Whether a COVID vaccine mandate that provides no religious exemption while allowing medical exemptions violates the Free Exercise Clause

QUESTIONS PRESENTED Using its emergency regulatory powers, New York has imposed a COVID vaccine mandate on healthcare workers, but provided no religious exemption. Workers who are unvaccinated for religious reasons are excluded from the workplace. By contrast, healthcare workers remaining unvaccinated for medical reasons are permitted to continue in-person healthcare work— often in the same facilities, doing the same jobs, and carrying the same claimed risk as the terminated religious objectors. New York even allows vaccinated workers with active and symptomatic infections to continue working, but not healthy religious objectors. New York’s approach deviates from virtually every other state and the federal government, which continue to allow unvaccinated religious objectors to provide in-person healthcare. The questions presented are: 1. Whether an administrative rule that targets and forbids religious conduct, while permitting otherwise identical secular conduct, is permissible under the Free Exercise Clause. 2. Whether Employment Division v. Smith should be overruled.