Judge denies father visitation rights due to unvaccinated status

A judge has denied a father visitation rights with his 3-year-old daughter because he is unvaccinated and refuses to submit to regular testing; the father has natural immunity.

Quick Facts

• Manhattan Judge Matthew Cooper ruled that allowing the father to visit the child was not in the child’s best interest.
• Cooper dismissed the father’s claims of natural immunity and religious objection.
• The judge derided the unvaccinated and claimed exposure to the father was a danger to the child.

The Long Island parent is considered a danger to his daughter due to his refusal to receive the vaccine, according to Judge Matthew Cooper, who railed against the unvaccinated, “Unfortunately, and to my mind, incomprehensibly, a sizeable minority, seizing upon misinformation, conspiracy theories, and muddled notions of ‘individual liberty,’ have refused all entreaties to be vaccinated.”

The judge noted that the child’s preschool requires parents who participate in pick-up or drop-off of students to be vaccinated.

“[Father] professes to love his daughter with all his being and he asserts that he wants nothing more than to play an active and meaningful role in her life, which, presumably, would include dropping her off and picking her up from school and being part of her school community,” Cooper writes. “Nevertheless, he adamantly refuses to do what his daughter’s schoolmates’ parents have all been required to do—be vaccinated.”

The judge called the father’s arguments against vaccination “unconvincing.” He claims that the father originally claimed natural immunity and would consult a doctor but abandoned that argument and did not consult with a doctor. “Instead, he adopted the novel position that his ‘religious beliefs as a Roman Catholic’ precluded him from receiving the vaccine.”

The judge continued, “This justification rings hollow given that Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, is vaccinated and has encouraged Catholics everywhere to be vaccinated for ‘the common good,’” the judge wrote.

The mother had amended her requirement that the father be vaccinated if he submitted to regular Covid testing. The father declined unless the mother also was tested, leading the judge to conclude that his refusal was due to animus against the mother.

He writes,

In the final analysis, the fundamental question in this dispute between the child’s two parents is this: What matters more to each of them, his or her own interests or those of their child? On one hand, there is the [father], who is unable to offer any reasonable, let alone compelling, reason why he should not be vaccinated or even undergo testing, resisting both simply because he sees it as his ‘right’ to do so. On the other hand, there is the [mother], who is fully vaccinated and observant of COVID-19 protocols, seeking the imposition of reasonable conditions on [father]’s access not because it somehow benefits her, but because it serves to protect the health, safety, and well-being of the child.

It is of note that the mother claims that the father has a history of substance abuse and untreated mental health issues. The father’s visitation rights were already restricted to supervised visits.

This father isn’t the only one being denied visitation rights because of vaccination status. An Ohio mother was barred from seeing her son unless she was vaccinated. That order was later rescinded.

In the case of the New York father, it seems there are other mitigating issues, but the judge didn’t deny him visitation rights for those issues. He denied visitation rights because the father refused to be vaccinated. The judge’s ruling is dripping with contempt for the unvaccinated and his dismissal of any medical or religious exemptions is alarming.

With vaccine mandates and rulings like this, parents are told, “If you loved your child you would get vaccinated.” This allows judges to deny parents the right to be in their child’s life regardless of any valid objections to the vaccine.

The statement of a rogue pope does not invalidate the concerns of Roman Catholics who value life and who have concerns about the development of the vaccine using aborted fetal cell lines. Moreover, natural immunity has been shown to be at least as effective if not more effective than vaccine immunity.

The right to determine what goes in your body is a foundational human right.

Yet all of this has been tossed aside for COVID vaccines, which, while Judge Cooper claims they are safe and effective, are still only under emergency use authorization and not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Parents should not have to give up their rights to see their children. It isn’t selfish to have concerns about the vaccine. Through guilt and coercion, authorities are attempting to force everyone to receive an experimental vaccine. Americans with true objections to the vaccine must not give in, or those authorities will know they can force Americans to do other things they disagree with.