The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled lawsuits against schools and medical clinics over COVID-19 jabs can move forward.
“The ruling was 5-2 along party lines, with all the Republicans in the majority and all the Democrats dissenting,” WRAL reports.
The decision overturns past rulings that blocked lawsuits alleging children received a COVID-19 shot without parental consent.
The case in question involves a mother and son who filed a lawsuit against a public school system and doctors’ group, alleging they gave the boy, age 14, a COVID-19 shot without parental consent.
A mother can proceed with her lawsuit against a public school board and medical provider after her son was given a covid-19 vaccination without consent, North Carolina’s Supreme Court has ruled. https://t.co/qhPamtuRf2
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 22, 2025
From the Associated Press:
A trial judge and later the state Court of Appeals had ruled against Emily Happel and her son Tanner Smith, who at age 14 received the vaccination in August 2021 despite his protests at a testing and vaccination clinic at a Guilford County high school, according to the family’s lawsuit.
Smith went to the clinic to be tested for COVID-19 after a cluster of cases occurred among his school’s football team. He did not expect the clinic would be providing vaccines as well, according to the litigation. Smith told workers he didn’t want a vaccination, and he lacked a signed parental consent form to get one. When the clinic was unable to reach his mother, a worker instructed another to “give it to him anyway,” Happel and Smith allege in legal briefs.
Happel and Smith sued the Guilford County Board of Education and an organization of physicians who helped operate the school clinic, alleging claims of battery and that their constitutional rights were violated.
A panel of the intermediate-level appeals court last year ruled unanimously that the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act shielded the school district and the Old North State Medical Society from liability. The law places broad protections and immunity on an array of individuals and organizations who perform “countermeasures” during a public health emergency. A COVID-19 emergency declaration in March 2020 activated the law’s immunity provisions, Friday’s decision said.
Chief Justice Paul Newby, writing Friday’s prevailing opinion, said that the federal law did not prevent the mother and son from suing on allegations that their rights in the state constitution had been violated. In particular, he wrote, there is the right for a parent to control their child’s upbringing and the “right of a competent person to refuse forced, nonmandatory medical treatment.”
“We may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” Newby wrote about the COVID-19 scamdemic, according to WRAL.
“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,” Newby added.
🔥🔥🔥 NC Supreme Court ruling opens path for parents to sue schools, health clinics over Covid-19 vaccineshttps://t.co/r9eqvDAAcI
— Allen Mashburn (@Mashburn4NC) March 21, 2025
WRAL reports:
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,” Riggs wrote. “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.”
The North Carolina ruling contrasts decisions in Vermont and Maine, where the high courts ruled families could not sue over COVID-19 jabs due to the PREP Act.
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