The HHS’ Office for Civil Rights has now taken what they wrote for West Virginia school boards on August 21 and sent the warning out nationally

This is getting interesting...

The language is a bit tricky here. It makes me wonder whether Medicaid’s arcane rules require states to offer religious vaccine exemptions. Medicaid was established nearly 30 years before the Vaccines for Children’s Program (VCP), which allowed the states to impose vaccine mandates, because every child was now eligible for vaccines, without demanding the parents pay for them.

So without reading these statutes, it seems at first glance that back in the day, Medicaid and Congress expected the states to offer religious exemptions. There were no broad vaccine mandates then, such as CA, NY, CT and ME have imposed. And now the Office of Civil Rights is telling states to go back to their old rulebooks, and if these laws are on the books, they better adhere to them, or lose funding for over 50% of children’s vaccines in their states.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Providers participating in the VCP must comply “with applicable State law, including any such law relating to any religious or other exemption.” 3 By specifically mandating that a state’s plan for administering Medicaid must respect state laws regarding religious exemptions, Congress recognized the importance of Americans’ religious convictions regarding vaccines and laws protecting such.

and then this

VCP providers are responsible for following state laws “relating to” religious and other exemptions to vaccination laws. Express religious exemptions contained in compulsory vaccination statutes are examples of such laws; so, too, are state statutes that mirror the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). 4

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ocr-nationwide-vaccine-letter.pdf