A New York City judge recently ruled that a father in a divorce and custody case may not visit his three-year-old daughter unless he gets one of the COVID-19 vaccines or submits to a stringent testing regimen.

“Here, in-person parental access by defendant is not in the child’s best interests, and there are exceptional circumstances that support its suspension,” Manhattan Justice Matthew Cooper wrote in an October 7 decision, according to the New York Post, which broke the story Thursday.

“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,” he added.

He ordered the father either to get vaccinated or to submit to weekly (and highly unreliable) PCR tests and to an antigen test within 24 hours of a scheduled visit with his daughter. Those visits normally occur every other weekend.

Cooper appears to have legitimate concerns about the three-year-old’s safety. He had already ordered the father’s visits with his daughter to be supervised by her mother because of the man’s “history of substance abuse and untreated mental health issues,” he explained in his ruling.

However, his concerns are seriously misplaced when it comes to COVID-19. Children are at almost no risk of coming down with a serious case of the disease, much less dying from it, a fact recognized even by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which employs no less an authority on the virus (by mainstream-media standards) than Dr. Anthony Fauci. Denying a father a few days per month with his young daughter over fears of her suffering from COVID-19 is, as the father’s attorney put it, “absurd.”

“This judge must feel that 80 million Americans who aren’t vaccinated are placing their children at imminent risk of harm and, therefore, the courts should intervene and remove those children from their parents,” Lloyd Rosen told the Post. “This is an absurd position to take.”

There’s more to the story than just a judge who has consumed the COVID Kool-Aid, of course. The divorce case has been going on since 2019, with custody one of the main sticking points. The mother’s attorney waited until early September to raise the matter of the father’s vaccination status, which suggests it was more of a ploy to prevent his visits than a genuine concern over the child’s health.

Nevertheless, Cooper bought it and ordered the father to get the jab if he ever wanted to see his daughter again. “The jurist argued that inoculation has become a prerequisite ‘to participate meaningfully in everyday society’ and pointed to sweeping vaccine mandates for public school teachers, police officers and health care workers,” wrote the Post.

Apparently, Cooper hasn’t gotten wind of the fact that many of those same people are balking at accepting the shots out of fears of side effects or questions about the mandates’ legality. Nor does it seem to have occurred to him that regimes that most civilized people despise are known for imposing onerous requirements — such as having the “correct” political opinions or genetic makeup — as prerequisites for participation in society.

In fact, when the mother relented slightly, saying she’d let her estranged husband see his daughter if he’d submit to the testing regimen, Cooper denied the father’s request for a full hearing, saying that “the risk of imminent harm to the child” outweighed the father’s right to present his case.

Cooper also was not swayed by the fact that the father has already recovered from COVID-19, giving him far greater protection against catching and transmitting the virus than any of the vaccines would. In addition, the judge mocked those who question the vaccine regime, writing, “Unfortunately, and to my mind, incomprehensibly, a sizable minority, seizing upon misinformation, conspiracy theories, and muddled notions of ‘individual liberty,’ have refused all entreaties to be vaccinated.”

Rosen begged to differ.

“My client is not a conspiracy theorist,” he said. “He has concerns about the vaccine. He’s heard about side effects. He once had a bad reaction to a flu vaccine.”

None of which matters to COVID cultists such as Cooper, even at the cost of further dividing a family that is already strained to the breaking point.