Walgreens Sued for Wrongfully Giving COVID Shots to Children
- by Rishma Parpia
- Published February 20, 2024
- Federal & State Courts
Parents in Evansville, Indiana have filed a lawsuit against Walgreens pharmacy store for administering the wrong vaccine to their children. Alexandra and Joshua Price took their four-year-old son and five-year-old daughter to Walgreens to receive influenza vaccines on Oct. 4, 2021, but instead the children were given adult doses of Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty mRNA ((messenger ribonucleic acid)) COVID-19 biologic.1
At that time of the incident, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had only allowed the Comirnaty shot to be administered under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for people 16 years of age and older and children 12 to 15 years old.2
The Prices said that they received a call 90 minutes after their children received the shots informing them that they had made an error in vaccine administration. The family was told that entire family, included the two children, had been injected with adult doses of the Comirnaty shots. Alexandra Price said:
When they called us and told us that they had made a mistake and had given us the wrong shot, I was just in shock. All I could say to them was, ‘What does this mean for my kids?3
Lawsuit States Children Had Adverse Reactions to COVID Shots
On Oct. 4, 2023, the Prices filed a civil suit against Walgreens and the pharmacist who administered the Comirnaty shots to their children. Vanderburgh County Superior Court in Indiana said the parents were seeking “punitive damages, costs, plus all other relief allowed by law.” By the end of October 2023, attorneys for Walgreens moved the case to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana after attorney Scott Tyler argued the Price’s complaint “asserts a claim arising under and governed by federal law.” The Walgreens attorney also asked the court to dismiss the case.4
According to the family’s complaint, the adult version of Comirnaty contained three to 10 times the dosage of the Comirnaty shot for which the FDA subsequently granted EUA in young children between the ages of six months and five years old. The Price family’s attorney, Daniel Tuley, said that the children experienced “elevated blood pressure, headaches [and] body aches” due to the incident. The family as a whole suffered “emotional distress.”5
Tuley added:
The children have experienced a number of adverse effects since receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Fever, body aches, cough, headaches, and nausea are among the symptoms the children are experiencing. The 4- and 5-year-old are also under treatment of a pediatric cardiologist for tachycardia and elevated blood pressure, respectively.6
The Price family said that, after the incident, Walgreens only provided them with proof of COVID vaccination because the family insisted on getting the record. The family also claimed that Walgreens did not report the incident to the FDA’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).7
Walgreens Attorneys Cite Immunity Under PREP Act, Blame Family for Negligence
Attorneys for Walgreens argued in a formal answer that the company nor its employees were responsible for the alleged suffering claimed by the Price family and that family may have actually been at fault for “failing to avoid injury” or “mitigate damages.” They also cited immunity from each of the Price’s claims of liability under the Public Readiness for Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) implemented during the COVID pandemic.8
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the PREP Act granted health care providers broad protections from liability as long as an incident did not involve “willful negligence.”
The attorneys added that Walgreens could not confirm the accuracy of the family claims that they intended to receive the influenza vaccine rather than the COVID shots. The also argued that complaint failed to account that a third party, such as a vaccine manufacturer, could bear responsibility for the alleged mix up by the mislabeling the vaccine.
Tyler stated:
[Walgreens] affirmatively states that the incident and ensuing damages, if any, about which Plaintiffs complain were caused or contributed by their own carelessness and negligence.9
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