Connecticut’s HB 5044 Is Not Just a Vaccine Bill. It Is a Legislative Rewrite of RFRA Mid-Litigation.

April 24, 2026

Connecticut’s HB 5044 is being sold as a vaccine-governance bill. In one sense, that is true: the bill deals broadly with immunization standards, the Department of Public Health’s authority, insurance coverage, and related vaccine-administration issues.¹ But buried inside that larger package is the provision that matters most for religious-liberty law: HB 5044 rewrites Connecticut’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, General Statutes § 52-571b, to carve school immunization requirements out of RFRA’s protection.²

That is a remarkable move, and not because Connecticut lacks authority over school immunization policy. Connecticut already eliminated the religious exemption to school vaccination requirements in 2021 through Public Act 21-6, while retaining medical exemptions and a limited grandfathering structure for some previously exempt students.³ The state Department of Public Health still describes Public Act 21-6 as the law that repealed non-medical exemptions.⁴ The significance of HB 5044 is different. It is not merely another vaccine-policy dispute. It is the legislature stepping in after a live lawsuit exposed that Connecticut’s own state RFRA still supplied a possible path for religious challengers.⁵

That procedural history matters. In Spillane v. Lamont, the Connecticut Supreme Court rejected the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims as a matter of law, holding that Public Act 21-6 was a neutral law of general applicability rationally related to public health.⁶ But the court also held that the plaintiffs’ statutory free-exercise claim under § 52-571b survived sovereign-immunity dismissal and could proceed.⁷ The court specifically concluded that § 52-571b’s waiver extended to free-exercise challenges to the enforcement of legislation and that applying the statute to Public Act 21-6 did not violate Connecticut’s anti-entrenchment principles or implied-repeal doctrine.⁸ In plain English: the Connecticut Supreme Court did not revive the old religious exemption, but it did leave the door open for a state-RFRA challenge to the 2021 repeal.⁹

HB 5044 is the legislature’s attempt to close that door.

That is why the fight over the bill has been so sharp. The House passed HB 5044 on April 21, 2026, by a vote of 89-60.¹⁰ The Senate then gave final passage on April 23, 2026, by a vote of 22-12, after which the bill was transmitted to the governor.¹¹ Public reporting has been unusually candid about the bill’s purpose: Connecticut Attorney General William Tong requested the RFRA amendment because of the ongoing school-vaccine lawsuit and the risk that the state could lose under Connecticut’s 1993 religious-freedom statute.¹² Supporters argued that the bill merely clarifies what the legislature always intended in 2021—namely, that there should be no religious route back into the school-vaccine exemption.¹³ Opponents argued that changing RFRA in the middle of live litigation is a dangerous way to legislate.¹⁴

The legal stakes are larger than the vaccine context alone. Connecticut’s RFRA is not some recent culture-war add-on. It dates to 1993, when Connecticut enacted one of the earliest post-Smith state religious-freedom statutes.¹⁵ The original act barred the state or its political subdivisions from burdening a person’s exercise of religion unless the government could satisfy a compelling-interest / least-restrictive-means standard, and it authorized judicial relief when that burden occurred.¹⁶ For decades, that statute stood as a generally applicable state-law shield for religious exercise. HB 5044 changes that by writing a categorical exception into the statute for school immunization requirements.¹⁷

That means the controversy is not just about vaccines. It is about what happens when a state discovers that its own RFRA may do real work in litigation it expected to win. Connecticut’s answer, at least here, was not to prevail under RFRA’s strict-scrutiny framework. It was to amend RFRA itself.¹⁸ From a purely legislative-power standpoint, that is unsurprising. Legislatures rewrite statutes all the time. But from a religious-liberty standpoint, the optics are brutal: once § 52-571b became inconvenient in a politically charged case, the legislature chose carveout over adjudication.¹⁹

