The North Carolina Supreme Court granted a mother and her son permission to sue a public school system for administering the COVID-19 vaccine without consent.
The decision reverses a lower-court ruling that claimed a federal health emergency law blocked the family from filing a lawsuit. The case centers on Tanner Smith, who was vaccinated against his will in 2021 at a clinic at a Guilford County high school. The then-14-year-old visited the clinic to be tested for COVID-19 but did not seek vaccination.
Smith and his mother, Emily Happel, claimed a worker told a colleague to “give it to him anyway.”
The court held the belief that the family’s allegations concerned state constitutional rights. “Because tort injuries are not constitutional violations, the PREP Act does not bar plaintiffs’ constitutional claims,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote.
Newby found that parents have the right to oversee their child’s upbringing and possess the “right of a competent person to refuse forced, nonmandatory medical treatment.”
“Plaintiffs do not argue that they have a categorical right to disobey a vaccine mandate. Rather, their argument is essentially about the existence of a right to resist an unwanted, nonmandatory medical touching that in this instance just so happened to be a vaccine,” Newby wrote, adding, “Tellingly, defendants do not attempt to justify the workers’ behavior, nor do they claim Smith’s vaccination was necessary to protect the health of his football teammates, the school population, or the general public. Instead, defendants simply contend that they are not liable for this action, whether because of PREP [Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness] Act immunity, the principal-agent relationship, or another legal theory.”
