The North Carolina Supreme Court decided that a mother and son from North Carolina have the right to sue a public school system and a doctors’ group for allegedly administering a COVID-19 vaccine to the boy without their consent. This ruling overturns a previous decision by a lower court that cited a federal health emergency law as grounds to dismiss the case.

The initial trial judge and later the state Court of Appeals had rejected the claims of Emily Happel and her son Tanner Smith. Smith, who was 14 years old at the time, was given the vaccine in August 2021 at a testing and vaccination facility located at a Guilford County high school, despite his objections that were outlined in the family’s lawsuit.

Smith went to the clinic to be tested for COVID-19 after a cluster of cases occurred among his school’s football team.

It was stated in the lawsuit that Smith was not aware that the clinic was offering vaccines when he visited. Despite expressing his desire not to receive the vaccine to the clinic staff and not having a signed parental consent form, he was still administered the vaccine.

When the clinic was unable to reach his mother, a worker instructed another to “give it to him anyway,” Happel and Smith allege in legal briefs.

Happel and Smith sued the Guilford County Board of Education and an organization of physicians who helped operate the school clinic, alleging claims of battery and that their constitutional rights were violated.

A panel of the intermediate-level appeals court last year ruled unanimously that the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act shielded the school district and the Old North State Medical Society from liability.

The law places broad protections and immunity on an array of individuals and organizations who perform “countermeasures” during a public health emergency.

A COVID-19 emergency declaration in March 2020 activated the law’s immunity provisions, Friday’s decision said.

Chief Justice Paul Newby, writing Friday’s prevailing opinion, said that the federal law did not prevent the mother and son from suing on allegations that their rights in the state constitution had been violated.

In particular, he wrote, there is the right for a parent to control their child’s upbringing and the “right of a competent person to refuse forced, nonmandatory medical treatment.”

The federal law’s plain text led a majority of justices to conclude that its immunity only covers tort injuries, Newby wrote, which is when someone seeks damages for injuries caused by negligent or wrongful actions.

“Because tort injuries are not constitutional violations, the PREP Act does not bar plaintiffs’ constitutional claims,” he added while sending the case back presumably for a trial on the allegations.

The court’s five Republican justices backed Newby’s opinion, including two who wrote a short separate opinion suggesting the immunity found in the federal law should be narrowed further.

Associate Justice Allison Riggs, writing a dissenting opinion backed by the other Democratic justice on the court, said that state constitutional claims should be preempted from the federal law.

Riggs criticized the majority for “fundamentally unsound” constitutional analyses.

“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.