Finally, a Curbing of Jacobson
The Health Freedom Defense Fund has once again come to the aid of rights and won a hugely important case in Los Angeles and for the entire country. A court decision has declared that prior Supreme Court rulings for vaccine mandates are inapplicable to the Covid shot for simple reasons: it is not truly sterilizing and therefore not protective of public health. It is first court decision to narrow Jacobson on record, and the implications for health freedom are profound. Leslie Manookian explains the case, the decision, and the implications. She is interviewed by Jeffrey Tucker.
Jeffrey Tucker (00:02.19)
Hello, this is Jeffrey Tucker with Brownstone Institute. It’s my pleasure today to welcome Leslie Minuchian from the Health Freedom Defense Fund. And we’re fresh off a huge court victory in Los Angeles against the vaccine, COVID vaccine mandates in the public schools. Am I getting that right, Leslie?
Leslie Manookian (00:22.651)
Yes, well it’s the Los Angeles Unified School District is what we challenge their mandate for their employees to take the COVID shot. That’s correct.
Jeffrey Tucker (00:32.302)
so it didn’t pretend to the students, it was just the employees, but by implication the students too?
Leslie Manookian (00:37.499)
Yeah, well, we only sued on behalf of the teachers. There’s a completely different kind and all employees. There’s a different set of rules for students and and for employees in the state of California. So we sued for the employers or the employees rather. And there have been other cases brought by parents on behalf of the students. But what was really bizarre about our case is that.
LUSD rescinded the mandate for the students because of the outcry of parents. 5 ,000 parents showed up at the school board and protested, but they kept it in place for the employees.
Jeffrey Tucker (01:15.47)
I see, I see, I see. So there’s no litigation for the students. This litigation just pertains to the employees, but it’s probably just as important. What do you see as the, where you track this stuff and have for years, and this is a federal appeals court, right? So how impactful do you think this decision is going to be on other mandates?
as regards COVID -19 and then other vaccine mandates.
Leslie Manookian (01:48.923)
Yeah, it has very, very big implications for mandating any kind of shot in this country that doesn’t provide sterilizing immunity. So if a shot does not stop transmission and infection, what is the public health argument for it? That’s exactly what we argued, that these shots don’t stop transmission and infection. They are not actually a traditional vaccine. Now, all of this, let me just say, Jeffrey, is,
Jeffrey Tucker (02:15.47)
Yeah.
Leslie Manookian (02:18.683)
All of these mandates we’ve seen in the last four years were justified under a Supreme Court ruling known as Jacobson versus Massachusetts. Jacobson versus Massachusetts, we argued had been misapplied here. And the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with us that the district court under it had misapplied Jacobson. And I can explain that if you want me to.
Jeffrey Tucker (02:42.286)
Yeah, no, we can go into that a little bit. Back in November of 21, I ran an article by Harvey Rish and a co -author on this Jacobson point. And let me see if I can get the year right about Jacobson. We’re talking about what year was that? 1905. And the argument was, well, it was about smallpox vaccine.
Leslie Manookian (02:56.987)
1905.
Jeffrey Tucker (03:05.582)
And it was that everybody in society benefits if everybody gets a smallpox vaccine because then nobody can infect anybody else. That was basically what it said. And I did not, I mean, I think this, I think Jacobson’s decision is terrible. It’s been used to justify vaccine mandates for more than a century now, ever since. So the implications of that are profound, but at some point,
Leslie Manookian (03:25.051)
ever since.
Jeffrey Tucker (03:31.982)
the core issue was lost. And this is what Risch argued in his November 21 article for Brownstone, which that if the vaccine is not, as you say, sterilized, and I don’t think a court used that term, and either court used that term, but that’s the point. If it doesn’t stop transmission, if it doesn’t actually crush the disease, then the argument for Jacobson kind of falls away.
Leslie Manookian (03:58.971)
Yeah, well, Jacobson was very, very unique and the Supreme Court was actually very specific when it wrote its ruling in Jacobson. It said that smallpox is an extreme emergency with a 30 to 40 % death rate, okay? We argued COVID’s not smallpox. But so basically Jacobson said, listen, this is an extreme emergency and in an extreme emergency where there is a vaccination that is known.
believed to be safe and effective, then the state had an interest in mandating it. Okay? So in a very, very narrow, it didn’t say the entire state. It was actually only for Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was not the entire state of Connecticut. It was a localized, or sorry, Massachusetts. It was a localized area with this outbreak. And they said that in this very narrow application, this is acceptable. But the court even cautioned that it should not be construed.
as a blanket authority to mandate vaccinations. They very clearly said this. So it’s been completely bastardized ever since. It’s been misapplied now for 120 years, essentially. And I think this is why we won, because we actually argued that COVID’s not smallpox. We knew that from the Princess cruise ships. COVID has, even in the elderly in the Princess cruise ships,
it had a slightly increased death rate over the flu, the normal seasonal flu. That is not an emergency by any metric. The only thing that really made it into emergency was all of the hype and the fear and the panic, which then causes, and the lockdowns and all the measures, right? This is what caused all the problems. And so we argued that it is not a, you know, it’s not smallpox, that the shot doesn’t stop transmission or infection. Harvey’s one of our.
experts as well, by the way, as is Dr. J. Bhattacharya, that the natural immunity is real and must be adopted by the courts, be recognized, acknowledged by the courts and codified in case law that this is actually something legitimate and that if you’ve already had an illness, then that surely is better than getting a shot and that Jacobson doesn’t apply. So we argued all of these things.
