patrick.net

https://x.com/SecKennedy/status/1996411283772416281

“Today, we are putting pediatric medical professionals on notice: you cannot sideline parents,” HHS Secretary Kennedy said. “When providers ignore parental consent, violate exemptions to vaccine mandates, or keep parents in the dark about their children’s care, we will act decisively. We will use every tool at our disposal to protect families and restore accountability.”

He meant it. Apparently, some health bureaucrats think “parental consent” is just a decorative sticker on the syringe, like a mattress label or a “do not eat” warning on laundry detergent. Funny—these were the same people who once shrieked at us to follow federal guidance. Whoopsies! Now they’re acting like defiant jungle guerrillas, crouched in the foliage, ambushing stragglers in the lunchroom’s dark corners.

💉 Back in August, HHS —working through the DOJ’s Office of Civil Rights, now helmed by pandemic superlawyer Harmeet Dhillon— threatened to yank $1.37 billion in federal health funding from West Virginia for refusing to honor religious exemptions. That put the Mountain State’s simmering jab war on full boil.

West Virginia, famously stubborn, recognizes only medical exemptions for school shots. (It’s one of just five states that still refuses religious or philosophical opt-outs.) In January, Governor Patrick Morrisey signed Executive Order 7-25, creating a religious exemption based on the state’s brand-new Equal Protection for Religion Act (EPRA). A few schools grudgingly complied. Most dragged their feet like they were marching uphill in wet sand.

Then in June, the State Board of Education rebelled, voted unanimously to defy the governor, and ordered schools to resume jabbing any kid who dared raise religion as a shield. (It triggered me, since I waged a similar legal war against defiant Florida schools during covid over mandatory masking.) Cue chaos, lawsuits, and parental fury. In late November, a trial court sided with Morrisey and ordered schools to follow the law.

But two days ago, West Virginia’s Supreme Court executed a procedural bayonet charge—leapfrogging the appeals court to freeze the lower ruling. Within hours, the Board of Education blasted out new orders: stop honoring exemptions and start sticking students again. ...

The fight isn’t over. The legislature tried —but failed— this year to pass a statutory religious exemption. Gov. Morrisey isn’t backing down. “Whether we prevail in the courts or prevail with the Legislature,” his office said, “West Virginia will ultimately join the other 45 states that protect and defend religious liberty.” So.

💉 Kennedy’s warning shot matters. Victimized parents keep reporting the same nightmare: kids coming home saying they were jabbed at school despite the parents opting out, invoking exemptions, or explicitly refusing. In places like West Virginia, county health departments have been known to swoop in like syringe-wielding SWAT teams and start sticking everything that moves.

These are the same schools that won’t give your kid an Advil without a notarized affidavit and two witnesses. But inject 72 doses of federally funded pharmaceuticals? Sure, no problem, please line up here.

But here’s the twist: those county-administered vaccines are federally funded, which means they’re subject to federal rules. And those rules require schools to honor exemptions. That’s the lever Kennedy is now yanking, hard.

In his clip, he twice directed parents to HHS’s revamped reporting page— effectively a national tip line for bureaucrats who can’t keep their needles to themselves: (HHS.gov/ocr/complaints.) “We will use every tool we have to protect parents and families,” Secretary Kennedy said. “Parents know their children best; parents love their children most,” he added.

Two especially bright flashes of good news: First, the national climate around school jabs has flipped faster than an exhausted general at Appomattox. Under Biden, federal agencies were shoving shots down every open hallway. Now, HHS keeps steadily rolling out policies, one after another, that strengthen parental authority and weaken compulsory vaccination culture.

It’s an exact inversion of the bizarro world we woke up in just a couple years ago.

Second, for anyone who doomscrolls too much and thinks Secretary Kennedy abandoned the vaccine battlefield to wage holy war only on seed oils and food dyes— nope. Not even close. Yesterday’s cannon blast —and the rest of the great stuff we’ve seen rolling out of HHS this week— should settle that question nicely.

The University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine will pay more than $10.3 million to 18 faculty and students whose religious exemptions to the school’s COVID-19 vaccine policy were denied.

The lawsuit challenged the university’s refusal to accommodate sincerely held religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine. The plaintiffs, who sued anonymously, included physicians, medical students, nurses and administrative staff.

The Thomas More Society, which filed the lawsuit and represents clients in religious liberty cases nationwide, stated that the settlement is a rare instance in which plaintiffs recovered monetary damages under the First Amendment for a government COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Michael McHale, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, said the resolution cannot undo the harm inflicted on the plaintiffs.

“No amount of compensation or course-correction” can make up for the damage caused by the university’s vaccine mandate, McHale said. “At great, and sometimes career-ending, costs, our heroic clients fought for the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans who were put to the unconscionable choice of their livelihoods or their faith.”