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(LifeSiteNews) – The Vermont Supreme Court rejected a family’s lawsuit against the Windham Southeast School District for accidentally injecting their (at the time) six-year-old child with a COVID-19 vaccine without their consent, ruling that the error was covered by a federal liability shield.
Fox 26 reported that during a 2021 clinic hosted by the district and the Vermont Department of Health, the child identified only as LP had a directive in place from the father, accepted by school officials, that the child was not to be vaccinated. However, the child was given one dose of Pfizer’s mRNA-based COVID shot after being erroneously given the name tag of a child with no such restriction.
Officials notified the parents and apologized, and the parents pulled their child from Windham’s Academy School.
“Thankfully, we are not aware of any harm to the student because of this mistake,” Windham Southeast superintendent Mark Speno said in a 2021 apology letter. “We take our responsibilities to students and families very seriously, and we respect parents’ rights to make health care decisions for their children.”
That was not sufficient for the parents, who sued. But last week, the state’s highest court ruled that the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005 shielded school officials from liability.
“To avoid dismissal on immunity grounds, plaintiffs would have had to present wellpleaded allegations showing that (1) at least one defendant was not a covered person, (2) some conduct by a defendant was not causally related to administering a covered countermeasure, (3) the substance injected into L.P. was not a covered countermeasure, or (4) there was no PREP Act declaration in effect at the time L.P. was injected,” the court explained.
According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the PREP Act empowers the federal government to “limit legal liability for losses relating to the administration of medical countermeasures such as diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.” Near the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, the Trump administration invoked the Act in declaring the virus a “public health emergency.”
Under this “sweeping” immunity, CRS explains, the federal government, state governments, “manufacturers and distributors of covered countermeasures,” and licensed or otherwise-authorized health professionals distributing those countermeasures are shielded from “all claims of loss” stemming from those countermeasures, with the exception of “death or serious physical injury” brought about through “willful misconduct,” a standard that, among other hurdles, requires the offender to have acted “intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose.”
A large body of evidence identifies significant risks to the COVID vaccines, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative. Among it, the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 37,734 deaths, 217,112 hospitalizations, 21,793 heart attacks, and 28,490 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of June 28, among other ailments. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published in February in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID vaccines, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines and offered several theories for a causal link.
The issue is particularly egregious in the case of children, who evidence finds face little to no danger from COVID itself. In February, the first interim report of a grand jury impaneled by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to investigate the COVID vaccines determined among other things that COVID was “statistically almost harmless” to children and most adults.
