Three one-room Amish schools in upstate New York already owe the state $118,000 for letting unvaccinated children sit in class. The open question is not whether that bill exists. It does. The open question is whether New York can keep adding $2,000 a child, every school day, until a small farm community either vaccinates or leaves.
A fine that fits on one page, and a threat that does not
The schools are not city systems. Dygert Road, Pleasant View (also called Twin Mountain), and Shady Lane sit in Amish settlements around Clymer, Heuvelton, and Canajoharie. They take no state or federal school money. The children in the rooms are Amish children. That is the point of the schools.
After a hearing on May 2, 2022, an administrative law judge recommended no money penalty, in part because notice had gone out online to families who do not live online. On December 15, 2022, then Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett set that advice aside and imposed the full amounts: $52,000, $46,000, and $20,000. Counsel for the families, Aaron Siri, later told the New York Post that the only way to pay was if the state took the land.
Public Health Law section 2164 is the lever. After 14 days in any public, private, or church school, a child must show proof of the state shot list — measles, polio, whooping cough, chickenpox, and the rest of a schedule that runs to roughly two dozen doses. A doctor may excuse a child if a shot would be medically harmful. A parent may not excuse a child for faith. Each violation can draw a civil fine of up to $2,000.
Here is the part headlines often blur. The $118,000 is the sum already imposed: 59 children, $2,000 each, one round of enforcement. The “every single school day” line is also real, but it is the state’s theory of the statute. Footnote 9 of the Second Circuit opinion, as quoted in the families’ September 2026 petition, records New York’s view that each day each unvaccinated student attends is a separate violation and a separate $2,000 fine. One more day of school for all 59 children is another $118,000 of exposure. A full school year stops being a fine and becomes a closing notice.
Whether Albany has already stacked those daily sums on top of the 2022 order is a different question. The public papers used here show the $118,000 judgment and the per-day reading of the law. They do not show a collected six-figure bill for every morning bell since 2022. One number is a debt. The other is a weapon still in the holster, or partly drawn.
The Amish in New York are facing massive fines over Democrats vaccine mandates. Amish families will likely have to flee the state after losing the religious exemption they’ve had for decades Amish private schools are being hit with crushing fines for not having students vaccinated The fines are roughly $2,000 per noncompliant children, multiplied by the number of school days 3 small schools were sited, of the 59 children already cited, one more day of attendance brought the total fines to $118,000, they say they can’t pay it New York Democrats position is that every day an unvaccinated child attends school there will be a fresh violation worth up to $2,000
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) October 3, 2026
How a 50-year opt-out ended in a week
From 1966 until June 13, 2019, New York let a parent claim a “genuine and sincere religious belief” against school shots. In the 2017–18 school year, state health officials counted 26,217 students using that opt-out in schools and child-care programs.
The repeal did not start in an Amish schoolhouse. It started in a measles outbreak that hit New York hardest in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and in Rockland County. By the day of the vote, the nation had passed 1,000 measles cases, the most since the early 1990s. Rockland alone had 266 confirmed cases. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill the day lawmakers passed it. He said religious freedom did not outweigh the risk. California had dropped its religious opt-out in 2015 after the Disneyland outbreak. Maine moved the same year as New York. A handful of states now have no religious exemption. Most still do. The families’ petition says 45 states and the District of Columbia still allow one.
Floor debate was not polite. Assembly sponsor Jeffrey Dinowitz called a religious objection “utter garbage” and said he knew of nothing in the Torah, the Bible, or the Koran against vaccination. State Senator James Skoufis called the exemption “made up” and “fake,” because, he said, no religion objects to vaccines. Those lines are in the legislative record and in the court papers. A law can be neutral on its face and still be born in a room where the people voting called the belief fake.
The Amish objection is not a slogan invented in 2019. In a handwritten letter in the administrative file, school representative Ezra Wengerd thanked New York for years of peace, then wrote that God asks the community to put trust in Him, “which is in conflict to put our trust in vaccines,” and that they are told not to be conformed to the world. Other papers say members would choose prison or death before breaking that rule. A reader can think the belief is wrong. The record does not support the claim that it is new, or cooked up to dodge a form.
