West Virginia’s new governor, Governor Patrick Morrisey, signed an Executive Order on January 14, 2025, formally providing the right to religious exemptions from mandatory vaccines for school children in his state—a historic feat following two ICAN-funded litigations. West Virginia now joins the other 45 states that recognize Americans’ inherent religious freedom!
Just 24 hours after his inauguration, Governor Morrisey issued an Executive Order providing a process for students to request religious or moral exemptions to the vaccines mandated for attendance at state schools or state-regulated childcare centers.
The Executive Order provides guidance on West Virginia’s “Equal Protection for Religion Act,” signed into law in 2023, which mirrors the First Amendment and provides that the state may not “burden a person’s exercise of freedom of religion.” The recent Executive Order now expands upon the Act, recognizing that West Virginians do have the First Amendment right to object to vaccines on religious or moral grounds, and directs that a process be implemented to request an exemption. If this sounds familiar, that is because it is similar to what the court in Mississippi held after ICAN brought suit there and was able to restore religious exemptions in that state.
On the heels of restoring the religious exemption to students in Mississippi, ICAN’s attorneys, funded by ICAN, filed two lawsuits on behalf of West Virginia parents seeking to obtain religious exemptions to vaccination for their school children. Although both are still in active litigation, both have already had early successes. In one case, ICAN’s attorneys recently won out against the state’s attempts to get the case diverted to state court. In the other, ICAN’s attorneys won a preliminary injunction that allowed a religious couple to continue sending their young unvaccinated child to her remote school. Absurdly, West Virginia challenged her attendance even though her schooling program was exclusively online. The Executive Order recognized these instances, stating that “the compulsory immunization law [was] still being used to bar West Virginians with religious [] objections to vaccines from sending their children to state schools.”
ICAN is very pleased with the Executive Order and the Governor’s actions as this is the same outcome that was sought in the lawsuits: a win for medical freedom and informed consent. This means that there are just four more states to go—New York, California, Connecticut, and Maine—in our “Free the Five” initiative to restore religious exemptions in every U.S. state!
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