The North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that a mother can sue the public school system and a doctors’ group for allegedly giving her son a COVID-19 vaccine without her consent. The new ruling reverses a lower-court decision that a federal health emergency law prevented Emily Happel and her son, Tanner Smith, from filing a lawsuit. The mother, who sought litigation after her son, Smith, received an unwanted vaccine during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, can now take legal action.
The lawsuit said Smith was vaccinated without consent at age 14 in August 2021, despite his opposition at a testing and vaccination clinic at a Guilford County high school. The lawsuit adds that the teenager went to the clinic to be tested for COVID-19 but did not anticipate that the clinic would also administer vaccines. Despite telling the clinic that he did not want a vaccination and also did not have a parental consent form to receive one, they injected him anyway.
Happel and Smith filed the lawsuit against the Guilford County Board of Education and the Old North State Medical Society, alleging that their constitutional rights were violated. A panel of the intermediate-level appeals court ruled unanimously that the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act shielded the school district and the physicians’ group, Fox News reported.
The law grants broad protections and immunity to individuals and organizations performing “countermeasures” during public health emergencies. The state’s high court noted on Friday that an emergency declaration in response to COVID-19 was made in March 2020, activating the federal law’s immunity provisions.
However, Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote that the law did not prevent the mother and son from suing on allegations that their rights in the state constitution had been violated, adding that the parent has the right to control their child’s upbringing and the “right of a competent person to refuse forced, nonmandatory medical treatment.”
Newby said the law’s plain text prompted a majority of justices to conclude that its immunity only covers tort injuries when someone seeks damages for injuries caused by negligent or wrongful actions.
“Because tort injuries are not constitutional violations, the PREP Act does not bar plaintiffs’ constitutional claims,” he said.
Newby’s opinion was backed by the court’s conservative justices, including two who suggested that the immunity found in federal law should be narrowed further. However, liberal Associate Justice Allison Riggs said state constitutional claims should be preempted from federal law and criticized the court’s majority for a “fundamentally unsound” interpretation of the Constitution.
“Through a series of dizzying inversions, it explicitly rewrites an unambiguous statute to exclude state constitutional claims from the broad and inclusive immunity,” Riggs said.
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