North Carolina Law Extends Pharmacists’ Authority to Administer Vaccines, Adds Parental Consent for Minors

A 12-year-old girl receives her COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination hub in Dubbo, Australia, on Aug. 21, 2021. Belinda Soole/Getty Images

A North Carolina law now extends the authority of pharmacists to administer COVID-19 vaccines without a prescription from a physician.

The temporary authority had been granted by an emergency amendment to the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) in 2020.

Gov. Roy Cooper signed a bill into law on Friday.

“This important legislation will help our state administer COVID-19 vaccines more quickly and efficiently,” Cooper said in a press release.

The amendment to PREP had authorized licensed pharmacists, pharmacy interns, and pharmacy technicians to administer COVID-19 vaccines without a prescription from a physician.

In December 2020, North Carolina State Health Director Elizabeth Tilson signed an order authorizing immunizing pharmacists in North Carolina to administer the COVID-19 vaccines in order to reduce the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19.

That emergency authorization was temporary, but House Bill 96, now law, will expand vaccination authority, beginning on Sept. 1, for pharmacists, interns, and technicians to continue administering the vaccines without a prescription from a physician.

Parental Consent

Republican state Sen. Joyce Krawiec, who sponsored House Bill 96, had told The Epoch Times that her reasoning for sponsoring the bill was to “get the parental consent piece in there.”

She said she was surprised to discover that children 12 to 17 could get the vaccine without the permission of a parent or guardian.

“One of my constituents called to make me aware that his child was offered the vaccine without his consent, and I was shocked,” Krawiec had said. “I thought, ‘this can’t be.’ At first, I told my constituent, ‘I don’t think that’s accurate, but I’ll get back with you.’”

Cooper has had several programs offering scholarships to youth who took the vaccine.

One of the programs involved North Carolinians aged 12–17 to be eligible for a $125,000 college scholarship at a school of their choice if they received at least one shot.

Vaccine Warnings Being Ignored

In a Monday interview on Epoch TV’s “Crossroads,” Rex Lee, a cybersecurity and privacy adviser, said that categories for high-risk patients listed within the inserts of the COVID-19 vaccines, such as the risks to the immunocompromised and pregnant women, are being overlooked by physicians, third parties granted permission to administer the vaccines, and the mainstream media.

“There is a whole category of people who fall into this, but the mainstream media keeps pressing people, or shaming people, into arbitrability going out and getting the vaccine,” Lee said. “And I don’t think a lot of doctors know about these guidelines either because my personal doctors have not told me about these guidelines, and I’m not sure if they’ve ever read them themselves.”

Lee added that, by getting a COVID-19 vaccine from a third party, such as a pharmacist at Walgreens or CVS Pharmacy, a person is waiving his or her legal right in the possible case of injury from the vaccine.

“Who are you going to sue in that case, if they don’t know that you have an inflamed heart, or if you are on blood thinners, or they don’t know your cancer history,” Lee said, “then you’re getting a vaccine from third parties who have no idea what your health history is. And then they are not doing an examination on you beforehand to see if you’re even compatible with the vaccine, plus they are not doing this under a doctor’s care. More often than not, you are not getting the vaccine not even from a registered nurse. You are getting it from an employee at a CVS drug store, or a Walgreens drug store.”

FDA Approval

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for people 16 and older on Monday, almost nine months after having issued emergency use authorization for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine on Dec. 11, 2020.

According to an FDA press release, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine will be marketed as Comirnaty.

The vaccine continues to be available under emergency use authorization, including for children 12 through 15 years of age, and for the administration of a third dose “in certain immunocompromised individuals.”

Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said the approval “may now instill additional confidence to get vaccinated.”

“While this and other vaccines have met the FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for emergency use authorization, as the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product,” Woodcock said.

President Joe Biden said in a press conference on Monday that he hopes the approval will encourage “more companies in the private sector to step up the vaccine requirements that will reach millions more people.”

Comirnaty contains messenger RNA (mRNA), according to the FDA, “a kind of genetic material,” which “is used by the body to make a mimic of one of the proteins in the virus that causes COVID-19.”

Vaccines and Censorship

Robert Malone, who said he was one of the developers of mRNA technology, addressed censorship around and possible risks of the mRNA vaccinations in an interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders“ program.

His own LinkedIn profile had been suspended (now reinstated) after providing an opinion on negative side effects in individuals under 18 injected with the mRNA vaccine.

With increased public and private universities implementing vaccine mandates, Malone had warned adolescents about being vaccinated, pointing to reports linking heart inflammation as a potential side effect of the mRNA vaccine.

Regarding censorship around information on COVID-19 vaccines, he told The Epoch Times: “This censorship of information, those that are experiencing it, including myself, are profoundly disturbed by what we’re seeing, and the long-term meanings of it.”