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A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit challenging the COVID-19 vaccine mandate imposed by the Los Angeles school district, noting that the record does not establish whether the COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission of the illness.
The Health Freedom Defense Fund and other challengers to the mandates asserted that it violated the due process and equal protection rights of district employees, in part because the vaccines, unlike traditional vaccines, “are not effective” in preventing infection.
U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer disagreed, throwing out the case in 2022. She ruled that even if the COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent infection, mandates can be imposed under a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court ruling because the vaccines reduce symptoms and prevent severe disease and death.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on June 7 concluded otherwise and reversed that ruling. The panel found that Judge Fischer extended the 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts ruling “beyond its public health rationale—government’s power to mandate prophylactic measures aimed at preventing the recipient from spreading disease to others—to also govern ‘forced medical treatment’ for the recipient’s benefit.”
U.S. Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson, for the 2–1 majority, added, “At this stage, we must accept plaintiffs’ allegations that the vaccine does not prevent the spread of COVID-19 as true. And, because of this, Jacobson does not apply.”
That position was reached after lawyers for the defendants provided facts about the vaccines that “do not contradict plaintiffs’ allegations.”
Leslie Manookian, President and Founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, said in a statement that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling “made clear that [Americans’] cherished rights to self-determination, including the sacred right of bodily autonomy in matters of health, are not negotiable.”
Health Freedom Defense Fund has filed over a dozen lawsuits in the past two and a half years. The most significant lawsuit, Health Freedom Defense Fund et al. v. President Biden et al., ended the federal travel mask mandate nationwide.
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