Leslie Manookian (06:23.579)
And I think that’s what’s the most important thing here is that Jacobson has just been totally misconstrued for over a century and it’s time to rein it in. And there’s other two things that have happened, Jeffrey, that are so important. Number one, the…
When Jacobson, well actually three things, when Jacobson was ruled upon, that was an era when the Supreme Court believed it was acceptable to forcibly sterilize a woman that they deemed was too unintelligent to bear children. This is a completely different era. And I hope all of us, Jim Crow laws were in place. I hope all of us are glad that we have moved on from that place and that we shouldn’t be using.
Supreme Court rulings from 1905 necessarily to govern the conduct of life today. I think that’s very important, okay? But then there’s two other really important developments. One is that there’s been a body of case law developed in the last 40, 50 years, in which the Supreme Court has determined that we have a zone of privacy around ourselves, each of us, into which the state cannot intrude. And that, so,
The first piece of that was really, it was Connecticut, Griswold versus Connecticut. And this was where a couple in Connecticut said that we want to use a condom for contraception. And it was illegal in the state of Connecticut back then. And so they filed a challenge. It went all the way to the Supreme court and the Supreme court said, listen, the state does not have the right or the authority.
to be going into people’s bedrooms and policing their activities. This is outrageous. You have a zone of privacy and you can do what you want. And then they took it further in Cruzon versus Director and Washington versus Glucksburg, where they ruled in those two cases that you have the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment and then that you have the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment, even if it might save your life. So it’s gone so much further. And then the third development, which is very important, is that…
Leslie Manookian (08:27.355)
that Jacobson took place before we had an application of different tiers of scrutiny to which state laws are subjected. So it didn’t used to be this way, but nowadays, and I’m not sure how far it goes back, but it’s sometime in the intervening years. It used to be if the government, whether it was state or federal, wanted to issue a law and it didn’t infringe a fundamental right, which means a constitutionally protected right.
then the rule only had to survive what’s called rational basis scrutiny. But if it infringes a fundamental right, such as what you inject into your body, then or freedom of speech or something like that, then it must survive strict scrutiny. Until our case, every court had stated that vaccine mandates,
only required rational basis review. So this is a monumental shift.
Jeffrey Tucker (09:31.022)
Yeah, that’s a big deal. Yeah.
Leslie Manookian (09:33.499)
It’s a very, very big deal. They said that the rational basis is inappropriate and was misapplied here. And that, yeah.
Jeffrey Tucker (09:39.79)
Let me ask you a specific question concerning smallpox and Jacobson. Now, going back to the case of George Washington and his troops, obviously, there’s a smallpox outbreak and he wanted everybody to get inoculated with the smallpox, which, you know, in those days was highly dangerous, you know, because it involved using…
Leslie Manookian (09:45.979)
Ahem.
Jeffrey Tucker (10:05.262)
you know, a dead virus, I think, taken from scabs and injected into your skin, giving yourself a little exposure and then…
Leslie Manookian (10:11.803)
I don’t think it was dead, Jeffrey. They would take literally the pus out of someone’s arm and inject that. Scrap, scrape you. And then that’s how, my gosh, I can’t believe I’m forgetting his name, but that’s how the first guy who actually did this, he did it. He just took the pus out of an open wound on a cow and then smeared it into open, like created a wound on a human and smeared it in.
Jeffrey Tucker (10:16.654)
well, that’s right. That’s okay.
Jeffrey Tucker (10:27.598)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Tucker (10:35.886)
Yeah, well, I only mentioned the dead part because we have all sorts of envelopes from that period that were people would use Pony Express to send scabs from dead, dead smallpox patients to their family members to make sure they didn’t get it. So that’s the reason I mentioned that. But, but, but Jordan, so just to keep in mind, so there’s a lot of myth about this George Washington and his troops thing, right? As if that was some sort of vaccine mandate, but, but.
George Washington himself had smallpox when he was young, so he carried the immunities to it. So he himself did not get shot. And it was true for his other troops that anybody who had natural immunity didn’t have to get the smallpox inoculation back in those days. Well, so this raises my question. How did Jacobson and the events surrounding Jacobson deal with the presence of natural immunity to smallpox, which did exist?
