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Attorneys suing the state over a new law that prohibits parents from seeking religious exemptions to vaccines for their children to attend school in New York will pursue a preliminary injunction against the statute after they were denied a temporary restraining order Friday.

Albany County Supreme Court Justice Michael Mackey said in the decision that, given case precedent on state vaccine laws, the lawsuit filed earlier this week may be unlikely to succeed in striking down the law.

“The contours or claimed inapplicability of this precedent may be argued as this action proceeds, but long standing decisional law portends insufficient likelihood of success on the merits presently,” Mackey wrote.

Attorneys Michael Sussman, from Orange County, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are representing more than four dozen families in the lawsuit against the statute. Those families said they were previously granted religious exemptions to vaccines and have argued that the new law violates their First Amendment rights.

They'll now move for a preliminary injunction against the law, which Sussman said will give them another opportunity to make their case against the statute. He acknowledged that the burden on plaintiffs is especially high when seeking a temporary restraining order.

“This is not the decision I had hoped for, but I recognize that getting a TRO against state legislation is very difficult,” Sussman said. “I hope that further development of all the issues will cause this or another judge to preliminarily restrain the operation of this statute and I will be working on making that happen.”

State Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Democrat from Manhattan who sponsored the bill this year, said in a statement that he was confident the law would ultimately be upheld as constitutional during further court proceedings.

“I'm pleased that this important law will continue to be implemented and enforced across our State, and remain confident that the law will ultimately be upheld as constitutional, consistent with over a century of federal and state jurisprudence,” Hoylman said. “New Yorkers are safer as a result.”

Hoylman, along with attorneys for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, have previously said they were confident the law would survive judicial review, based on prior legal decisions surrounding vaccine laws.

Mackey set a briefing schedule for the preliminary injunction motion with his decision, which prescribes that attorneys from both sides will file papers over the next two and a half weeks.

Sussman and Kennedy argued in the lawsuit filed Wednesday that the law was both unnecessary and violated the religious freedoms of the plaintiffs. They claimed that neither state nor local health officials followed standards already in place that may have helped contain a measles outbreak over the past year in Rockland County and areas of New York City.

It started with a handful of cases in Rockland County last September, but had grown into hundreds in the months that followed. State law, according to the complaint, allows state and local health officials to quarantine individuals with a contagious disease and clean areas where they might have been. That didn't happen in this case, the suit claimed.

They also argued that the law puts some parents in a difficult situation. They can either vaccinate their children against their beliefs, or choose to home-school them. The latter option isn't a possibility for everyone, and in some cases would be denying children the option to attend a religious school, the suit argued.

The law eliminates nonmedical exemptions for vaccines for children attending school or any kind of day care in New York, regardless of whether that institution is public, private or parochial. The law took effect in June after it was signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

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