The New York judge Matthew Cooper has set a worrying precedent with a recent ruling: Cooper denied a father the right to visit his 3-year-old daughter in a custody dispute due to his vaccination status.
Cooper is of the opinion that it is not in the child’s interest to have contact with his unvaccinated father. Voluntarily remaining unvaccinated poses a threat to the child’s health, judged the judge – and showed complete incomprehension towards anyone who rejects the Covid vaccination. This is based in his eyes on “misinformation, conspiracy theories and confused ideas of ‘individual freedom’”, such as Daily Mail reported.
If the father wants to see his child despite the lack of proof of vaccination, he must submit weekly PCR tests and bi-weekly antigen tests. Then he can visit the child every other weekend.
The father’s lawyer countered that his client was by no means a “conspiracy theorist”, but rather worried about the side effects of the vaccine – not least because he himself had already had a negative reaction to a flu shot. In addition, he has recovered – and of course immune to Covid.
The couple’s custody battle began in 2019. In September, the lawyer for the child’s mother, who lives in Manhattan, suddenly expressed “concern” on her behalf about the father’s vaccination status – and the judge took it on. The father’s lawyer thinks this is absurd:
That judge must feel that 80 million Americans who are not vaccinated are putting their children at immediate risk or harm, and so the courts should step in and remove those children from their parents. That is an absurd position.
It is still unclear whether the father will accept the mandatory test. The fact that children are not at risk from Covid-19 apparently played no role in the process.
