KENNER, Louisiana (LifeSiteNews) — A mother will sue after a mobile vaccination clinic at a Louisiana high school gave the Pfizer COVID-19 shot to a teenager without parental consent, an act the family’s lawyer said amounts to “battery upon the minor child.”
According to local news outlet WWLTV, on October 20 an Oschner Health mobile vaccination clinic was rolled out to offer COVID-19 shots to students at East Jefferson High School in Jefferson Parish near New Orleans. The clinic employees administered the jabs to the teenagers after requiring them to present a signed parental consent form authorizing the injections.
In at least one instance, however, the clinic appears to have failed to obtain proper parental permission before administering a jab.
The mother of a 16-year-old boy is now readying a lawsuit with the help of Lafayette-based attorney G. Shelly Maturin, arguing that her son was given the shot without her permission after signing the parental consent form himself.
The Louisiana Department of Health requires that anyone under the age of 18 must first obtain parental consent before receiving a COVID-19 injection.
In a statement announcing intent to sue, the family’s attorney said, “The egregious and reckless actions of Ochsner and East Jefferson High School went well beyond any legal or moral bounds and at a minimum, constitute a battery upon the minor child.”
“Their actions should shock the conscience of all citizens of Louisiana, and every legal avenue will be pursued to make sure that justice is served,” Maturin continued, adding, “Hopefully, this type of lawless behavior will stop immediately, and no other parents or children will have to go through this nightmare.”
The lawsuit will name Ochsner Health, the Jefferson Parish School Board and East Jefferson High School as defendants, Fox8Live reported, and will be filed in Jefferson Parish.
In a written statement, Ochsner Health chief medical officer Dr. Robert Hart admitted that the teenager had been vaccinated without parental approval, and said his organization will beef up its procedures to prevent future policy violations.
“While we firmly believe in vaccinating adolescents to keep them safe from COVID-19, this should be done only with parental consent,” Dr. Hart said. “Our team has been notified that a student was vaccinated without proper parental consent at a school vaccination event on Oct. 20. We have procedures in place to ensure that all policies are followed; however, in this instance, this did not occur. We have taken immediate action to review our on-site vaccination policies and to ensure that these policies will be strictly enforced moving forward.”
“We are in communication with the parent who brought this to our attention. We offer our sincere regret and apology for any distress this has caused,” Hart continued. “We value the trust that parents put in us to care for their children.”
Hart promised that in response to the incident, Oschner is “revising our school vaccination program to ensure that this does not happen again.”
Jefferson Parish School Board spokesman Paris Vinnett issued a statement affirming that “our standard operating procedures include obtaining written consent from a parent or legal guardian prior to a student receiving the vaccine during an event conducted at one of our schools.”
“We will continue to work with Ochsner Health and our other healthcare partners to ensure vaccination events conducted on our campuses follow this process,” Vinnett said.
Beyond concerns about proper parental approval of the vaccination of minors, experts have sounded the alarm about the necessity and potential risks of vaccinating children and teenagers, who face extremely low risk of serious harm from COVID-19.
This summer, a team of researchers with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine “analyze[d] approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020,” and found a “mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.” In response to the finding, the lead researcher, Dr. Marty Makary, accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of basing its advocacy of school COVID vaccination on “flimsy data.”
Studies published after the jabs were authorized for teenagers have shown that young people, especially teenage boys, may develop severe side effects to the experimental COVID-19 drugs, including heart inflammation.
Meanwhile, responding to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s move to consider the approval of COVID-19 vaccination for young children aged 5 to 11, Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch recommended parents pull their children out of school rather than give them the jab.
“Honestly, I would organize with other parents to take them out of the school and create homeschooling environments,” Risch said. “There’s no choice. Your child’s life is on the line.”
While stating that it “is not a high risk that’s going to kill every child,” Risch said the danger posed by the shots is “enough of a risk, that on the average the benefit is higher for homeschooling than it is for vaccination and being in school.”
Currently Pfizer-BioNTech’s double-dose mRNA COVID-19 shots have received “full approval” for adults, and they are being administered to young people aged 12 to 17 under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).