failed, when the individual interests are not strong enough to outweigh the public benefit.”

Jason Grant from Law.com mentions:

In turn, some attorneys who represent clients injured by vaccines or who’ve refused to take vaccines despite orders to do so, as well as with some law professors, have challenged the bar association group’s interpretation of constitutional-based case law regarding state police powers.

In addition to making arguments during interviews with the Law Journal in June, the attorneys and law professors also distinguished between how certain pertinent case law should be applied to adults versus children. And they laid out some policy-based arguments against the idea of making it mandatory for Americans to take a COVID-19 vaccine.

The passage of the resolution on Saturday comes in the wake of a New York State Department of Health announcement that laid out the framework for a vaccine administration program with the capability of reaching all New York residents interested in receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.

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Joseph Jankowski is an Editor-at-Large for Planet Free Will. His works have been published by major news publications such as ZeroHedge.com and Infowars.com.