By John Klar – Brownstone Institute
A controversial Vermont Supreme Court decision reached the rather astonishing conclusion that the government can vaccinate very young children with experimental products without parental consent or legal recourse. The ruling is surreal in a state that claims it prizes individual liberties. If not overturned by sane minds in the US Supreme Court, the consequences of this shortsighted, simplistic opinion may prove profound for American civil rights law.
Dario Politella and Shujen Politella v. Windham Southeast School District et al. concerned a young child who was administered a Covid-19 vaccination despite his parents’ prior communication to their local public school that he was not to be vaccinated. The boy told workers his parents objected, but they distracted him with a stuffed animal and administered the jab.
Immunizing the Government – from Children’s Rights
The Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act immunized school officials from “all state-law claims…as a matter of law.” The Court did not address state or federal constitutional privacy protections or bodily autonomy, merely swallowing these paramount individual rights in a perverse, all-entrusting servitude to federal preemption by an omnipotent administrative state.
Particularly callous toward parents whose children might be vaccinated – or vaccine-injured – by negligent or incompetent medical care was the Politella Court’s construction of the PREP Act to extinguish informed consent protections for minors, despite the Act lacking any such stated intent. To rub salt in this civil rights wound, the Court interpreted federal PREP Act preemption (and thus immunity) to include even experimental vaccines, regardless of efficacy, future vaccine injury, or a balancing of potential benefits versus harms to children.
The Court reasoned that, because “[t]he ‘sole exception’ to the PREP Act’s grant of immunity is a federal cause of action against a covered person whose ‘willful misconduct’ causes ‘death or serious physical injury,” plaintiffs’ cause of action required a showing of one of four possibilities that would exempt them from the Act’s vaccine-litigation shield: 1) a defendant wasn’t covered; 2) a defendant’s conduct “was not causally related to administering a covered countermeasure” (that is, a medical or other PREP-protected person did something other than give a shot); 3) the injected substance was not covered by the Act; or 4) the PREP Act declaration had expired.
This construction of federal law allowed the Court to dismiss the Vermont parents’ concerns that the vaccine they asked not to be given to their young son was experimental, concluding that even a poison vaccine would still merit congressional protection under #2 above:
“Despite plaintiffs’ arguments to the contrary, they have alleged only tortious conduct that is causally related to the administration of the vaccine to [their son].
Plaintiffs characterize the Pfizer BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine as “experimental,” but they do not dispute that [their son] was injected with the Pfizer vaccine. Nor do they dispute that the Pfizer vaccine is a covered countermeasure.”
Translation: The Vermont Supreme Court construes evidence that clearly proves that an approved vaccine is experimental, harmful, ineffective, or even deliberately designed to inflict illness (so long as it does not result in death or ‘serious physical injury’) to defeat any claim because all of these factual allegations confirm a ‘covered’ shot was administered, which bars all claims short of planned genocide.
Upending Child Protection Ethics
This decision reverses a century of medical ethics, concluding that PREP Act immunity also extends to children separated (negligently or deliberately, the latter only being actionable if death or serious injury results) from their parents and denied long-standing parental informed consent protections. A 2023 review of academic literature concluded:
“Ethical challenges can arise when vaccines are mandated for all ages, but they increase significantly when mandated for children…
“Children are less susceptible to COVID-19; the disease severity in children is mild, and the potential benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine are low, so mandating vaccines is untenable…
“Mandates imply coercion, which might agitate the reaction towards COVID-19 vaccination and increase anti-vaccination attitudes among the public.”
The nonprofit Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law harshly condemned the decision:
“Informed consent is a foundational ethical principle in medical practice, requiring patients or their guardians to be fully informed about and voluntarily agree to medical procedures. This principle is especially crucial in the context of vaccinations, which are preventative measures administered to healthy individuals. The Vermont Supreme Court’s decision effectively reverses this principle by placing the burden on parents to proactively send refusals of permission to schools.”
The decision is far worse than this: post-Politella, proactively sending parental refusals provides zero legal or medical protection for schoolchildren. Vaccine hesitancy has been seeded by government disinformation, coercion, and speech infringements. Here, it is being amplified by Kafkian bureaucratic blather about how the federal government is unfettered by the inalienable Bill of Rights that the Vermont Supreme Court flushed down the jurisprudential outhouse.
A Not-So-Brave New Vermont World?
This dreadful ruling seeds moral hazards with zero accountability: if children are now denied informed medical consent, by what path are uninformed adults to bypass PREP Act preemption? Forced jabs, injection by deception, fraudulent vaccine claims, proof of unethical monetary kickbacks – all of these would merely prove to Vermont’s brain-trust Supreme Court that the Act’s bad actor shields were fully in force.
China required vaccination for school attendance, but “China’s top health authorities…said that while people should be encouraged to get jabbed, the decision would be left to them.” During the pandemic, Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed, “In my opinion, it is counterproductive and unnecessary to introduce mandatory vaccinations…” The Biden Administration unconstitutionally attempted to mandate vaccines for healthcare workers; Vermont’s Court is saying government actors can administer them however they want, with zero recourse unless people die.
That is decidedly upside-down in a state that prizes bodily autonomy for abortion, though consistent with Vermont’s trans-sanctuary state status and laws providing minors with gender ‘affirming’ hormones without parental consent or knowledge – what’s a little Pfizer shot when Big Pharma already has an exclusive government monopoly on the nation’s children?
The seminal case in US Constitutional law addressing vaccine mandates is Jacobson v Massachusetts, a 1905 decision affirming a state’s power to compel citizens to obtain a smallpox vaccine or pay a $5 fine. Jacobson explicitly acknowledged Constitutional guarantees swallowed whole by the Vermont Supreme Court’s astonishing 2024 deference to the PREP ACT as the highest law of the land:
“A local enactment or regulation, even if based on the acknowledged police powers of a State, must always yield in case of conflict with the exercise by the General Government of any power it possesses under the Constitution, or with any right which that instrument gives or secures.”
This embarrassing Vermont decision will likely reach the United States Supremes, who are versed in the fundamental human liberties flippantly ignored by Vermont’s highest court. If this vaccine-cult decision stands, parental distrust of vaccines will extend to ‘public-school hesitancy’ – why send a child to a school that has almost no legal accountability for its actions? The only way to protect American children’s basic human rights would then be to keep them out of public school…
Or send them to China or Russia.