The week before last, a panel of three federal judges at the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco did something unusual – it called out a government agency for lying and, in the process, opened up for litigation one of the crucial questions of the pandemic response: when is a ‘vaccine’ not a vaccine?
What is so important about the decision is that it is the first time a court has even opened the door to deciding the question the efficacy of the ‘vaccine’ itself.
In other words, what it means is that whether or not the Covid shot was an actual traditional vaccine – one that stopped transmission and kept people from getting the illness at hand – could be litigated in court for the first time ever.
The lawsuit itself involves the dissembling – as usual – of the Los Angeles Unified School District and its on-again, off-again Covid shot mandate and its subsequent firing of hundreds of workers for refusing to get an experimental medical treatment.
Between March of 2021 and last autumn, LAUSD both instituted and dropped, and re-instituted and re-dropped its Covid shot mandate. And the district made these decisions for legal reasons only – the decisions had nothing to do with the actual shot itself, whether or not it worked, or what did it really do, or what are the side-effects, etc.
Essentially, each time the district changed its mind was because of either the filing of a lawsuit – dropped the mandate – or the dismissal of a lawsuit – re-instituted mandate. In fact, the LAUSD attorney even taunted the attorneys for the Health Freedom Defence Fund (HFDF), California Educators for Medical Freedom and the number of individual plaintiffs who brought the suit.
The Covid shot mandate resulted in the firing of hundreds of teachers and other district employees, turning lives upside down for people who were leery of getting an experimental medical treatment (the suit for monetary damages etc. against the district for those employees is a separate but parallel effort).
The ruling, said plaintiffs’ attorney Scott Street, does not automatically mean that a Government agency cannot impose public health mandates but it “better be right and be able to prove it” if and when it does. Additionally, the ruling does not specifically say the Covid shot is not a traditional vaccine, but – incredibly importantly – it does allow that issue to be litigated going forward.
Legal precedent holds that a Government may enforce mandatory public health laws. In 1905, the State of Massachusetts was sued over a mandate for the smallpox vaccine and the court found that “mandatory vaccinations were rationally related to preventing the spread of smallpox”, therefore the mandate was appropriate.
The case, known as Jacobson, has been cited across the nation when mandates were challenged previously. But what the Ninth Circuit panel did was “appropriately apply” for the first time the diktats of Jacobson, said plaintiffs’ attorney John Howard.
Briefly, a Government agency can ‘rationally’ act to protect the health of the general public, but only if said mandate actually protects the public, i.e., stops the transmission of the virus and stops people from getting the virus in the first place. The Covid shots neither stopped transmission nor conferred immunity, a fact that should have been clear from the very beginning of the vaccination craze. In fact, the shots were not even tested to see if they prevented transmission of the virus, only if they helped prevent infection or ease symptoms.
But Government agencies either ignored or hid those data in order to justify the mandates, to ‘get back to normal’ as so many politicians and ‘experts’ said.
What this all means is that while Jacobson has been used as a justification numerous times, it may not actually apply in the case of the Covid shot.
For unlike in Jacobson – in which the smallpox vaccine had been shown to stop the spread of the disease – the ruling states that the “plaintiffs allege that the vaccine does not effectively prevent spread but only mitigates symptoms for the recipient and therefore is akin to a medical treatment, not a ‘traditional’ vaccine. Taking plaintiffs’ allegations as true at this stage of litigation, plaintiffs plausibly alleged that the COVID-19 vaccine does not effectively ‘prevent the spread’ of COVID-19.”
To get to this point, the court also ruled that the lawsuit was not “moot”, as has been ruled in a number of other pandemic-related cases.
The problem for the district – which had basically argued the suit was moot because the pandemic was over – is that for something to be legally moot it has to be, in part, incapable of being repeated. In other words, it has to be clear the party – in this case the school district – could not or would not do it again, a fact clearly at odds with LAUSD’s actions. Add in that the mandate droppings were “recisions in the face of judicial review”, i.e., done solely to get a lawsuit thrown out, and it was not terribly difficult for the court to decide the suit is clearly not moot and can continue.
