The recent case of Happel v. Guilford County Bd. of Educ., 2025 N.C. LEXIS 191, 2025 WL 879618 (N.C. March 21, 2005), will probably provoke a political debate, but that is not why your friendly neighborhood DDL blog has it up for discussion today. In Happel, the North Carolina Supreme Court created an exception to the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act , 42 U.S.C. section 247d-6d preemption for a state constitutional claim against governmental actors who allegedly “forcibly vaccinated a child without his or his parent’s consent.”
The plaintiffs in the case were a 14 year old high school football player and his mother. After the school spotted a cluster of Covid-19 cases among the football team, it suspended all team activities and required players to undergo testing and to be “cleared by a public health professional” before returning to practice. The player showed up a clinic for what he thought would be only testing. Instead, personnel at the clinic wanted to vaccinate the player. The player did not consent. The clinic attempted to contact the player’s mother to secure her consent, but could not reach her. Then – and here is where the facts get ugly – “[i]gnoring additional protests from [the player] himself, the workers forcibly injected him with the first dose” of a Covid vaccine. The player and his mother later sued the school board and medical personnel for battery and for constitutional violations.
Notably, the Happel case did not involve a vaccine mandate. Rather, consent was supposed to be a prerequisite to administration of the vaccine. It just did not happen that way in this case. Have you heard the saying that hard cases make bad law? Sometimes easy ones do, too.
The defendants relied on the PREP Act to immunize them from liability. We’ve written about PREP Act immunity several times before, including here and here. The...
