(LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sent a notice to West Virginia officials reminding them of their duties under both state and federal law to honor religious exemptions from vaccine requirements.
The August 21 letter, signed by OCR Director Paula Stannard, offers “assistance” and “support as West Virginia makes good faith efforts to ensure it and its health care providers comply with our nation’s robust protections for religion and conscience,” and provides an overview of relevant state and federal laws and rules pertaining to conscience rights in vaccination.
It noted that West Virginia participates in the federal Vaccines for Children Program (VCP), which mandates compliance “with applicable State law, including any such law relating to any religious or other exemption”; that West Virginia’s Equal Protection for Religion Act (EPRA) places strong limits on the state’s ability to “(s)ubstantially burden a person’s exercise of religion”; and that in January West Virginia Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed an executive order directing state officials to “establish an exemption process for those who want to send their children to public school, and who have religious or moral objections to receipt of one or more vaccines otherwise required by the State’s compulsory immunization law.”
Federally, the letter says, OCR also “enforces 26 conscience statutes applicable to various funding streams as well as 21 religious non-discrimination provisions in other federal statutes and regulations, which include a number of grant and block grant programs. Conscience statutes protect the exercise of conscience from discrimination by federal programs, state or local governments, or health care entities that receive certain streams of federal funding.”
The letter does not identify any controversy or violation that prompted it, but LifeSiteNews reported in July that a conflict arose between Morrisey and the state Department of Health over vaccine mandates in certain school districts that argued the governor’s order did not reflect an explicit obligation in state law.
A judge ruled in favor of three parents who had objected to vaccine mandates on their children, but the ruling only applied to those families, and the state legislature has so far failed to pass an explicit religious exemption into statute.
Meanwhile, the West Virginia chapter of the far-left American Civil Liberties Union is pursuing a restraining order against Morrisey’s order.
The past four years have seen a renewed critical look by many at conventional vaccines and the laws governing them, provoked by the federal government’s lack of transparency regarding the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines that were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.
Attempts to mandate the shots also reignited awareness of the use of cells derived from aborted babies in vaccine development and testing, raising moral objections. In many states and under the Biden administration, neither health nor moral concerns were enough to stop authorities from attempting to mandate the shots, further intensifying anti-vaccine sentiment.
