© Jamie Kelter Davis/ New York TimesCovid 19 booster • Portage Park Senior Center • Chicago, Illinois • Sept. 13, 2022
The ruling was 5-2 along party lines, with all the Republicans in the majority and all the Democrats dissenting.
Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote the majority opinion, which opens with the declaration that during the Covid-19 pandemic, "we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country."
Newby cited concerns over government decisions in other states that allowed casinos to remain open even while churches had to close.
"And in our state," Newby continued, "medical workers affiliated with a public school forcibly vaccinated a 14-year-old boy despite knowing they lacked consent from both the child and his mother."
The case in question deals with a then-14-year-old Guilford County high schooler named Tanner Smith. He was given a vaccine even though he and his mother later said they were against it. Smith played football at Western Guilford High. After a 2021 outbreak of Covid-19 cases among some football players, school officials ordered the whole team to go get tested.
But when Smith showed up to get a Covid test at a local clinic, he says, the clinic workers also gave him a vaccine, even though he said he didn't want one.
Newby wrote that the student didn't have a signed parental permission slip for the shot, and that clinic workers tried calling his mother to get her permission. Despite the fact she didn't answer, the ruling says, "one of the workers instructed another to 'give it to [Smith] anyway.' The workers made no effort to contact Smith's stepfather, who was waiting outside in the parking lot. Ignoring additional protests from Smith himself, the workers forcibly injected him with the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine."
The family sued the health clinic where Smith got the vaccine, as well as Guilford County Schools. Their lawsuit was thrown out in trial and again on appeal, due to a 2005 federal law that gives immunity to people engaged in public health actions during public health emergencies, such as the Covid-19 pandemic — which was declared a public health emergency by then-President Donald Trump's administration on March 10, 2020.
The goal of the 2005 law, called the PREP Act, is to allow fast reaction and containment during health emergencies. The PREP Act was written in 2005 by a Republican majority in Congress and signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush.
Opinion and dissent
In Friday's ruling, Newby acknowledged the PREP Act's broad immunity rules. But he added that the unwilling vaccination violated the constitutional rights of Smith and his parents — and therefore should void the immunity rules and open the way for lawsuits that claim violations of constitutional rights. Fellow Republican justices Richard Dietz and Trey Allen joined in Newby's opinion.
Republican justices Tamara Barringer and Phil Berger Jr. wrote a concurring opinion that said they agreed with everything Newby wrote, but that they had wanted to go even further in rolling back health workers' immunity protections.
Writing in dissent for the court's Democrats, Justice Allison Riggs called the GOP majority hypocritical for engaging in the exact kind of judicial activism they often claim to oppose.
Riggs wrote that "while I agree that the constitution protects rights to bodily integrity and those of parents to care for their children," there is no legitimate way to read the immunity rules that Congress wrote into the PREP Act as providing for the kind of carve-out that she said Newby and the court's other Republicans have now invented.
"Self-described textualists and originalists have historically professed to avoid 'turning somersaults' to reach particular interpretations of the written law. The majority here should abandon any such pretense; through a series of dizzying inversions, it explicitly rewrites an unambiguous statute to exclude state constitutional claims from the broad and inclusive immunity."
That's attempted murder right there. Plus there's more than one person involved so that's at least two dozen state & government laws and regulations that were transgressed.
The parents should sue them for every cent they got. put them out of business.