Leslie Manookian (11:34.619)
It didn’t. To my knowledge, I don’t remember anything about natural immunity. In fact, this is one of the reasons we raised the issue of natural immunity because natural immunity has never been recognized by the courts in this country, which is crazy. So if you go to a doctor and you have, you’ve had chickenpox, then a school district will usually accept that. But I don’t believe it’s ever been recognized by a court of law. And that’s why it’s so important that we raised it. We, you know, there were millions of Americans who had
recovered from this illness and they thereby had natural immunity and they were being told that they still had to subject themselves to this experimental injection. And so this is why we’ve raised this issue because it has not been adjudicated.
Jeffrey Tucker (12:18.926)
It’s generally just a dangerous proposition to have courts weighing in with mandates on health that are highly contingent upon scientifically difficult to prove things anyway. But nonetheless, a natural immunity exemption seems like it would be a step in the right direction in any case.
Leslie Manookian (12:41.851)
Well, and the thing is even smallpox, smallpox is not nearly as clear cut as we have been told. Leicester, England never, there were parent, you know, citizen revolts all across Britain. And five years after Britain had mandated the shots, they had the biggest outbreak they’d ever had. 98 % of Britons came down with it. But Leicester, England chose to quarantine those who got ill.
and they saw a better experience and trend than the rest of England did. So it was not the case that the shots actually protected. It was not the case that the shots actually suppressed the illness. In fact, it got worse. If I remember, it’s memory, and I haven’t read this study in a long time, but if memory serves, you were multiples, maybe twice or even higher times as likely to die from smallpox having been inoculated.
Jeffrey Tucker (13:36.59)
Yeah. Well, it’s a problem. Like even if your vaccine is safe and effective, the delivery mechanism itself can be toxic and dangerous. Yeah.
Leslie Manookian (13:36.987)
than not having ever had any intervention.
Leslie Manookian (13:49.179)
100%. And so to me, it’s first of all, no court of law, no doctor, no health authority of any kind knows unequivocally that anything is safe for every human being. And,
Jeffrey Tucker (14:02.894)
Yeah, right, there it is, right? And so you can gen, something could be generally safe, but, and this is, Leslie, something that’s been driving me crazy, you know, for the last two, three years hearing about this controversy about the vaccines that, you know, Fauci and everybody else will say, yeah, there’s always some outliers, but generally, this is very safe. They’re very, very minority piece. Well, I mean,
that’s a that’s a weird standard because if it’s not safe for you it’s not safe you can’t say you can’t you know the vaccine injury can’t say well i’d rather be injured by a safe and effective vaccine than one that was unsafe well you’re it doesn’t make any sense you know for the individual himself it doesn’t matter what your abstract metric is
Leslie Manookian (14:51.067)
No, you know, it’s essentially, it shocks me that it’s still happening, but we’ve kind of reverted to this utilitarian ethic. And that’s what bothers me the most. And that’s why I started health freedom defense fund Jeffrey, because I am vaccine injured. Okay. When I graduated from business school and had my big job on wall street, I went and got every shot that they would give me before I went to Southeast Asia for two months. And I didn’t think there was any downside because I had been raised to believe that they were like,
Jeffrey Tucker (14:59.79)
Yeah.
Leslie Manookian (15:20.923)
or a glass of water they only had upside. I didn’t know that they could cause catastrophic harm. And I have been dealing for 30 years with trying to recover my health since then, okay? What that did was impress upon me the absolute, the essentiality of bodily autonomy. And so I’m a bodily autonomy absolutist. No one gets to tell me what I put into my body or my children’s body. That’s it. And the whole mission of Health Freedom Defense Fund,
is to get us to a point where that is recognized culturally and codified in law. Because no one knows what your risks are and no one has to live with the ramifications of your choices. So I don’t really give a damn if they say that it’s one in a million because if it’s one, if I’m the one in a million, then my risk is a hundred percent. And then I’m, you know, and I know people, thousands of people whose children have been catastrophically injured and even killed by shots. This is outrageous. The federal government has been,
Jeffrey Tucker (16:06.606)
Yeah, then I’ll take. Yeah.
Jeffrey Tucker (16:13.966)
Yeah. Yeah, sure.
Leslie Manookian (16:20.059)
lying to us about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. And I’m sorry to say that I know it’s unpopular, but it’s becoming more widespread and accepted for nearly a century. And that needs to change.
Jeffrey Tucker (16:31.79)
Well, I only heard the other day, I think maybe I won’t say from who I heard it, but there’s a book called Pox, which is a book on the history of the smallpox vaccine given to new immigrants at Ellis Island in the 1880s and 1890s, which apparently there are many batches of those things that were far more dangerous than even the…
COVID -19 vaccine, which is saying something. So, you know, the incredible thing about Jacobson is that it was ruling after this experience. So we, the court should have known that it was in no position to say, you know, every smallpox vaccine is safe. That was even back then, you know, completely untrue.
