Don Figer was taken to court late last year by his ex-wife because he refused to grant her permission to vaccinate their 11-year-old child. Mr. Figer, who is vaccinated, said he feels that drugmakers haven’t fully tested the vaccines on children, and that it was unclear to him whether the risk of getting the shot outweighed the risk of Covid-19 for his child.

“The potential downside of waiting, given the severity of Covid for children, is small,” said Mr. Figer, a professor in the college of science at the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York. “I wanted to wait and see this experiment play out on other people’s children, not on my child.”…

In most cases, U.S. courts have followed the guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommend that everyone over the age of 5 gets vaccinated, he said.

“Most courts don’t like to get involved in raising a child,” Mr. Davis said. “But the courts are falling in line with getting the children vaccinations.”