Just to emphasise – the district dropped its mandate for the second time days after the hearing in federal court; in fact, the wheels to get the decision in front of the board reportedly started turning literally that afternoon and you just can’t do that.
“What are you going to do when we drop the mandate?” sneered the district lawyer to plaintiff’s attorney, San Diego lawyer John Howard, after the oral arguments before the panel last fall.
During the course of the mandates, LAUSD fired hundreds of teacher and employees for refusing to comply with its order. In fact, considering the sketchy performance of the Covid shot, the mandate may not have been about Covid at all but was used as a tool to cull the district of employees who will do not blindly follow orders and may cause all sorts of the trouble in the future.
Note: this particular suit is not about the damages the employees suffered – being fired, loss of pension, etc. That issue is being addressed in a separate, but essentially parallel, legal action.
The ruling remands the case back to federal district court, leaving the LAUSD with pretty much four options.
The district can go back into the district court to re-litigate the matter; it could appeal to the United States Supreme Court; it could ask the Ninth Circuit to hold an en banc hearing which involves having a much large panel of judges review the issue; or it could settle the case.
The Supreme Court route is almost certainly too early for consideration, but the en banc request would at the very least delay – and possibly change – the results of the outcome from the Ninth Circuit.
As to settling: in one sense, that is highly unlikely. LA government institutions, as has been shown in the past (the freedom of speech case against Barbara Ferrer’s health department for example) are surprisingly arrogant (considering their track records,) especially when it comes to legal matters. The government institutions aren’t spending their own money so they tend to let the lawyers loose to litigate to their hearts content.
But there could be another aspect to that decision. It is also highly unlikely that the feds, the CDC, the Deep State, the ‘experts’, etc. – in other words, the entire pandemic response crowd that upended society and is still lying about it – wants the the question of whether or not the vaccine is an actually vaccine litigated in public, let alone in court.
A ruling to the contrary of what has been claimed could open a tsunami of litigation and political consequences for the powers that be, hence the pressure that could be brought to bear on the LAUSD to shut up and move on.
The district – which said it is reviewing the ruling and its options – is expected to make its choice in the next month or so.
The ruling was hailed by those who have been questioning the pandemic response strategy for years.
“At the beginning of Covid lockdowns, the courts themselves were closed, so there was no hope for legal relief. Even after the courts reopened, for about three years they largely displayed a closed-minded, deference to Government experts, even when their policies were demonstrably nonsensical from a medical standpoint,” said Dr. Clayton Baker, internist and former Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester. “This decision gives hope that the courts will finally reject a know-nothing attitude, and be willing to assess the scientific merit of plaintiffs’ arguments on a consistent basis.”
Though the mistrust sown by the draconian, nonsensical Covid response has only grown, whether or not this ruling – and the pretty much for certain appeals and legal back-and-forths to come – will help rebuild public confidence in the concept of public health is not yet clear.
Dr. Steven Kritz was cautious about that outcome
“In the end, it really doesn’t matter, since from a public trust and public health perspective, we ended up with an ‘original sin’ that is irreversible and unpardonable,” Kritz said. “Had the courts done their job, they had the tools to intervene early, and may have short-circuited this disaster before it began.”
Oh – one more thing: In Jacobson, the plaintiff – unlike the LAUSD teachers and countless other victims of the pandemic response – did not lose his livelihood, he wasn’t quarantined and he was not forced to take the vaccine.
He was fined five bucks ($161 today) and that was it.
Really.
Thomas Buckley is the former Mayor of Lake Elsinore, California and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly here. Subscribe to his Substack here.
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My father and I started work well before the age of 16. Do we get additional votes to make up for our deprivation.
