A Colorado school district said it won’t be letting kids get vaccinated on its campuses after one parent’s campaign to sabotage the school clinic culminated in a video going viral on right-wing Twitter.
Gregg McGough, the father of a 15-year-old high-school student, circulated a video that showed his son trying to obtain a vaccine at school by lying about his age and providing a fake note of parental consent. McGough told the Colorado Sun that his goal in sharing the video was to shut down the vaccination clinic at Littleton Public School and to prevent other clinics from cropping up in schools in the future, ostensibly by showing that students could obtain inoculations by simply forging notes from their parents.
In addition to a video showing McGough’s son, Owen, apparently misleading vaccine workers, a second video showed another student offering up a fake name, “Draper Ensling,” and giving a phony date of birth.
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In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Owen McGough said he was behind the videos and that he worked with another student to get around requirements for obtaining a COVID-19 vaccine from a clinic hosted at Heritage High School “without very much effort at all.”
“They really didn’t check into the facts,” Owen McGough said.
Gregg McGough defended the videos in a Facebook post, calling it “disturbing and criminal” that the kids had come so close to getting the vaccines–while insisting that any school district that allowed Tri-County Health Department to offer vaccines on school property is “putting your children at risk.”
“This is subterfuge and indoctrination allowing children to make medical decisions without their parents permission or even being present,” he wrote. “I find this a disgusting overreach on the part of LPSD.”
McGough told The Daily Beast in an email on Saturday that the videos “exposed the very real dangers created by the CDPHE” after the vaccine clinic fell short of following an area of its website indicating a parent or guardian “must be present for anyone 5 to 17 years old to get vaccinated.”
Elsewhere on its website, Tri-County urges parents to “talk to your provider to see if you should be present at your child’s vaccination appointment or if you provide parental consent over the phone or in writing.”
When asked by Fox News what had prompted him to make the video, Owen McGough replied: “I just don’t like seeing vaccine clinics being put into schools.”
“Bringing the vaccine clinics into schools brings politics into schools as well, and opportunities for social pressure from other students and teachers and staff administrators to get the vaccine and even override parental consent,” he said.
The pair of videos generated fury among vaccine opponents after appearing on the right-wing Twitter account “Libs of Tik Tok” as an example of how easily kids could circumvent rules to get the jab. Commenting on the second video, Libs of Tik Tok said it had been recorded during school hours and featured a 16-year-old “lying about his age,” to nurses who agreed to give him the vaccine without asking him for identification.
McGough told The Daily Beast that the CDPHE was to blame for a decision that “removed the opportunity for health care providers to ask for an ID,” which he likened to a state agency ordering that liquor stores are not allowed to ask for identification from customers.
“That opens the door for minors to be able to purchase liquor. ID requirements were there for a reason,” he wrote. “This is entirely the fault of the CDPHE for creating this problem.”
The CDPHE said that the identification requirement created barrier and exacerbated “accessibility inequities” particularly for critical groups, according to a copy of the amended public health order issued in November.
Neither of the videos shows a student getting vaccinated, but the response was swift after McGough sent a letter demanding “the immediate halting of LPS permission for Tri-County Health Department vaccine clinics’ to operate inside Littleton Public Schools.”
In an email to Littleton Public Schools Superintendent Brian Ewert published to the Libs of Tik Tok’s Twitter account, McGough details the bid by two kids who are 15 and 16 years old to see if they can get vaccinated by misleading vaccine staffers.
“The district was on notice regarding the problems with pushing the vaccine to minor children at schools,” he wrote.
McGough added that he had been assured by the superintendent that vaccines would require permission from parents and the presence of a guardian for all doses, but he touted the kids’ “experiments” as proof that was not the case.
“Superintendent Ewert was wrong, and is now on notice for that,” he wrote, insisting that after providing false information the kids were “readily offered the shots and encouraged to get them.”
“Since there have been serious adverse effects to minors taking these shots, including serious cases of myocarditis, real physical harm could have occurred,” he wrote.
Neither child ended up getting vaccinated, as McGough himself confirmed.
A day after the email and videos were posted on Twitter, Ewert announced in a letter to parents on Tuesday that the district would no longer offer vaccines on its campuses.
Ewert said the school district had been mistaken in its assumption that vaccination clinics would follow a protocol practiced at the Children’s Hospital that required a parent or authorized guardian to be present at the time of vaccination.
Tri-County Health, which staffed the clinic with employees from a contractor with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, told school officials that Colorado doesn’t require parents to accompany kids to their vaccine appointments as long as parental consent is obtained before the appointment.
“Regardless, we don’t believe Jogan Health employees followed the proper protocol in obtaining parent permission, potentially putting children at risk,” Ewert wrote. “Please know that LPS does not condone the administration of COVID vaccines or any other vaccines to minors without a parent present to provide consent.”
Ewert could not immediately be reached for comment by The Daily Beast on Saturday.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment told the Colorado Sun the videos were made to obstruct vaccination efforts at schools, which were “an important way the state ensures access to COVID-19 vaccines in places that are convenient.”
Becky O’Guin, spokesperson for Tri-County Health, defended the vaccine staff, telling the Colorado Sun that the videos make it more difficult for those eligible for vaccines to get them.
“Our judgment is that state protocols appear to have been followed in assessing appropriateness of offering vaccination,” she told the outlet. The videos, she said, are “hurting those in our community who want and need easier access to the vaccine for themselves and their children and will now have to find another vaccine location.”
