NEW YORK CITY — A Manhattan judge has reportedly denied a father the right to visit his three-year-old daughter as a result of his refusal to be vaccinated for COVID-19.
The New York Post reports:
“Here, in-person parental access by defendant is not in the child’s best interests, and there are exceptional circumstances that support its suspension,” wrote Justice Matthew Cooper, who is presiding over the pair’s divorce and custody dispute.
“The dangers of voluntarily remaining unvaccinated during access with a child while the COVID-19 virus remains a threat to children’s health and safety cannot be understated,” the jurist said in the Oct. 7 decision, which withheld the parties’ names.
Furthermore, Cooper ruled that the father, whose natural immunity from a previous infection has been asserted by his lawyer, would have his visitation rights reinstated so long as he submits to what is effectively a court-ordered vaccination or otherwise receive weekly screenings for COVID.
This is judicial activism, plain and simple. COVID-19 poses a minimal threat to young children. Over the course of the pandemic, only 676 minors have died of the virus.
Of those 676, only 219, like the daughter of the man being denied visitation rights, were under the age of four.
Children, while naturally still susceptible to COVID, are nowhere near as vulnerable as those using them as political weapons make them out to be.
And judges, particularly matrimonial judges like Cooper, whose rulings should have effectively everything to do with case specifics and nothing to do with public policy, don’t get to use their position on the bench to cram their views on COVID policy into decisions that have little to do with it.
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