Leslie Manookian (17:20.315)
To me, Jeffrey, what it really suggests is that our media has been captured and controlled and essentially a tool of big business and even government for a very long time because they should have known and yet I don’t think it was widespreadly acknowledged or accepted. And yet we knew this from Leicester, England in this 18th century. We’ve known this for…
Jeffrey Tucker (17:35.726)
for joining us on the clip.
Leslie Manookian (17:48.604)
We knew this in the United States in the 19th century. Why was this not acknowledged? And the same thing, if you look, I mean, smallpox is a huge can of worms, which we won’t go into, but it is, we have not been told the truth about the smallpox vaccination or the successes of it because it was actually quite a failure in many ways. And it was only after the vaccine was stopped, they claimed that it had been a success and then they stopped it and then it died out. And…
Jeffrey Tucker (18:16.622)
Well, you know, and we don’t need to go into that argument now, but, but, you know, I read, I read Donald Henderson’s book on the eradication of smallpox and the thing that alarmed me most about his narrative, you know, cause he, he was with the world health organization and a great guy, you know, top anti -lockdown guy actually, you know, he wrote the famous article from the, from 2006, I believe that condemned all, all lockdowns and all.
Leslie Manookian (18:18.459)
This is what’s happened with polio in India too.
Jeffrey Tucker (18:46.03)
all travel restrictions and masking and everything. I said none of this stuff works, but his account of his eradication of smallpox, which gave him street cred and made him the most famous epidemiologist in the world, his description of how difficult it was to administer this vaccine in poor countries without clean water, without the resources necessary to assure that the vaccine was clean and everything, it was extremely alarming.
I remember telling the other told the story about the dangers of swabbing the needle with alcohol and then then injecting it to a person who said that that actually like created a toxic sort of combination between the vaccine and the alcohol. So it was just, it was really alarming actually. It was actually a really interesting book overall.
But aside from that, let’s talk about the COVID -19 vaccine because, so my attitude towards the vaccine was very much like yours coming out of law school or business school whenever you went to work in Wall Street. You didn’t want the vaccines, but you didn’t think they were gonna hurt you, right? And that was my view towards COVID -19. Now, I had read at the beginning of the pandemic, a first year medical school text on virology.
in addition to many other books on the topic. And it was very obvious to me that with a fast -spreading respiratory coronavirus, there could never be a vaccine worthy of that name. I mean, that was very obvious to me. And I said that to everybody openly. And I think everybody accepted that. I mean, there had never been a vaccine for, again, worthy of the name, for a coronavirus. And now just out of nowhere, they’re just gonna make one up.
so so I so I never took it seriously but I didn’t think it was going to be harmful that that was the difference and I remember when I think it was Rochelle Walensky first made the announcement and she was you know white the blood running drained out of her face when she made the national announcement that it turns out this vaccine does not stop the spread and does not stop infection I mean I found that to be the
Jeffrey Tucker (21:10.254)
the biggest no brainer non announcement ever. Like that was so obvious to me that that it could never stop spread, never stop because this particular virus does not lend itself to vaccination because it’s too fast mutating for one thing, it changes too much and you can’t keep up the formula of the vaccine.
And in fact, it’s sort of a smart mutator. Especially if you’re trying to vaccinate your way out of a wave, you’re going to create a structure that, I guess, not that they’re relational, but it incentivizes the pathogen to find a new way. I mean, it wants to spread everywhere and it’s not gonna let a vaccine stop it. So I knew that that was true at the time. I find it just incredible that we could have…
ever had these mandates for a vaccine. And that leaves aside the demographic difference in actual risk. I mean, you’re better off getting COVID than you were getting the COVID vaccine for. For vast cohort of the population, that was actually never any kind of serious risk for medically significant outcomes from getting COVID in the first place.
Leslie Manookian (22:31.227)
So I think there are so many things I want to comment on there. First of all, nature abhors a vacuum. That’s what really happens. And so we have seen this in pertussis vaccinations, whooping cough vaccinations. When you suppress the target antigen with the shot, you know what happens? More pathogenic and different microorganisms not covered in the shot flourish.
And so we’ve seen this in monkeys where they give them a shot and the, I think it’s B. Pertussis is what is in the shot. And then para pertussis is what explodes in their lungs, colonizes at a rate of 40 times what it was before the shot. And so this is something else that causes whooping cough. So you’re actually just making things worse. You’re not actually improving things in any way and you are forcing adaptation. So there’s this kind of, you know, vacuum nature,
Jeffrey Tucker (23:25.518)
That’s it.
Leslie Manookian (23:28.123)
vacuum in nature that nature does not like. And so it’s going to create something. So that’s one thing I think is very.
Jeffrey Tucker (23:32.942)
Yeah, yeah, I like your language. Force is an adaptation. It’s better than my incentivized mutations. I’m making up medical language out of an economics language. Sorry about that. Force to that point. Yeah, yeah.