No, thought not. The 16 year olds the Labour Party wants to harvest live in particular places and their pard TS subscribe to particular (currently minority) views.
Voting?
Age should be 25. Only those currently paying taxes can vote. Women raising a family can vote if their husband is paying taxes. If retired or unemployed prove you paid into the system for 10 years. No welfare queens, invaders, criminals or students can vote.
Mass voting is a sham and scam. It is not a ‘right’. Plundering others is not natural law.
Postal voting should be restricted – as it used to be – to members of the Armed Forces and the Diplomatic Corps serving overseas, and to people who cannot physically get to a Polling Station (doctor’s certificate needed).
Otherwise the whole thing is wide open to fraud, coercion and intimidation.
A recent case in point: In the Rochdale By-election 43% of the entire vote was by postal voting. Of those postal votes, 92% were for Galloway.
Go figure.
“In the Rochdale By-election 43% of the entire vote was by postal voting. Of those postal votes, 92% were for Galloway.”
That was the Imams sending out the troops to collect the postal votes. God knows how many of those postal votes were legitimate and how many “voters” had more than one vote.
Corrupt. Damn right.
Kind of agree, but not so sure about the voting rules for women. Why would having a husband make your opinion more correct? And what if the guy’s out of work? They can’t vote because of their employment status? Feminism has gone way too far, but we’ve got to be careful we don’t follow the same path. We have to get our noses out of the shite.
Democracy is a privilege, not a right. I’d make the voting age 30. Why should kids choose our leaders. Their experience of life is living with their parent, where the biggest choice they have to make is burgers or fish fingers for tea.
Mark Twain wrote, ‘When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant, I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned.’
The only thing that needs to change is Labours corrupt Muslim postal vote. Get rid of the postal vote and almost all Muslim women disappear off the turnout. Let’s be honest here, Muslim women: do they get to vote as they wish? Hell, half of them aren’t allowed out of the house!
Dropping the age to 16 is a blatant stab at getting stupid kids, wet behind the ears, votes. Who of you wasn’t a Communist or Socialist when you were 15/16? I was, I thought it was a great idea that everybody would be equal. By 18 I grew up and voted accordingly. Some never grow up and would vote for a dead dog with a red rosette and claim it had great ideas.
Did it occur to labour Low Command that this could massively backfire on them because of their preachy teachers telling the kids the planet is frying as they wander aimlessly around in the rain? Seems logical they’d do a Mad Greta and vote Green.
Looking at the comments, I seem to be alone on this one (and believe me I am no Starmer fan) but I can see his point; if you can become part of the adult world in other ways, you deserve a say in how it’s run, in my opinion. I’ve known plenty of 16 year olds who would vote as sensibly (by that I mean they’ve come to their decision in a sensible way, not that I agree with their vote necessarily) as any adult I know.
Having said that I’m sure Sir Keir is well aware that younger vote would benefit him and his party, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the wrong thing to do.
It’s his motive that is the issue, he suggests it because he knows it gives him an advantage, just the same as he would never suggest tightening down on his corrupt Muslim postal vote. Now, if the Muslims turn on him, as they will eventually do, watch how fast he wants to change the postal votes.
No matter how plausible anything that man says is do not accept it. He never, ever says anything unless there is something in it for him.
I’m sure he does have an ulterior motive as I said above, but I still don’t think it’s intrinsically wrong in itself.
How many kids start work at 16 and pay tax?
How many 16-year-olds in the army have fought or confronted an enemy?
Following Starmer’s logic, kids should be considered adults at 16 so can get married without consent, buy and smoke tobacco, buy and drink alcohol, gamble, see X rated movies, buy porn, get a full driving licence, have their own credit card, get a mortgage etc.
His argument does not stand up to scrutiny, the man is an idiot.
And how many 16-year-olds have the independence of mind to cast a vote, most can’t even wipe their own backsides.
In a proper democracy a super majority in both houses and a referendum would be needed to make such a change to the participants in decision making.