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ICAN’s attorneys have filed yet another “Free the Five” lawsuit—the third one in California—this time challenging California’s refusal to provide a religious exemption for a child seeking to attend a private parochial school.
The lawsuit, filed on June 24, 2025, against California officials, challenges their enforcement of California’s draconian compulsory vaccination law for school attendance.
The plaintiff’s eighth-grade child is missing just one dose of the Tdap vaccine and one dose of the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine, due to the child’s parents’ sincerely held religious beliefs. Although the student excels academically and has been accepted at two private religious schools, both schools have no choice but to prohibit her from attending due to her vaccination status.
What makes excluding this child particularly absurd is that injecting a child with Tdap does not prevent transmission of the target pathogens, and she already has immunity to varicella as demonstrated by a titer test.
As in the landmark ICAN-funded Mississippi case, California is blatantly violating the First Amendment by providing secular exemptions (medical and IEP)—but not religious exemptions—to mandated school vaccines.
As the complaint also highlights: “The state has pitted the mother’s conscience and religious obligation to not fully vaccinate her daughter against her desire to provide her daughter with a faith-based education. And in doing so, it has placed an unconstitutional burden on her religious exercise.”
Parents should not have to violate their religious convictions in order to comply with their legal obligation to educate their child. ICAN will not rest until every child in this country can attend school. We could not be prouder to take this next step in our quest to “Free the Five,” down from “Free the Six” after the massive win freeing Mississippi.
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