|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
This comes after Vermont courts ruled schools can vaccinate kids against parents’ wishes
All American children are constitutionally entitled to the protections of informed parental consent.
A Vermont family whose 6-year-old son was vaccinated with an experimental Covid-19 intervention against the family’s wishes has appealed a Vermont Supreme Court ruling. The Vermont court had ruled that the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) prohibits such claims, granting immunity to school and government personnel when they mandate vaccinations.
Stunningly, the Vermont Supreme Court did not even pay lip service to the constitutional liberties implicated, ruling against traditional protections of parental rights and informed consent. But the PREP Act is not above the Constitution’s supremacy clause; it’s the other way around.
Parents’ rights are being chiseled away rapidly. In Vermont, minor children may obtain transgender hormones and birth control without parental consent, and a 2024 law bars parents from seeing which library books are checked out by their children 12 years and older. Yet these are examples where the child wants something against his parents’ wishes. In Vermont’s Covid-19 vaccination case, the child protested and was forced to be jabbed anyway.
Leo’s Case
According to the Supreme Court petition, for which I was the lead attorney, Tony and Shujen Politella and their son Leo were shocked that their clear expressions of opposition to Leo being vaccinated were ignored. Tony had visited his son’s school with the express purpose of ensuring his child would not receive a Covid-19 vaccine, offering to keep Leo home on the day of an upcoming clinic. He was assured Leo would be fine, but instead Leo was given an arm tag displaying another boy’s name and vaccinated despite his vocal protests.
It was a further insult when the public school, which was eligible to obtain monetary “awards” from the state of Vermont based on vaccination rates, provided no explanation for how such a gross error occurred, as Mrs. Politella related in her testimony. Leo transferred to a private school the family trusts. Yet a third injury was inflicted when the Vermont attorney general and Vermont court system employed laws designed to grant product liability immunity to Big Pharma to instead insulate incompetent government employees from accountability for their wrongs.
Vermont’s appalling Politella decision threatens every child in America. Other courts may rely upon its implied federal preemption of family rights and extinguishing of informed consent rights. As Ninth Circuit Judge Daniel Collins recently opined in a concurring opinion in a related ruling: The “‘right of a competent individual to refuse medical treatment’ was ‘entirely consistent with this Nation’s history and constitutional traditions,’ in light of ‘the common-law rule that forced medication was a battery, and the long legal tradition protecting the decision to refuse unwanted medical treatment.’”
Other State Rulings
This common-sense recognition of such fundamental rights has been absent from supreme courts in Wyoming and Nevada in addition to Vermont, as well as the Kansas Court of Appeals and federal courts in Kentucky and Oklahoma. A North Carolina case involving a football player vaccinated against his wishes is also making its way up the court system ladder.
Congress never intended for the PREP Act to abolish fundamental medical ethics or the legal rights of patients and parents. The PREP Act does not shield public servants from accountability for actions that have nothing to do with vaccine safety or efficacy. The Politellas did not sue a vaccine manufacturer for a harmful product; they sued school officials who inflicted very real harm.
All American children are constitutionally entitled to the protections of informed parental consent. Should these abhorrent court decisions stand, “vaccine hesitancy” may be joined by “public school hesitancy.” The distrust of vaccines and pharmaceutical companies engendered by Covid-19 policies extends to schools and courts that favor negligent or ill-willed workers over the rights — and health — of young children.
(Originally published at the Federalist.)
The author is a Brookfield best-selling author, lawyer, farmer and pastor.
Discover more from Vermont Daily Chronicle
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Categories: Commentary, Education, National News, State Government, Vermonters Making A Difference
“Stunningly, the Vermont Supreme Court did not even pay lip service to the constitutional liberties implicated….”
Stunningly? Not to me. In fact, you would have been able to knock me over with a feather had the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in any other way. I’m not ever 100% sure of anything, as weird stuff happens all the time, but I was 99.9% sure the VSC’s ruling would come down as it did. Literally no conservative should have been shocked by this. Extending immunity conferred on pharmaceutical companies (a horrible choice to begin with) to local schools is, take your pick: A) Stunningly audacious, B) Flat out stupid, C) Unconstitutional, D) Typical Vermont judiciary over-reach, or E) All of the above. Think it through!! If parents no longer have the right to represent their children’s best interests, and if by law children have no right to represent their own until 16, 18, or 21 depending on what the subject is, then doesn’t it follow that what the VSC is saying is that children have zero rights in Vermont? Talk about a slippery slope!
I’m far more confident that the the US Supreme Court will take this case and rule correctly on it. Sooner or later they’re going to have to step in and put an end to this socialist nonsense. Might as well be Vermont in the national spotlight, as this tiny state surely deserves it.
Lastly, even if your position is the exact opposite of mine, do you not see who ends up paying Vermont’s (totally unnecessary) legal fees? Do you have any comprehension as to how high those fees already are? And how exponentially higher they will get if the US Supreme Court takes this case? And that the State of Vermont’s position is, of course, an obvious losing position?
I’ll help you out. The answer is YOU. And ME. WE pay for this nonsense. Not cool, for reasons that should be obvious. Personally, I’d rather have my taxes fund the parents who brought this case. I’m sure they don’t have a bottomless well of cash.
Up is down, left is right, in is out, cold is hot, right is wrong. That’s where we’re at, my fellow Vermonters. And you thought the movie The Matrix was science fiction?
Again:
I have always assumed that our American Republic, as described and defined in the U.S. Constitution, was based on the precept that the American people (including Vermonters) are, or will learn to be, reasonably cognizant, pragmatic, and responsible. That they would, when earning the opportunity to do so, understand the difference between authoritarianism and the free enterprise of personal liberty and freedom. Apparently, I was mistaken.
I beg your pardon.