The mother of a 13-year-old LAUSD student says she’s now suing the district for vaccinating her son without her consent. Ted Chen reports on the NBC4 News at 4pm on Wednesday, July 27, 2022.
The mother of a 13-year-old LAUSD student says she’s now suing the district for vaccinating her student without her consent, claiming the school also bribed him with pizza.
"He said, 'yeah, they offered me pizza,'" Maribel Duarte said.
Duarte first spoke to NBCLA about her son Moises back in December 2021 in front of Barack Obama Global Prep Academy in South Los Angeles, where she says he told her he was given pizza in exchange for getting a COVID-19 vaccination shot, and told to forge his mother’s name on a consent form.
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"If I already know all the problems he has, why am going to let him allow him to get that shot?" Duarte said.
Duarte claims the shot re-awakened her son’s childhood asthma and bleeding condition. While next to her lawyer Wednesday, Duarte said she’s now suing the LAUSD, saying that even though she got the vaccine, she didn’t want it for her son.
"This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not an anti-vax case. This is about parental rights about having the ability to protect your children," attorney Nicole Pearson said.
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Surrounded by protestors, they spoke out against California Senate Bill 866, which would allow children 15 years and older to get vaccinations without parental consent. The author is state senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco.
"And of course we always want parents to be involved in their kids health care decisions that is absolutely the ideal," State Sen. Scott Wiener (D) San Francisco said.
"But unfortunately there are teenagers who are either being neglected...and then there are teenagers whose parents are anti-vaxxers and this has real ramifications."
Earlier this month, a judge struck down LAUSD’s vaccine mandate for students, which, like a similar state mandate, had already been delayed until next summer. Both sides now gearing up for a legal battle on how much freedom minors should have to make decisions about their health.
With school mandates now on pause, the LAUSD issued a statement saying they do not typically comment on threatened, pending, or ongoing litigation.
