Monday, March 11, 2019
Rockland health dept. sued over order barring unvaccinated students
The parents of 100 students at the Green Meadow Waldorf School have filed a lawsuit against the Rockland health department and its commissioner challenging an order barring the children from school because they haven't been vaccinated against measles.
The lawsuit states that Commissioner Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert's order, imposed during the county's continuing measles outbreak, violates the families' religious objections to vaccinations and is unnecessary because the cases have been largely confined to insular Hasidic Jewish communities.
The federal lawsuit filed by some 20 parents states that throughout the measles outbreak that started last fall, no cases have been reported among any of the Chestnut Ridge school's excluded children, their families or in the Fellowship Community that surrounds it.
"The medical benefits of the vaccination are debatable," state the court papers seeking a judge's order to allow the children to go back to school and compensatory damages for the violation of the families' constitutional rights.
Rockland is experiencing the longest outbreak in the state since measles was officially eliminated from the United States in 2000, with a total of 145 cases reported since last October. Three more suspected cases are under investigation.
The outbreak, which has mostly affected the Orthodox Jewish community in Spring Valley, Monsey and New Square, led Ruppert on Dec. 5 to impose an order that schools in the 10952 and 10977 ZIP codes with vaccination rates under 95 percent must keep unvaccinated children from attending.
The exclusion — which includes Chestnut Ridge — ends when there are no new cases in that area for 21 days, but because of the continuing increase in the number of measles infections, the exclusion time can be increased to 42 days.
Green Meadow's court papers, however, state that the immunization rate of 95 percent is "wholly incompatible with the number of families attending GMWS with bona fide religious exemptions to immunization, and, its implementation effectively excluded large numbers of children from continuing their education."
Green Meadow's students are "97 percent immune from the disease by all accounts," according to the court papers filed by attorney Michael Sussman.
Rockland County Attorney Thomas Humbach said Monday that Ruppert "has every legal right, under New York State's Public Health Law and the County's Sanitary Code, to take every necessary step to stop the outbreak of measles in this County." He noted the steps were taken in consultation with state health department epidemiological experts.
Humbach said the U.S. Supreme Court and Constitution hold that "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."
Waldorf schools are non-sectarian and non-denominational.
Green Meadow, which educates about 300 children in nursery school through grade 12, adheres to Rudolf Steiner's teachings of anthroposophy, which is "the belief that humanity has the wisdom to transform itself and the world, through one's own spiritual development," according to the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America.
Humbach said the families' reasons for religious exemptions to vaccinations "run the gamut from references to organized Christian doctrine to a generalized spirituality. As the case progresses, we expect several of the exemptions to be challenged, as not evincing a sincere religious belief against vaccination."
Green Meadow's lawsuit states that the exclusion order, which has caused "irreparable harm," "is nothing more than an overbroad attempt to force parents with strongly held religious beliefs to vaccinate their children," the lawsuit states.
It continues: "The children have been consigned to a difficult and anxiety filled existence not knowing when they will be able to return to school."
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