Will SCOTUS rule on another COVID outrage?

Vermont’s governor, Phil Scott, granted cash payments to Vermont public schools during the COVID-19 pandemic if they achieved high vaccination rates for schoolchildren.  When the state awards itself money to serve pharmaceutical companies at the expense of individual liberties, something is systemically broken.  This is a moral hazard with very real impacts.

Vermont’s notoriously left-leaning Republican governor was at the front of the vaccination line for the Green Mountains during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Governor Scott closed down farmers’ markets as well as schools and pushed Vermonters to get vaccinated with great urgency.  This included young children who were at very low risk of sickness from COVID-19 (per CDC data).

Vermont public school students who refused to wear masks were sent home and not provided with at-home schooling support.  Partly inflamed by Governor Scott’s fearful rhetoric, many Vermont educators treated families who declined the novel, experimental jabs as modern-day lepers even as it became clear that the hastily manufactured “products” did not work as safely or as effectively as Governor Scott and Big Pharma advertised.  (Imagine that: Pfizer Corporation misleading the public about its products, as it did with OxyContin.  What’s not to trust?)

It was bad enough that doctors and pharmacists were paid cash incentives based on the percentage of patients or customers who received these dubious “interventions,” for which pharmaceutical companies received unlimited legal immunity by federal law under the PREP Act.  Whether a doctor or pharmacist will fully and adequately inform patients about the potential risks of a medication when he is paid substantial rewards for recommending it is a fair question, but the conflict in Vermont public schools is even more suspect.

Yes, Governor Scott actually did this.  He employed some of the federal slush money for “COVID relief” to relieve Vermont schoolchildren of protections against conflicts of interest:

I have directed the Agency of Education to reserve $2 million in [ostensible American Rescue Plan Act “ARPA”] grant dollars for schools who achieve high vaccination rates. There will be benchmarks with corresponding awards as a school reaches higher percentages. Funds will be awarded to schools when they reach those thresholds. [Governor Phil Scott and Dr. Mark Levine Discuss Delta, Vaccine Effectiveness and Pandemic Divisiveness at Weekly Covid-19 Briefing, Wed., Sept. 28, 2021.]

What could possibly go wrong with such a scheme?  Vermont’s public schools are already some of the most costly in the nation in per-pupil spending despite declining test scores and student enrollment.  Vermont has lost some 30% of all public school students since 2000, but not a single school superintendent!  Governor Scott’s “award” money for failing public schools that coerce students to get experimental vaccines they don’t really need would likely fund more BLM and gay pride flags for the woke school walls.  How could anyone complain?

The better question is, why hasn’t anyone complained?  The government has a history to match Pfizer’s — the Tuskegee experiments, exposure of veterans to radioactivity and experimental drugs, forced sterilization in the eugenics movement (Vermont was at the forefront of that one), lobotomies, thalidomide, and a host of other failed medical or government “policies” that turned out to be unhealthy if not devious.

One Vermont family was concerned about its young son receiving an experimental vaccine.  So Tony Politella visited the local public school the week before a scheduled vaccination clinic and was assured that his six-year-old boy would be safe from the jab.  On the day, however, the young child received an arm tag with another child’s name and was vaccinated against his will and despite his protests.  When Mrs. Politella inquired, she was met with school officials who could not explain how such an incident occurred, or even who was responsible!

Perhaps Governor Scott’s economic incentives influenced this heinous incident.  The Politellas have been denied any legal recourse by Vermont’s Supreme Court, which ruled in August that the family has no right to sue for this blatant violation of their fundamental rights as parents (and their son’s rights as a patient) to be properly informed of the risks of, and to decline, a medical intervention.

The Politella family has decided not to take this added insult lying down.  They have filed suit in the United States Supreme Court to challenge the Vermont Supreme Court’s bizarre holding that PREP Act provisions immunizing pharmaceutical companies for harms caused by their products also shield Vermont’s (cash-incentivized) public bureaucrats from any responsibility for their actions against this young student.

Who could question that?

[Disclosure: John Klar is legal counsel to the Politella family before the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Politellas shared their story publicly for the first time in a short video interview.]

Attorney-farmer John Klar hosts the Small Farm Republic Substack and podcast from his Vermont farm.  His recent book is Small Farm Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival.

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