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Rutgers University students for now will have no choice but to comply with the university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, a federal appeals court ruled.
The Feb. 15 decision stemmed from an appeal filed in January 2023 by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and 13 students who sued Rutgers in August 2021, arguing the mandate violated the students’ “basic right to control our bodies.”
Julio C. Gomez, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, told The Defender that CHD and the students “are considering all options, including further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
In its ruling, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Rutgers had a rational basis for the mandate as part of efforts to curb the pandemic on campus.
“Rutgers had to decide in real time, on a changing landscape of executive pronouncements and medical judgments, how to sustain its educational mission while protecting the safety of its student body,” the court wrote.
According to the ruling, there is no “unqualified right to attend a university, let alone the university of one’s choice, without conditions.”
The court said the students failed “to offer any historical example to establish a ‘fundamental right’ to be free from a vaccine requirement at a public university.”
One of the three 3rd Circuit judges, Kent A. Jordan, agreed with most but not all of the majority ruling. He said Rutgers “failed to proffer a rational basis for distinguishing between students and University employees” in its initial decision to allow faculty and staff to remain unvaccinated in the fall of 2021 while compelling students to take the shots.
The school indicated “the stated concern from the very beginning was for ‘all persons at Rutgers University,’” not just students, he said.
Jordan also said the students should be able to amend their complaints as the circumstances around COVID-19 vaccine policies have shifted.
“[Rutgers] is not free to ignore the current state of the world, a point its own vaccine mandate policy expressly recognizes,” Jordan wrote. “I believe the Plaintiffs should be permitted to amend their complaint to test the rationality of leaving the mandate in place…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (childrenshealthdefense.org)
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