Leslie Manookian (23:49.435)
That is very economics. That’s hilarious. I hadn’t thought of it, but yes, it is very econ, econ geekish sort of. So that’s one aspect. And then the other aspect is that they have been trying for decades to create a vaccination for the common cold, which is what coronaviruses are. And they have failed spectacularly.
Jeffrey Tucker (24:13.87)
Exactly.
Jeffrey Tucker (24:18.158)
Of course. Of course.
Leslie Manookian (24:19.387)
But it’s been worse. I mean, it’s literally like all the animals that they inject with this stuff dies in some of these cases, right? And yet, okay, so this is just outrageous for them. I mean, the hubris required for them to do what they did is unconscionable, truly.
Jeffrey Tucker (24:23.854)
Yeah, well, I know.
Jeffrey Tucker (24:33.262)
I know. And you know what’s funny about this, Leslie? I don’t know if it’s a generational thing, but I grew up with that knowledge. When I was young, my parents tried to teach me about virology and diseases, and the public schools did too. And they would explain this because you would have to get chickenpox. And I think measles was, Arvadi, largely not eradicated, but…
Now I’m problematic by that time. So I miss that. I miss that little fun of getting, but I got chickenpox and the way they explained it to me and the reason, cause you’re wondering why are my parents so happy that I’m sick? And so they would have to, right? And so you would have to explain to kids, well, there’s natural immunity. If you get it, then you’ll be protected against getting this later. And it’s much worse for you to get it later in life than it is. And so then the question, then the child’s question is,
Well, how come I ever have to get sick? And well, the answer is that some of these pathogens mutate and so you can get it one time, but it’s gonna change the way it is. And there’s cross immunities to other paths. So you learn about these things. But one thing I always heard, cause we started to get vaccinations, you know, smallpox among them, maybe measles, I’m not entirely sure. But…
But it was common knowledge that there was no vaccination against the common cold. And that’s what everybody said, and that’s what everybody knew. And that is for a reason.
Leslie Manookian (26:13.627)
Yeah, it’s, we also learned, I mean, I was growing up that you don’t, you can’t take an antibiotic or do anything for a virus only for a bacteria, right? Bacterium. And so that’s something else we were learning. I’ll tell you, chickenpox, I have two siblings and we were going, we lived in California and we were going to visit family in Missouri for Christmas. And my brother woke up with chickenpox. And today, if that happens, you are literally,
Jeffrey Tucker (26:23.278)
That’s right. That’s right.
Leslie Manookian (26:41.115)
told to stay home, not go to school and all this stuff. We all got on an airplane and everyone was just giggling. I got it on the plane and my sister got it after we arrived, but everyone was just giggling, you know, it’s a rite of passage. And I think this points to something else that is critically important. What if disease actually performs some kind of developmental function in us?
and there is much evidence accumulating that this is indeed the case. So we now know that the measles are protective against certain autoimmune inflammatory conditions and even cancer. Okay, so these illnesses that we go through that used to be considered a rite of passage and now we’re trying to suppress actually protect us from cancer and autoimmune disease and inflammatory conditions.
But you know what else happens oftentimes? Children will often have a developmental leap after having gone through some kind of childhood illness like this. And so, you know, concurrent with the advent of vaccinations, the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963.
despite the fact that in the preceding five years on average, there’d only been 430 deaths every year across the entire country of 150 million. Think about that, that’s nothing. Now, of course I don’t want anybody to die, but all of those people had some kind of other complication or problem. There was no reason to introduce this vaccination for millions of American children, but that’s what happened. And what we’ve done is there’s been this kind of trade -off. We have suppressed these childhood illnesses to some extent.
but we have exchanged it for something far worse, which is chronic disease. And now there was information that came out of an insurance company in 2011, I think it was, it’s now old, but that information was that 54 % of American school children have a chronic illness or neurodevelopmental disability. And those can all be connected scientifically to vaccinations. And so are we trading off an acute…
Leslie Manookian (28:56.795)
temporary infection and swapping in something that is actually a lifelong plague. And what is that doing to our nation and our prospects as a whole? And I think that that’s essentially what is happening. And unfortunately, it’s not being acknowledged, which brings me to my last point, which is that Rachelle Walensky made that announcement, Jeffrey, but you know what? The CDC did not take their safe and effective down off their website.
Jeffrey Tucker (29:25.71)
Mm -hmm.
Leslie Manookian (29:26.043)
They did not change their guidance. They were speaking out of both sides of their mouth. They continue to tell people that the COVID shots are the best way to avoid getting COVID. That’s outrageous, but that’s what’s happening. And this is why, this is why I think it’s so hard to convince people because it’s still reported in the media that way. They look to the CDC and it’s still there.
Jeffrey Tucker (29:37.07)
Yeah, yeah, they said that every day.