Supporters of HB 5044 insist that this is not a retreat from religious liberty, only a clarification of legislative intent.²⁰ That argument has surface appeal. Public Act 21-6 was enacted to end the school vaccine religious exemption, not to preserve it through a different statute by implication.²¹ If that was indeed the legislature’s aim in 2021, then HB 5044 can be described as a cleanup bill closing a loophole.²² But that defense understates what happened in Spillane. The Connecticut Supreme Court already considered and rejected the argument that Public Act 21-6 had simply displaced § 52-571b by implication.²³ The whole reason HB 5044 matters is that the judiciary had said the RFRA claim could proceed under existing law.²⁴ The legislature is therefore not merely clarifying a typo. It is rewriting the legal terrain after the courts identified a live statutory problem.

Critics of the bill have seized on exactly that point. Public reporting shows Republican lawmakers, Catholic leaders, and other opponents arguing that the state is changing religious-freedom law midstream to defeat a pending claim it feared might succeed.²⁵ Whether one agrees with the vaccine plaintiffs or not, that criticism is not frivolous. Connecticut is effectively saying that school immunization policy is important enough not merely to survive constitutional review, but to be removed from the ordinary operation of the state’s general religious-freedom statute as well.²⁶

There is an institutional lesson here. RFRAs matter most when they are inconvenient. A religious-liberty statute that protects only causes the majority already favors is not much of a religious-liberty statute. The point of a RFRA is to force government to justify burdens even when the state is confident of its policy wisdom. Connecticut’s HB 5044 does the opposite. It identifies one of the most contested areas of state policy and places it outside the usual RFRA framework altogether.²⁷ Whatever one thinks of vaccine mandates as a policy matter, that is a narrowing move.

And it is a narrowing move with precedent-setting implications. Once a legislature decides that an area of law is too important to leave inside RFRA’s strict-scrutiny regime, the obvious next question is: what other areas will eventually be carved out? Critics have already raised fears that if school immunizations can be excepted from § 52-571b, other politically sensitive subjects could follow.²⁸ Supporters may view that concern as alarmist. But the logic of the bill is undeniable: when a live RFRA claim becomes too threatening, the legislature can solve the problem by shrinking RFRA itself.

That is why HB 5044 deserves to be understood as more than a public-health bill. It is a state-RFRA amendment enacted in direct response to ongoing litigation. It is a reminder that religious-liberty statutes remain politically popular only until they stop operating as abstractions and begin functioning as actual constraints. And in Connecticut, at least for school immunization requirements, the answer was not to defend the burden under RFRA. It was to rewrite RFRA so the challenge could not proceed on the same terms.²⁹ ³⁰

Footnotes

¹ H.B. 5044, 2026 Gen. Assemb., Feb. Sess. (Conn. 2026) (titled “An Act Establishing Connecticut Vaccine Standards”); see also Bill Analysis for H.B. 5044, 2026 Gen. Assemb., Feb. Sess. (Conn. 2026), available at https://www.cga.ct.gov/2026/BA/PDF/2026HB-05044-R01-BA.PDF.

² See H.B. 5044, File No. 405, 2026 Gen. Assemb., Feb. Sess. (Conn. 2026) (search snippet indicating repeal and replacement of § 52-571b); Bill Tracking, H.B. 5044, FastDemocracy, https://fastdemocracy.com/bill-search/ct/2026/bills/CTB00033220/.

³ 2021 Conn. Pub. Acts No. 21-6 (Substitute H.B. 6423), available at https://www.cga.ct.gov/2021/act/pa/pdf/2021PA-00006-R00HB-06423-PA.pdf.

⁴ Immunization Laws and Regulations, Conn. Dep’t of Pub. Health, https://portal.ct.gov/dph/individuals-and-families/immunizations/laws-and-regulations.

⁵ CT vaccine bill involving religious freedom law passed through House, CT Insider (Apr. 21, 2026), summarized at  .

⁶ Spillane v. Lamont, 368 Conn. 1, slip op. summary (officially released July 30, 2024), available via Justia at https://law.justia.com/cases/connecticut/supreme-court/2024/sc20776.html.  

