Second Supreme Court Amicus Brief in Less Than a Month Supports Amish Families in New York, With Potential Implications for School Vaccination Mandates Nationwide
NEWPORT BEACH, CA / ACCESS Newswire / November 3, 2026 / Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization, has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Miller v. McDonald (No. 26-438), continuing its efforts to uphold informed consent, medical ethics, and constitutional protections for families.
The case concerns Amish families challenging New York's 2019 elimination of religious exemptions to school vaccination requirements. The law threatens their ability to educate their children in private Amish community schools, which they consider essential to their religious upbringing. This PIC filing follows its October 2026 Supreme Court amicus brief in Perry v. Marteney, involving a West Virginia family whose daughter was excluded from virtual public school due to missing one dose of the MMR vaccine and one dose of the chickenpox vaccine.
The implications of these cases extend beyond New York and West Virginia. California, Connecticut, and Maine have also eliminated religious vaccine exemptions to both public and private school vaccine mandates, and related legal challenges have been filed in those states. Supreme Court decisions in these cases could help establish how such vaccine mandates are evaluated nationwide. Although both cases involve religious exemptions, PIC advocates for informed consent for all families, including those with religious and nonreligious objections. PIC is also seeking opportunities to advance the rights of parents with nonreligious objections to vaccine mandates.
PIC's brief draws on its 2025 scientific reference work, Vaccines and the Diseases They Target: An Analysis of Vaccine Safety and Epidemiology (the Silver Booklet), to examine the scientific evidence and medical ethics underlying New York's vaccination requirements.
The Silver Booklet reports that approximately 99.99% of measles cases in the United States fully recovered before the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963. The brief also cites Dr. Alexander Langmuir, the first and longtime Chief Epidemiologist of what is now the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from 1949 to 1970, who wrote in his 1962 article The Importance of Measles as a Health Problem, "Thus, in the United States measles is a disease whose importance is not to be measured by total days disability or number of deaths . . . ."
Regarding vaccine risks, the Silver Booklet cites a peer-reviewed JAMA study involving more than half a million Danish children that found nearly three times the risk of fever-related seizures in the two weeks following measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination. Extrapolating from these findings, PIC estimates approximately 5,700 additional fever-related seizures among U.S. children annually, based on a risk of about 1 in 640 vaccinated children.
"Public-health concerns do not justify disregarding established principles of medical ethics or the constitutional protections guaranteed by the First Amendment," said Shira Miller, M.D., founder and president of PIC.
PIC opposes mandatory vaccination laws, particularly those that restrict children's access to education, maintaining that medical decisions should be guided by sound scientific evidence, established principles of medical ethics, and informed consent, while respecting applicable constitutional protections.
Prepared and filed on PIC's behalf by Schaerr | Jaffe LLP, the brief urges the Supreme Court to review the case and reverse the decision upholding New York's elimination of religious exemptions.
PIC's continued participation in Supreme Court cases reflects its longstanding commitment to safeguarding informed consent in vaccination. Those who wish to support PIC's ongoing educational and legal efforts can learn more at physiciansforinformedconsent.org.
About Physicians for Informed Consent
Founded in 2015, Physicians for Informed Consent is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization that unites doctors who support health freedom in vaccination and educates the public about disease risks versus vaccine risks. physiciansforinformedconsent.org
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SOURCE: Physicians for Informed Consent
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire:
https://www.accessnewswire.com/newsroom/en/education/physicians-for-informed-consent-files-another-supreme-court-brief-defending-parental-righ-1245967