Leslie Manookian (29:51.099)
And so we actually, unfortunately do in this situation need the courts to say, you know, listen, this doesn’t hold water anymore. I would like to avoid the courts like you point out, but I think that what do you do at the end of the day when the media is not telling the truth and the health officials aren’t telling the truth?
Jeffrey Tucker (29:58.862)
Wait, in –
yeah. I don’t know.
Jeffrey Tucker (30:06.958)
Right. So it was the strangest time and none of us can ever forget it, but Fauci was frequently asked about natural immunity and his responsibility, which about which of course he knew for certain. I mean, we have, he’s not an idiot. And he had talked about natural immunity in the past. I think he has that famous interview who says, if you’ve had the flu, you don’t need the flu vaccine because an infection is the best possible vaccine.
Remember that? But he was asked about natural immunity during this COVID period. I mean, during 2020 and 2021, he said, well, we just don’t have any evidence about that. I mean, okay, that was just a flat out lie. We have 2 ,500 years of evidence. We have all of human experience evidence about natural immunities, but he actually like it wasn’t really there. And…
But that was just the start of it. There was a weird sense that we don’t know anything. Like all of our medical knowledge, all of our epidemiological knowledge, all of our knowledge about virology and infections and diseases and everything, but just suddenly gone. It was, and I had, you know, I had thought at the time that it was a case of mass forgetting, but as time has gone on, it seems much more of a case of.
forced, forced oppression of no knowledge.
Leslie Manookian (31:40.379)
maybe we can call it mass manipulation. I think that’s what it really was. This is why I was so alarmed at the beginning of 2020. So, I don’t know if your viewers know or if you’ve even ever seen it, but I made a documentary film called The Greater Good. And it’s an investigation of the vaccination debate told through the stories of three families who’ve had.
Jeffrey Tucker (31:42.638)
Yeah.
Leslie Manookian (32:08.987)
personal experiences with vaccine injury. And then the backdrop is letting the scientists and the advocates argue out the science, basically have a discussion that they refuse to have in public and then let the viewers decide. And my point is that when I started making that movie, I started researching it in 2001 when I first heard that there even was a vaccine debate, because I had no idea that there was a vaccine debate. I never connected what had happened to me.
10 years earlier with the shots at this point. It wasn’t until the middle of making the movie that I started to realize that, my goodness, what happened to me happened then. Holy cow, my health just went over a cliff. I can’t believe it. But anyway, the point is that when I started making that movie and started doing research for it, I was just shocked at what I was reading because this information goes back.
centuries about the dangers and the failures of vaccinations. It’s just not acknowledged in the mainstream, you know, corporate media, the medical journals, although there was, there was a lot published decades ago in the medical journals more than there is today about this stuff. And so what happened in 2020 was at the very, very beginning, I, having done all this research for 20 years, I realized, gosh, this is it. They’re actually going to use a public health scare.
as an opportunity to establish authoritarian medicine in this country. And there was no doubt to me. And I said to my husband, you just mark my words. This is it. This is the big one. It’s what I’ve been fearing because I knew what they had done with the Patriot Act and the Emergency Health Powers Act legislation, which was introduced two weeks after the Patriot Act was passed. And then the PREP Act at 05 and then so much more going forward. I knew this. And so I just thought, holy cow, we’d already been…
band from Facebook and YouTube and all of these on our movie channels. I’d been kicked off of Twitter ages ago and I’m still Shadow Band. No doubt I’m still Shadow Band.
Jeffrey Tucker (34:13.07)
When you play ages ago, when did these bands start to affect you?
Leslie Manookian (34:19.611)
Gosh, okay, so the movie came out in 2011 and we started getting, we would have 300 ,000, and this is a lot back then in 2012, 2013, we would have 300 ,000 likes every week. We were reaching more than a million people a month. And within a short period of time, it was two or 3000 people, that was it. So we’re talking probably 14, 15, 16. And then there was a measles scare. They used that to attack us. And then,
What’s his name? gosh, Adam Schiff, Shifty Schiff. He wrote a letter to Amazon, Google, Zuckerberg, all the big social media and retailers and said, please take any of these misinformation pieces off of your websites. Do not sell these, do not support them. So then they cracked down further. Our film had been on, The Greater Good had been on Amazon Prime.
free streaming for four or something years at that point. And then they took it down, just demonetized us basically. And so it got worse and worse. Then I just lost my Twitter at some point. And I think it was, was it the beginning of 2018 or the beginning of 2019 in January of one of those two years, the World Health Organization comes out and says, our top 10 threats to global health are, and lists all these things. And amongst them is anti -vaxxers.
Jeffrey Tucker (35:47.246)
Yeah, sure. By the way, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an anti -vaxxer. I mean, the first time somebody, I didn’t know there was such a thing as an anti -vaxxer. And somebody accused me early on of being an anti -vaxxer. I didn’t even know what that was. I mean, I couldn’t, how could I be something that I don’t even know exists? And I couldn’t even imagine, of course, much more knowledgeable now, but.
