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.
