Photo courtesy of Liberty Counsel

RALEIGH, NC (MPG) – Last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that a mother can sue a public school system and a medical provider for allegedly forcing her 14-year-old son to get the COVID-19 shot without his and her consent and without her knowledge. The ruling reverses the state trial court and appeals court decisions that considered state actors who forcibly vaccinate a child as protected under a federal health emergency law. The decision now allows the lawsuit to move forward for further proceedings in a lower state trial court.

The case involves Emily Happel, who sued Guilford County Board of Education and Old North State Medical Society in August 2022, alleging battery and infringement of state constitutional rights after her son, Tanner Smith, forcibly received a dose of Pfizer’s COVID shot against his wishes and without parental consent.

The incident happened when Tanner reported to the school clinic to be tested after a COVID-19 cluster was detected among the Western Guilford High School football team. According to the details of the case, his stepfather drove him to the school clinic and waited outside. The family had been informed by the school via letter that the school clinic only offered COVID-19 tests. They were not told that the experimental COVID shots were being administered on site. When inside, health care workers attempted to inject Tanner. He told the workers he didn't want the injection, and he also lacked the required signed parental consent form to get one. According to the ruling’s summary of the allegations, when the clinic’s workers were unable to reach his mother by phone, they then ignored additional protests from Tanner, and made no attempt to contact his stepfather waiting outside. A worker then instructed another to “give it to him anyway,” the ruling stated.

The lower courts unanimously found that the 2005 federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act shielded the school district and medical provider from any liability in the case. They determined that the law’s broad protections “fully immunized” organizations and individuals who administer medical “countermeasures” during a public health emergency from state law claims. As the North Carolina Supreme Court noted, the law’s provisions went into effect in March 2020 after the state declared a public health emergency at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

North Carolina Chief Justice Paul Newby, who authored the majority opinion, wrote that the PREP Act’s immunity protections were intended to protect against claims of “loss,” which includes deaths and injury related to emergency health actions. However, he noted the law does not suggest that Congress meant for that immunity to “block state constitutional claims.” The majority determined that the law does not prevent a mother and son from suing the school district and medical providers alleging their rights in the state constitution had been violated.

In fact, Chief Justice Newby wrote that at least three different rights fit “comfortably” within the PREP Act’s framework, such as the right for parents to control their child’s upbringing, the right to “refuse forced, nonmandatory medical treatment,” and the right for a mother to make medical decisions on behalf of her child.

“Indeed, the constitutional right to full ‘custody and control’ over one’s minor children would ring hollow if it did not include the right to consent on the child’s behalf, as well as the right to seek a constitutional remedy when the State disregards the absence of that consent,” wrote Chief Justice Newby.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “No law can preempt the U.S. Constitution. The PREP Act does not authorize a forced injection of an experimental shot, which is an egregious abuse of power and a constitutional violation. The North Carolina Supreme Court has rightly ruled that Emily Happel’s case involving her son Tanner Smith can move forward. Parents have the longstanding right to direct the upbringing of their children and the right to make medical decisions on their behalf.”