Leslie Manookian (35:47.387)
Anti -vaxxers are a top 10 threat to global health, not dirty water.
Jeffrey Tucker (36:15.406)
fascinating for me to crawl into your head and imagine what you thought at the beginning of the outbreak of COVID because you could clearly see what was happening and where we were headed with all these things. And you knew for sure there’d be a vaccine and then they would try to, you know, they would be mandated. It would, you know, and so you saw all this coming. I was asked in, I think, March of 21, what is the relationship between the lockdowns and the vaccines? And I said, no, I don’t think there’s any. I don’t think.
there was any relation. Okay, yeah, so here we are two years later, three years later, and it’s very obvious to me now that part of the thinking of the vaccine was of the lockdowns was to prepare the public either psychologically or even in terms of seroprevalence, reduce seroprevalence levels, to prepare for the pandemic to be solved by the vaccine.
I’m pretty sure that that’s what they were thinking. In fact, I am sure that’s what they were thinking. Which if you think about it was quite the gamble because you know, they were betting a lot, namely the credibility of all public health in the US and all over the world and even the credibility of all governments and the credibility of all media on mRNA technology under the belief that it was going to somehow
to accomplish some magic that had never been done ever before in history.
Leslie Manookian (37:45.595)
It was a huge gamble, but don’t forget that they had been priming the public for a long time, right? Think about what happened after the Patriot Act. First of all, I have done, I took psychology in college and I’m very interested in and passionate about psychology and personal development and thought patterns and training, you know, experiences and things that wound us and then affect how we behave.
And if you look back to what happened with the invasion of Iraq, with 9 -11, subsequent to 9 -11, what was the language that they used? Shock and awe. That’s what George Bush, the president at the time, kept saying shock and awe. It’s gonna be a shock and awe campaign. And I think that that’s really important because it was the first time that I remember having…
some kind of feeling like I was being manipulated to some extent. So, shock and awe, why do you want shock and awe? Why are you calling it that? And then they showed the planes over and over and over and over going into the buildings. And then they showed the invasion and all these things of what we were doing in Iraq. And I think it was to install kind of a psychological imprint on us that responded to shock and awe and fear, terror. So the planes put this imprint in us of terror.
Because they know what happens to people when they’re afraid, obedience to authority. So it happens. And so then, and then think about what happened, you know, is it orange or we stage orange? What stage of terrorism are we? Do you remember this in the early parts of, in the, in the.
Jeffrey Tucker (39:23.566)
Yeah, and they used, you’re right, they would use that same thing, the New York Times every day to track community spread for COVID. It was exactly the same paradigm.
Leslie Manookian (39:32.475)
Exactly, remember the ticker tape, how many people, how many cases, how many deaths. And then there was the, if you see something, tell someone. And then all of the contact tracing, it’s all out of the same play.
Jeffrey Tucker (39:41.71)
Yeah, the contract tracing and the scapegoating of the sick, I mean the demonization of the sick, or the, you know, if you got COVID it means it’s a sign you’re doing something wrong. And you and I could talk for, and actually we have in the past, talk for weeks about this, but just quickly on your point about cases, the difference between a case, what we used to call a case, what we used to call a case was somebody who had medically significant.
sickness, you know, so you would be bedridden or you’d be in the hospital, you’d be on the meds, you’d be calling your doctor. But a case was not an exposure. And it wasn’t even just a mild infection. A case was a specific thing. But for the whole period of COVID, I’ve never heard an explanation for this. We called every positive PCR, you know, evidence of the presence of COVID -19 a case.
Leslie Manookian (40:39.771)
I think that that just speaks further to my point that this was an organized effort to achieve a certain outcome and that was the sale of billions of shots. We know now that Fauci and friends in the federal government made 700 million in royalties from these shots. But I think it also achieves something else, which is I think they hoped that it would crush.
the anti -vax movement, which is ridiculous. I mean, I’m called it a huge anti -vaxxer, right? I’m a disinformation spreader. I got all shots until I was, you know, 30, I even got the flu vaccines after I got injured, because I didn’t connect the dots. I got a couple of flu doses. Yeah. So it is, I know what a fool, what a fool, because I believed them, but my point is, yeah.
Jeffrey Tucker (41:24.654)
What is wrong with you, Leslie? That’s crazy.
What are you thinking? Everybody knows that flu vaccines don’t work.
Leslie Manookian (41:37.019)
Back then, I didn’t know what Jeffrey did. This is back when I was in my early 30s and I still actually believed in the pharmaceutical industry and I believed that the federal government would never lie to us and had our best interests at heart. And I think this is another thing that they capitalize on. Most human beings find it too terrifying to contemplate the possibility that government deceives them.
