Court rules North Carolina family can sue for giving 14-yr-old son Covid shot without parental consent

After a clinic’s decision to “give it to him anyway,” one state’s Supreme Court cleared the way for a family’s lawsuit over a COVID-19 shot administered without consent.

As the five year anniversary of 15 days to slow the spread passed last week, many had put the virus and the draconian policies that accompanied it in their rearview mirrors. Despite compulsions to move on, the fight against perceived and blatant injustices carried on and, in the case of North Carolina mother Emily Happel and her son Tanner Smith, advanced to the next step as they gained approval for their lawsuit against the government-run school system and a doctor’s group.

In a ruling issued Friday by the North Carolina Supreme Court, Chief Justice Paul Newby overturned a decision by an appeals court panel that had ruled in 2024 that the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act protected the defendants, the Guilford County Board of Education and Old North State Medical Society, from liability during a public health emergency.

According to the lawsuit, then-14-year-old Smith was said to have reported to a clinic for testing after a number of teammates from the school’s football team reported positive COVID diagnoses in Aug. 2021. Despite his objections, lack of a consent form and the clinic’s inability to reach his mother, the suit alleged a worker said “give it to him anyway” and injected the boy with the shot.

North Carolina’s General Statue Section 90-21.5 detailed “Minor’s consent sufficient for certain medical health services,” but the court’s ruling indicated under emergency use authorization, “Before medical providers may administer that kind of treatment, state law requires them to obtain written parental consent.”

As Newby put it, the parent has the “right of a competent person to refuse forced, nonmandatory medical treatment.”

“Because tort injuries (those brought by negligence) are not constitutional violations, the PREP Act does not bar plaintiffs’ constitutional claims. We therefore affirm the decision below as to the plaintiffs’ battery claim, reverse as to their constitutional claims, and remand for further proceedings,” added the ruling.

A concurring opinion from Associate Justices Phil Berger and Tamara Barringer provided an example of the apparent overreach of the government’s reading of the act that argued, “shouldn’t immunity under the PREP Act be predicated on a lawful administration of a covered countermeasure?”

To their point, the justices presented a scenario of customers waiting for their orders at a coffee shop. “While standing with other customers, a healthcare official authorized to administer a covered countermeasure walks in and injects everyone in the coffee shop without asking or otherwise obtaining consent.”

“All have been the victim of a battery,” concluded the jurists. “But under the government’s reading of the PREP Act, unless death or serious physical injury results, the healthcare worker has blanket immunity for these intentional acts.”

Meanwhile, Associate Justice Allison Riggs argued in her dissent of the majority’s opinion, “Through a series of dizzying inversions, it explicitly rewrites an unambiguous statute to exclude state constitutional claims from the board and inclusive immunity ‘from suit and liability under Federal and State law with respect to all claims for loss’ established” by the PREP Act.

Worth noting, it was reported last year that the former superintendent of Guilford County Schools Mo Green (D), who went on to become North Carolina’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, had been accused of connections to radical groups through his work as executive director of Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Republican Michele Morrow, his opponent in the superintendent election, had told Fox News Digital, “It appears that there has been funding for very radical groups like Antifa and potentially BLM, as well as we are looking into the fact that he may have been funding drag queen story hours and things that have been divisive, even antisemitic.”

Staff Writer

Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.

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