FINALLY, a court rules that the PREP Act does not provide a waiver of liability for battery (jabbing a child against their will)

Now with 2 states' Supreme Courts ruling one way, and NC's Supreme Court ruling the other way, one hopes the US Supreme Court will take up the matter of the PREP Act

Why would you inject someone with a vaccine against their will?

• Because you are so sure the vaccine contains a wonderful, health-giving potion

• Because it does not cross your mind you are committing a crime. Even if there was nothing in the syringe that you were injecting, STILL sticking a needle in someone is battery. Injecting them with a gene therapy could change their life’s trajectory and is even more of an attack on someone’s bodily autonomy

• Because you think you are shielded from all liability by the PREP Act, but only after injecting the vaccine

• Because you are being paid per injected dose

• Because they are a child and therefore, you can!

• Because you are “just following orders”

I do not know what was in the minds of the individual “health care” workers in Vermont, Maine and North Carolina who chose to inject children with COVID vaccines against their will, without a parental consent form, and without making much effort to learn what the parents’ wishes were. It makes you wonder what else happens in schools, away from the prying eyes of parents.

How often did this happen? We don’t know, but parents in Vermont, Maine and North Carolina were understandably upset enough to sue the health care workers and the schools over their children’s unwarranted jabs.

Instead of obtaining an easy win, in each case the parents and children lost in the lower courts. How could this be? Battery is battery. Consent is consent.

You see, the PREP Act provides an extraordinary, total liability shield over everyone involved in the administration of a “covered countermeasure.” Or at least people thought it did, until North Carolina’s Supreme Court ruling on Thursday.

The anthrax letters gave members of Congress PTSD. Even they could be attacked! And so they passed the PREP Act, allowing designated countermeasures to be used in an emergency, only after a cabinet Secretary had declared the emergency, then the HHS Secretary declared there was a drug or vaccine which had better than even odds of ameliorating the emergency, and then after the FDA Commissioner issued an EUA for the product.

Congress may have thought that was good enough — a 3 step process before the liability shield was issued. But we now know that it is not much of a deterrent. We also know that all you need is the potential for an emergency, not an actual emergency. And so the PREP Act was born in 2005. And kids have been jabbed with a dangerous so-called vaccine.

Finally, a state Supreme Court said that no, the PREP Act does NOT protect vaccinators from being charged with other crimes, like battery. The PREP Act does not waive other Constitutional protections.

Many of us think the PREP Act is unconstitutional for that reason, but the courts have not agreed, until now.

What I still find troubling, however, is that the judges vote along party lines. We thought judges were “blind”—that they put aside all bias. Yet in case after case, the judge’s party seems to be the deciding factor as to how they will decide a case.

In any event, this blow to the PREP Act is welcome and long overdue.

NC Supreme Court ruling opens path for parents to sue schools, health clinics over Covid-19 vaccines

The ruling was 5-2 along party lines, with all the Republicans in the majority and all the Democrats dissenting. Chief Justice Paul New wrote the majority opinion, with Justice Allison Riggs writing the dissent.

Will Doran for WRAL

Lawsuits can move forward against schools and medical clinics over Covid-19 vaccines given to children without their parents' permission, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled Friday, overturning past rulings that had blocked the lawsuits.

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," 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."