Amicus Supports New York Amish Families Challenging School Vaccine Mandate

NEWPORT BEACH, CALIFORNIA / ACCESS Newswire / September 4, 2025 / Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization has filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Amish families' right of informed refusal to vaccinate their schoolchildren in the case Miller v. McDonald (United States Supreme Court Case Number 25-133). PIC was founded in 2015 in California-after legislators there similarly denied parents their right of informed refusal to vaccinate their schoolchildren-and provides the Court with critical infectious disease risk facts from its newly published Silver Booklet. Specifically, the landmark reference work concludes that for normal-risk U.S. children the vaccine safety data is inconclusive, and vaccines may cause more death or permanent disability than the diseases they target. Therefore, mandated vaccines have not been scientifically substantiated…which raises grave ethical concerns for current public health policies.

According to the Amish families' petition for writ of certiorari, seeking to uphold freedom of religion:

"For more than 50 years, New York permitted both medical and religious exemptions to its school vaccine requirement. But in 2019, the New York Legislature categorically eliminated religious exemptions…[b]ut they kept in place a regime of medical exemptions. And they continued to permit nonvaccination of nonstudents (such as teachers) and children outside of school.

This makes New York an outlier. Forty-six other States (and the District of Columbia) allow religious exemptions to their school vaccine requirements. In this case, New York has imposed existential penalties on three Old Order Amish schools for failing to require vaccines that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. These private schools are in rural Amish communities on private Amish land and are attended only by Amish children."

According to PIC's general counsel Greg Glaser, this case "satisfies all the necessary criteria for certiorari, and the lower court plainly violated the Supreme Court's free exercise jurisprudence since at least 2018. Federal courts in different parts of the country have been reaching different conclusions on the issue of religious and medical exemptions to vaccine mandates for school attendance. Several equal protection cases have moved through the court system with situations where a school allows secular (medical) exemptions but unfairly disallows religious exemptions, and a court in Mississippi recently found such inequality unlawful and upheld the right to religious exemption."

In the amicus brief, PIC notes: "Indeed, the only vaccine mandate upheld by this Supreme Court (a Medicare worker vaccine mandate in 2022) allowed for religious exemptions…And further, since then, legal commentators have been almost uniformly waiting for this Supreme Court to make explicit equal protection for the unvaccinated just like this Court has done so in similar situations."

The PIC amicus brief compares disease risks versus vaccine risks in normal-risk children and informs the Supreme Court that the "scientific data currently available demonstrate that vaccines mandated for school attendance have not been proven safer than the infections they were designed to prevent."

SOURCE: Physicians for Informed Consent