⁷ Id.  

⁸ Id. at syllabus and summary lines explaining that § 52-571b’s waiver extends to free-exercise challenges to the enforcement of legislation and that Public Act 21-6 did not expressly or implicitly conflict with § 52-571b.  

⁹ See CT House approves change to religious freedom law tied to vaccine case, CT Post/CT Insider summary,  .

¹⁰ CT vaccine bill involving religious freedom law passed through House, CT Insider, supra note 5.  

¹¹ Journal of the Senate, Apr. 23, 2026, Conn. Gen. Assemb.; see also Bill Tracking, H.B. 5044, FastDemocracy (listing “Immediate Transmittal to the Governor” on Apr. 23, 2026), https://fastdemocracy.com/bill-search/ct/2026/bills/CTB00033220/.  

¹² CT vaccine bill approved as controversial lawsuit plays out in court over religious freedom, CT Insider (Apr. 24, 2026), summarized at  .

¹³ CT vaccine bill passes in Senate amid controversial lawsuit, Newstimes/CT Insider summary,  .

¹⁴ Lamont’s vaccine bill HB 5044 passes after heated debate in CT House, CT Mirror (Apr. 21, 2026), summarized at  ; see also CT vaccine bill involving religious freedom law passed through House, CT Insider, supra note 5.  

¹⁵ An Act Concerning Religious Freedom, 1993 Conn. Pub. Acts No. 93-252, available at https://www.cga.ct.gov/ps93/Act/pa/1993PA-00252-R00HB-05645-PA.htm; see also Alex Fulco, Connecticut’s First-in-the-Nation State Religious Freedom Law, 50 Conn. L. Rev. 1491 (2018), available at https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1388&context=law_review.  

¹⁶ 1993 Conn. Pub. Acts No. 93-252, supra note 15.

¹⁷ H.B. 5044, File No. 405, supra note 2; see also public hearing testimony identifying the bill as creating an express school-immunization carveout from § 52-571b, e.g., Testimony Opposing H.B. 5044, available through the Connecticut General Assembly public hearing archive, summarized at  .

¹⁸ CT vaccine bill approved as controversial lawsuit plays out in court over religious freedom, CT Insider, supra note 12.  

¹⁹ Id.; see also Connecticut Catholic bishops oppose bill to exempt school vaccines from religious freedom law, CT Insider (Mar. 2026), summarized at  .

²⁰ CT vaccine bill passes in Senate amid controversial lawsuit, Newstimes/CT Insider summary, supra note 13.  

²¹ 2021 Conn. Pub. Acts No. 21-6, supra note 3; Summary of Public Act 21-6, Conn. Gen. Assemb. Office of Legislative Research, available at https://www.cga.ct.gov/2021/SUM/PDF/2021SUM00006-R02HB-06423-SUM.PDF.  

²² CT vaccine bill passes in Senate amid controversial lawsuit, Newstimes/CT Insider summary, supra note 13.  

²³ Spillane v. Lamont, supra notes 6–8.  

²⁴ Id.  

²⁵ CT vaccine bill involving religious freedom law passed through House, CT Insider, supra note 5; Connecticut Catholic bishops oppose bill to exempt school vaccines from religious freedom law, CT Insider, supra note 19.  

²⁶ Lamont’s vaccine bill HB 5044 gets final passage in Connecticut Senate, CT Mirror/Stamford Advocate summary,  .

²⁷ See 1993 Conn. Pub. Acts No. 93-252, supra note 15; H.B. 5044, File No. 405, supra note 2.

²⁸ Connecticut Catholic bishops oppose bill to exempt school vaccines from religious freedom law, CT Insider, supra note 19.  

²⁹ CT vaccine bill approved as controversial lawsuit plays out in court over religious freedom, CT Insider, supra note 12.  

³⁰ Spillane v. Lamont, supra notes 6–8; H.B. 5044, File No. 405, supra note 2.