by WorldTribune Staff, November 1, 2026 — Real World News
In 2019, New York repealed non-medical (religious and philosophical) exemptions for school vaccinations.
Three small, one-room Amish schools upstate (Dygert Road, Pleasant View/Twin Mountain, and Shady Lane) and their surrounding families have refused to comply, arguing that mandatory vaccinations violate their deeply held religious beliefs and separation from the modern world.
State health officials have moved to penalize non-compliance, issuing fines that total over $118,000 across the schools, calculating potential penalties up to $2,000 per unvaccinated student for each day out of compliance.
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the Amish families and upheld the state’s mandates as neutral and generally applicable laws, the Amish legal team filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court in late September 2026, asking the high court to force New York to restore religious exemptions.
New York has the nation’s fifth largest Amish population, with an estimated 25,000 individuals. Their lawyers say if they are unsuccessful at the Supreme Court, they are leaving the state for good; possibly destined for Pennsylvania, which has the largest Amish population in the country at around 95,000.
Why are New York state authorities and what critics call medical cartels attacking one of America’s healthiest communities?
Attorney Brad Geyer, who has legal experience and advocacy in the Amish community, told SafeBlood that there are serious concerns about government interference with religious freedom, traditional agriculture, medical autonomy, and informed consent.
Geyer questions why authorities continue to target communities that prioritize independent farming, traditional food production, and personal medical decisions, and challenged the motivations behind what he describes as an increasingly aggressive regulatory system.
SafeBlood’s R. Clinton Ohlers noted that the reason for hostility against the Amish “is not a mystery. The Amish represent a living, thriving control group.
In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, home to roughly 45,000 Amish residents, the community rejected lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing, and mRNA injections. The result was an early achievement of natural herd immunity and a Covid fatality rate roughly 90 times lower than the national average, recording just five deaths across the entire pandemic.”
Additionally:
• Chronic developmental and autoimmune conditions are virtually non existent within unvaxxed Amish communities.
• Rates of autism remain essentially undetectable, estimated at roughly 1 in 15,000 compared to the national average of 1 in 31, with the rare cases occurring almost exclusively among adopted children who received vaccinations prior to joining the community.
• Similar disparities exist for childhood asthma, allergies, diabetes, and neurodevelopmental disorders, proving that an unvaxed, natural lifestyle consistently yields superior health outcomes.
Ohlers continued: “Rather than studying this extraordinary health profile, public health cartels and political operatives have responded with hostility. Because the untamed vitality of the Amish demolishes the core premises of industrial vaccinology, state officials actively seek to eliminate their autonomy. We see this in the recent weaponization of localized health events, such as public health officials touting pop-up vaccine clinics in response to alleged measles cases in Pennsylvania.”
As Dr. James Thorp, an OB/GYN and maternal-fetal medicine specialist with 47 years of clinical experience, has pointed out, these public health alarms mirror the deceptive tactics used during Covid, where administrative labels and financial incentives were weaponized to force compliance and inflate risk.
New York has declared war on Amish communities.
Three Amish schools have been fined over $150,000 and counting.
Why?
New York eliminated all religious exemptions to vaccine mandates.
But the Amish schools fought back.
They kept accepting religious exemptions anyways.
“They’ve been fighting for years against these tyrannical government mandates.”
We the Patriots USA attorney Brian Festa just broke down this massive legal battle for medical freedom with Dr. Marg Talley Bowden:
“They have their own religious beliefs.”
“They did not believe in forcing children to be vaccinated.”
“So they allowed religious exemptions for their students and families.”
“Sounds reasonable, right?”
“The state said, ‘No, we abolished religious exemptions for everyone.’”
“New York … eliminated religious exemptions for all schools, not just public schools.”
“Which we here at We the Patriots USA, or most attorneys who know anything about the First Amendment, don’t believe is legal.”
“It violates religious freedom, which is a clear fundamental right found in the First Amendment.”
@MaryBowdenMD @WTPatriotsUSA
— Health Freedom Defense Fund (@theHFDF) August 5, 2026
Ohlers concluded: “The lesson of the Amish is clear. True health is not manufactured by pharmaceutical coercion, nor is safety achieved by surrendering biological autonomy to captured institutions. When public health agencies attempt to destroy the living proof of human resilience, building resilient parallel systems is no longer merely an option; it is a moral imperative.”
Freedom Rocks! Until It Is Gone
War on the Amish: Behind the coordinated assault on one of America’s healthiest communities added by Editor Two on
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