A North Carolina mother and her son can sue a public school system and a doctors’ group for allegedly giving the boy a COVID-19 vaccine without consent, the state Supreme Court ruled.
The ruling handed down Friday reverses a lower-court decision that a federal health emergency law prevented Emily Happel and her son Tanner Smith from filing a lawsuit.
Both a trial judge and the state Court of Appeals had ruled against the two, who sought litigation after Smith received an unwanted vaccine during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Smith was vaccinated in August 2021 at age 14 despite his opposition at a testing and vaccination clinic at a Guilford County high school, according to the family’s lawsuit.
The mother and son argue that their constitutional rights were violated. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
The court’s conservative justices backed Newby’s opinion, including two who wrote a separate opinion suggesting the immunity found in the federal law should be narrowed further.
Associate Justice Allison Riggs, a liberal who wrote a dissenting opinion, said that state constitutional claims should be preempted from the federal law and criticized the court’s majority for a “fundamentally unsound” interpretation of the constitution.
“Through a series of dizzying inversions, it explicitly rewrites an unambiguous statute to exclude state constitutional claims from the broad and inclusive immunity,” Riggs said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