What the courts have actually decided
The families sued in June 2023. Plaintiffs are Joseph Miller, Jonas Smucker, Ezra Wengerd, and the three schools. They pointed to Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), which let Amish parents pull children from school after eighth grade for religious reasons. A district judge dismissed the case. The Second Circuit agreed in March 2025. The Supreme Court wiped that ruling and sent it back to be read again in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), which sided with parents who did not want young children in lessons that cut against their faith. On June 30, 2026, Judges José A. Cabranes, Richard C. Wesley, and Eunice C. Lee affirmed again. The shot law, they said, is neutral and applies to everyone in school, medical excuses aside, so the state need only show a rational reason. Stopping catching diseases is that reason. The burden is not “of the same character” as in Yoder or Mahmoud, so the harder test does not apply. Employment Division v. Smith (1990) is the backbone of that view.
On September 28, 2026, the families filed a new petition, No. 26-438. First Liberty Institute, with Siri & Glimstad and others, asked the high court to take the case again. Hiram Sasser said the community “wants to be left alone to live out their faith just like they have for 200 years.” A lawyer on that side told Just the News that if New York wins, “the Amish will be forced to flee the state.” The petition also says New York has threatened these schools with ruin while, by the state’s own estimates, as many as 100,000 noncompliant students remain in public schools. If that figure is even roughly right, enforcement has been a spotlight, not a blanket.
Earlier Planet Today coverage of the June loss is here: Amish Families Lose Vaccine Exemption Case. The March 2025 stage of the same fight is here: Amish Children Facing Forced Vaccinations in NY.
The health claim that outruns the data
Alternative outlets have paired this court fight with a second claim: that Amish children are the healthiest in the world, and that a Vaccine Safety Research Foundation review found Covid deaths in Amish communities 90 times lower than in masked, locked-down, boosted America. The court case does not need that claim. The claim also does not survive contact with the studies that name their methods.
The 90-times figure traces to presentations and posts associated with Steve Kirsch, who funds the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation. Researchers who count Amish deaths have not found a published VSRF study that establishes it. A 2021 paper and a June 2023 follow-up in the Journal of Religion and Health used obituaries in The Budget, a long-running Amish and Mennonite paper, because death certificates do not list religion. In 2020, before shots were widely available, excess deaths in those communities were in the same range as the country’s, with a sharp November spike. After shots rolled out, excess deaths in the wider public fell. In the Amish and Mennonite sample they stayed high, and in some months rose. The authors’ reading was that these groups largely met the virus by infection, and paid a death price for that path.
A Penn State study the same year found Amish-populated counties less vaccinated against Covid than other counties, but not unvaccinated. A 2021 survey in Holmes County, Ohio, found 59 percent of responding parents did not vaccinate their children at all, up from 14 percent a decade earlier. Fear of side effects was the top reason. Special-needs children were more likely to be vaccinated than healthy ones. The Amish are not a single switch set to off.
Autism, cancer, and diabetes are not absent either. A 2010 screen in Indiana and Holmes County found autism in about 1 in 271 children, lower than the U.S. rate then (about 1 in 91), and not zero. Amish children leave school after eighth grade and are less often sent for a formal diagnosis, so the gap mixes true difference with under-counting. A small set of 18th-century founding families also raises the rate of certain inherited diseases. Farm life and plain food sit in the mix. None of that is a clean test of shots alone.
Mass media often stops at “the court upheld public health” and skips the per-day fine and the selective-enforcement claim. Alternative media often stops at “90 times safer” and skips the excess-death papers. Both omissions leave a reader less able to judge.
The other side of the ledger: measles still kills
None of the above makes measles a rumor. In August 2026, Pennsylvania health officials confirmed two measles deaths in Lancaster County, the first U.S. measles deaths of the year and the first in that state in 35 years. Both people were unvaccinated. Lancaster holds one of the largest Amish populations in the country. By late summer the nation had logged more than 2,770 confirmed measles cases in 2026, above the full-year 2025 total, and about 94 percent of cases were in people unvaccinated or of unknown status. Planet Today reported that cluster here: Two Measles Deaths in Pennsylvania Mark First US Fatalities of 2026.
That is the state’s strongest ground, and it does not depend on calling anyone’s faith garbage. Measles spreads by air. Complications include pneumonia and brain swelling. A community with low coverage can become the place an imported case settles. Sweden saw a related pattern in August 2026, when cases tied to a folk festival clustered in unvaccinated children: Sweden Measles Outbreak After Urkult Festival Hits 21 Cases. The Amish reply is narrower than “measles is a myth.” Their schools are small, rural, and closed to outsiders. The 2018–19 outbreak that killed the New York exemption was not an Amish outbreak. A rule written for a dense city neighborhood now lands on a one-room school the state does not fund. The Second Circuit treated that as fair. The petition asks the Supreme Court to call it a mismatch of constitutional size.
