West Virginia’s highest court on Tuesday temporarily blocked a lower-court ruling that required all public schools to accept religious exemptions to the state’s compulsory vaccine law.
After the decision by the state’s top court, the state school board announced that it would direct county school boards to resume denying religious exemptions, which had been West Virginia policy until the lower-court ruling last week.
That vaccine law, one of the strictest in the country, had for nearly 90 years allowed exemptions only for medical reasons. Public health experts in the West Virginia credited the law with keeping the state free of outbreaks of infectious diseases like measles.
Attempts had been made to change the law to allow religious exemptions, including a push in the state Legislature earlier this year, but those efforts had fallen short.
In January, the governor, Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, issued an executive order declaring that under a religious freedom act passed in 2023, state health officials had to grant exemptions to families with religious objections. In the months after the executive order, hundreds of West Virginia families sought and received religious exemptions from the state’s department of health.
But the school board continued to deny these exemptions, insisting that the compulsory vaccine law superseded the governor’s executive order. Lawsuits were filed in counties around the state, with most judges siding with the school board.
Two such cases were consolidated in a trial in Raleigh County, in southern West Virginia. The judge in the Raleigh trial, Michael E. Froble, certified as a class all of the families who had sought religious exemptions to the law, meaning his eventual ruling would apply statewide. On Nov. 26, he issued his decision, ruling that under the religious freedom law, the state schools had to accept religious exemptions.
While lawyers for the school board had not yet appealed the judge’s ruling, they had appealed the class of certification several weeks ago. But the Supreme Court’s order on Tuesday put a stay on the whole matter pending a review of the case.
Drew Galang, a spokesman for Mr. Morrisey, said in a statement that the governor’s office was reviewing the order. “Whether we prevail in the courts or prevail with the Legislature, West Virginia will ultimately join the other 45 states that protect and defend religious liberty and will no longer be such an outlier on vaccine policy,” he said.
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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