Because if they do accept that as true, it means they’re totally on their own. Because if you can’t accept the government, take the government as trustworthy when it comes to dealing with our most vulnerable, our infants and our children, then you have to conclude you can’t accept them at face value on anything. And that’s far too terrifying. Most people don’t wanna be responsible for their lives. But I think that’s where we have to get back to this place where we all take charge.
You know, I wrote that post on Substack a couple of weeks ago, pain is the prompt. It is incumbent upon each and every one of us to engage in the civic process. It’s incumbent upon us to push back against these ridiculous mandates, standing six feet apart. I mean, who thought that that was gonna make any sense? You think that, I mean, that an airborne, yeah. But it all capitalized on this scaring us into submission. And to me,
Jeffrey Tucker (42:45.918)
Yeah, yeah, that was all based on fake science too, based on the idea that it spreads through population.
Leslie Manookian (42:58.139)
That was not an accident.
Jeffrey Tucker (42:59.694)
You know on that point on the aerosol spread through the air point I just bumped into an interview that Trump gave with Bernstein for his for his book in which Trump said this the in February 2020 it is spread through the air. Okay, so so Trump knew this already He must have been told that by his other experts and then you know a few months later
they’re saying, it’s spread through droplets. So that’s why you have to wear masks. By the way, and so I’m gonna let you go, but we can again talk about this all day, but just to be clear, Health Freedom Defense Fund also was behind the litigation that ended the vaccine mandates on buses and airplanes and.
all transportation stuff that we had to endure for such a long time. Keep the mask up over your nose, they kept shouting at us. But so it was your organization that litigated that and got that dropped in Florida. Federal case in.
Leslie Manookian (44:01.531)
Yeah, and now, sorry, go ahead, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Tucker (44:06.094)
Well, and the Biden administration was trying to appeal that decision, I think. I don’t know whatever happened to that. Maybe they just stopped working on the appeal. But because of that lawsuit, thank God for you. And I think we talked about that a lot at the time, but that was a catastrophe.
And then now you have this case, which is very important. It didn’t say mRNA is a bio weapon. It didn’t say that it’s not a vaccine. What it said was, because it doesn’t stop the spread, because as you say, not a sterilizing vaccine, it cannot be just, mandates cannot be justified according to the Jacobson test. And that is extremely significant because it could be impactful on many other vaccine mandates.
Leslie Manookian (44:56.283)
Yeah. Jeffrey, this is the first time that any court to my knowledge, let alone an appellate court has recognized that Jacobson does not always apply. What’s happened is they basically use this as a blanket justification and they cannot do that anymore. So this is huge. And in fact, I think that this is a bigger win for us than the mask mandate was because this has the ability to move the health freedom ball down the field. And that is what we’re trying to achieve.
Jeffrey Tucker (45:10.698)
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Leslie Manookian (45:24.347)
So we, as I mentioned earlier, we argued that the shots don’t stop transmission or infection. And the court said that this is what we pled and this must be accepted at this stage of the pleadings as true. That’s the law. But they also acknowledged in oral argument that the shots don’t stop transmission or infection and that the LAUSD’s rationale was irrational.
So this is huge because it opens the door to narrow Jacobson and ultimately to get rid of Jacobson, I believe, which is what we should all be aiming for over time.
Jeffrey Tucker (45:53.966)
Yes. Yes. I love the way you’re putting this because this is what bothered me about the original Rish article, which is brilliant, by the way, was that it just assumed that Jacobson was settled was decided correctly and then argued against COVID -19 vaccination around that. And that’s exactly what your attorneys did and what you’ve done. But by narrowing its relevance or its application,
then it raises other questions. It sets up a standard to evaluate all these kinds of these mandates that impact on human health because in fact, it was rather narrow.
Leslie Manookian (46:37.115)
It was extremely narrow, but there’s something else that’s really critical, and that is that Jacobson is 120 years old, and it needs to be updated to concur with the more recent jurisprudence, which says that you have the right to refuse unwanted medical treatments, even if they could save your lives. And so how do you, those things need to be reconciled, and they’re not. And so this is where we’re kind of driving the bus, if you will.
It wasn’t a frontal attack on Jacobson. In fact, it was saying this is not the purview of Jacobson. It’s the purview of these other cases of Washington versus Glaxburg in particular. And it needs to be treated as such. The next step will be going further with it.
Jeffrey Tucker (47:16.526)
Leslie, thank you so much. Health Freedom Defense Fund, it doesn’t get a lot of attention. You’re not tooting your own horn much, but you’re actually doing the hard work that is going to require to gradually claw back our lives. So, so grateful for you and thanks for spending time with me today, Leslie.
Leslie Manookian (47:37.915)
Thank you for having me, Jeffrey. And can I just say people can find us at healthfreedomdefense .org if they want to follow our work.
Jeffrey Tucker (47:45.102)
Thank you, Leslie.
Leslie Manookian (47:46.491)
Thank you
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Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.
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