What neither press corps likes to print
A few items sit between the lines of both versions.
First, the daily fine changes the moral math. A one-time $2,000 penalty is a hard spanking. A fresh $2,000 every day a child comes to school is an eviction. Families who will not vaccinate cannot catch up unless they close the school or leave. That is why counsel talks about land and about leaving the state in the same breath.
Second, the 2019 repeal was sold as an emergency response to a real outbreak, then left in place by Governor Kathy Hochul with no sunset. The Amish had the opt-out for half a century. The change was political as well as medical, which is why the floor quotes still matter.
Third, “Amish do not vaccinate” is too clean. Surveys show a large and growing refusal, a minority who accept some shots, and higher uptake when a child already has special needs.
Fourth, each press corps is protecting a different embarrassment. Health-freedom outlets skip excess Covid deaths in low-vaccination plain communities. Public-health outlets skip a state that told a hearing officer to drop the fine, then imposed it on people whose notice was a webpage. Readers who want a wider look at how official Covid practice met families can compare what 583 households told a senator about hospital protocols.
The choice, stated without a cheer
If the Supreme Court denies review, the June 30 ruling stands. The three schools remain under the $118,000 order. The per-day reading of section 2164 remains available to the health department. Medical exemptions remain. Religious exemptions do not. Parents can teach at home outside the statute’s school trigger, vaccinate against conscience, or, as their lawyers warn, leave New York.
If the Court takes the case, it will have to say whether Smith still lets a state price a long-held religious practice out of a private school, or whether Yoder and Mahmoud now require a harder look when the burden falls on a community that has organized its whole life around separation. That ruling would reach past Clymer. Every state that has already dropped the religious opt-out, and every legislature thinking about it, would read the result as a green light or a stop sign.
Nothing in the record makes the Amish a medical control group for the rest of the country. Nothing in the record makes $2,000 a day a light touch. The families say the conflict is not a chart. It is whether a people can raise children by an old rule of conscience. New York has answered, for now, with a judgment, a repealed exemption, and a meter that runs when the school bell does. The Supreme Court has the petition. It has not yet answered.
Sources
- Second Circuit opinion, Miller v. McDonald, No. 24-681, June 30, 2026: Justia
- Petition for certiorari, No. 26-438, filed September 28, 2026: U.S. Supreme Court docket PDF
- First Liberty Institute, October 2, 2026: New York Amish ask the Supreme Court again
- Just the News, September 29, 2026: Amish mandate petition
- Fine breakdown and hearing dates: Juicy Ecumenism, September 10, 2026
- Bloomberg Law, June 30, 2026: Amish lose bid to reinstate the exemption
- Repeal, June 13, 2019: New York Times · Associated Press
- Excess deaths, Journal of Religion and Health, 2023: Pathways to Immunity
- AFP on the 90-times claim: Fact Check
- Holmes County survey, Vaccine, 2021: Vaccination patterns revisited
Original source and disclaimer
Original prompt source: An unbylined compilation circulated under the headline “Big Pharma Declares War on ‘World’s Healthiest Children’: Amish Forced to Vaccinate Kids or Pay Massive Daily Fines,” supplied without a stable outlet URL or date. Closely related reporting appears at Independent Minute, September 12, 2026, and in the New York Post account cited by First Liberty. This article treats court opinions, the Supreme Court petition, and peer-reviewed papers as the primary record.
Note for fact-checkers: Planet Today is a news and commentary desk, not a court or a health agency. The $118,000 order, the school names, the June 30, 2026 holding, and the September 28, 2026 petition are taken from public court documents and can be checked at the links above. The per-day $2,000 exposure is New York’s stated reading of the statute in those papers, not a second collected judgment documented here. The “90 times lower Covid death” claim is reported as a claim only; published excess-death research does not support it. Health differences in Amish children have more than one proposed cause. Nothing here is medical advice or a prediction of how the Supreme Court will rule.
Original article: Amish Schools Face $118,000 Fines as Vaccine Case Returns to Court on Planet Today 🚀
Automatically republished from the main blog.