Case updates this week:

Thursday April 25th: The Maine Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of a challenge to the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for state emergency medical service employees in Calnan v. Hurley. The plaintiffs argued that Maine’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS) agency lacked the statutory authority to issue a COVID-19 and influenza vaccine mandate. In addition, even if the agency possessed statutory authority, it violated procedural requirements for issuing the vaccine mandate.

The Maine Supreme Court affirmed the lower court decision, stating that the Maine EMS enabling statute contained “a broad grant of authority to the EMS Board to promulgate rules related to the EMS program” which was sufficient to set immunization requirements for workers to protect patients. Plaintiffs had also argued that the rulemaking process was subject to a more stringent set of procedures applicable to “major substantive rules,” as opposed to the less stringent requirements for “routine technical rules.” However, the statute setting forth these two categories of rulemaking only applied to rules authorized for adoption after January 1, 1996. Because the rulemaking authority for the EMS Board was enacted before 1996, the court determined that the “major substantive rules” standard did not apply. The procedure that the EMS Board followed met the procedural requirements that did apply.