A legal decision issued by the North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday allows a mother and her son to proceed with their lawsuit against a public school system and a medical group’s personnel. The case contends that the boy was administered a COVID-19 vaccine without parental consent, counteracting a federal law which was previously thought to block such litigation. This ruling overturned a prior decision by a lower court that dismissed the lawsuit under the assertion that a federal health emergency law granted immunity.
The case revolves around Emily Happel and her son, Tanner Smith, who was 14 years old at the time he received the COVID-19 vaccination in August 2021. Despite his objections, the vaccination occurred at a testing and vaccination clinic held at a Guilford County high school, according to legal documents from the family. Tanner had come to the clinic to be tested following a COVID-19 outbreak among the football team at his school and did not understand that vaccinations were also being administered. He informed clinic staff that he did not want a vaccination and lacked the required signed parental consent. When attempts to contact his mother were unsuccessful, a worker instructed that the vaccine be administered nonetheless, as alleged in the lawsuit.
Happel and Smith’s lawsuit was filed against both the Guilford County Board of Education and a doctors’ organization involved in running the school clinic. They claim their constitutional rights were breached alongside the allegations of battery. The lawsuit targets what they see as a constitutional breach of parental control over their child’s upbringing as well as the right to refuse involuntary, nonmandatory medical treatment.
Previously, a panel from the North Carolina Court of Appeals had decided unanimously that the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act provided protection and was applicable in this scenario, thereby dismissing the claims against the school district and the Old North State Medical Society. This act extends a broad range of legal protections and immunities to entities and individuals undertaking “countermeasures” amid a public health emergency. The law’s immunity clauses were initiated by a COVID-19 emergency declaration dating from March 2020, but Friday’s Supreme Court ruling challenged this scope of immunity.
Chief Justice Paul Newby, who articulated the majority ruling, expressed that the federal health emergency law does not bar the lawsuit based on their allegations of constitutional rights breaches under state law. He highlighted the parental right to guide their child’s upbringing and a competent person’s right to decline nonmandatory intrusion for medical purposes. Newby’s interpretation, supported by most of the justices, indicated the immunity under the federal act solely pertains to tort claims but does not extend to constitutional grievances.
In the decision, five Republican justices supported Newby’s viewpoint, and two supplemented it with an additional opinion that suggested a further narrowing of the act’s legal protections. However, there was dissent from Associate Justice Allison Riggs, whose opinion, supported by the court’s other Democratic justice, argued that constitutional claims under the state should also fall under the act’s shield.
Justice Riggs criticized the majority ruling, suggesting that the interpretation of constitutional analysis was improper and that an existing federal statute had been reinterpreted inappropriately to exclude constitutional claims from the vast protections the act is meant to provide.