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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“but was used as a tool to cull the district of employees who will do not blindly follow orders”……Ironically the jab would’ve ‘culled’ a few of them!
So anyone got any idea how this (if at all) would effect the indemnity that the companies got if it’s ruled the product they supplied wasn’t the product they claimed it to be?
“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”
So why was there a Lawsuit beck then?
Wasn’t Smallpox mostly irradicated by better hygiene and living standards?
It’s impossible to know without a control group. Was there a third world country that that used the vaccine without any significant improvement in sanitation?
Quoting from the book Dissolving Illusions by Humphries and Bystrianyk, the original smallpox vaccines – the first ever vaccines – were created by taking
disease material from an animal, inoculating the raw pus into humans. The vaccination procedure then consisted of rubbing pox pustular lymph from the pock of an inoculated human to a cut in the arm of the next human recipient and was termed “arm-to-arm vaccination”. Another method of inoculation was to place numerous human pox scabs into a jar, fill it with water, and shake. The resultant pus material was used as vaccine material for one town.
Unsurprisingly, many people subsequently developed smallpox or some other malady and were lucky if they survived.
There were no control experiments performed in those days: it was sufficient for a claim to be published that a solution had been found against smallpox and everyone went along with that claim. Times have not changed much!
Of course, there were medical voices saying that vaccination was killing healthy people but then, as today, those voices were ignored. The world was simply desperate to supposedly have a cure for the terrible disease.
Charts in the above book clearly show that smallpox epidemics increased with every round of vaccination and that the ultimate cure for smallpox was simply better hygiene – clean drinking water, good nourishment, proper treatment of sewage.
In 1853, smallpox vaccination was made compulsory in UK for every child within 3 months of birth. Even when a child died of the vaccine and its parents refused to have a second child vaccinated, they were sent to prison and fined.
Since smallpox epidemics continued despite mass vaccination, the people of Leicester revolted in the mid 1880s at a time when thousands of prosecutions were being brought against parents who refused vaccination for their children. A huge demonstration resulted in the town council accepting the situation and from then on, the “Leicester Method” of reacting to smallpox epidemics was to rely on
quarantine of smallpox patients and thorough disinfection of their homes. They believed this was a cheap and effective means to eliminate the need for vaccination.
And so it was. Leicester remained a “vaccine-free” zone and never suffered during later smallpox epidemics in any way as badly as other “vaccinated” regions.
It is a very interesting book and I think we ought to offer “original” vaccine methods to all those who claim that they work. At one point the author mentions infected calves (cattle) whose pus is used for inoculations. Finally if the small pox “vaccination” was so successful why did it take 200 years (from Jenner to 1970s) for it to be wiped out as claimed? Any of these original experiments are impossible to replicate and definitely a lot of guess work and dodgy science is at the bottom of it all. See Gerald Posner investigation into the pharmaceutical industry — Gerald Posner and
Salicylates and pandemic influenza mortality, 1918-1919 pharmacology, pathology, and historic evidence – PubMed (nih.gov)
and Solving the Mystery of TB: The Iron Factor – The Weston A. Price Foundation (westonaprice.org)
Anthrax, Arsenic and Old Lace – The Weston A. Price Foundation (westonaprice.org)
It’s really about time to stop arguing this case. OTOH, nonsense tends to a take up a live on its own. It’s claimed that smallpox was eradicated. But smallpox vaccination continued for some time after that (I got vaccinated against smallpox in the second form after the official smallpox eradication date). But if smallpox vaccination really caused smallpox, it couldn’t have been eradicated as – as claimed in the text above – rounds of vaccination would inevitably have led to rounds of disease.
As stated
Charts in the above book clearly show that smallpox epidemics increased with every round of vaccination and that the ultimate cure for smallpox was simply better hygiene – clean drinking water, good nourishment, proper treatment of sewage.
doesn’t make sense. Clean drinking water, good nourishment and proper treatment of sewage (many people on this planet have none of this) cannot help against a disease caused by an agent injected in parallell to such measures. This can only have an effect if the by-far overwhelming cause of the disease is natural and thus, subject to being affected by environmental improvement measures.
Please read the book. I do not deny that today’s vaccines are more harmless than in the past and I have also had my fair share of vaccines. But we (and our doctors) were all taught that vaccines are wonderful and necessary, which does ignore the common sense fact that injecting pathogens directly into the body – bypassing the body’s natural defences – is a bit of a strange and illogical thing to do. I also recommend https://expose-news.com/2023/12/04/the-doctor-that-sacrificed-his-career-his-reputation-and-ultimately-his-life/. Other books, such as Virus Mania or The Real Anthony Fauci, similarly present overwhelming evidence that vaccines are simply a huge money generator and have never, repeat never, reduced illness. If you have documentary evidence to the contrary then please let us all know.
There was a Trucker who lost his job because he didn’t wear his mask in his cab, when he challenged in Court, he lost.
As the article clearly states, it does matter and a lot. There are mRNA therapy production facilities being deployed around the world in preparation for the next “pandemic”.
This “pandemic” isn’t over until we are sure they can’t do it all over again and it would seem, at least for now, the only viable route are court rulings against these measres that can serve as legal precedent in future.
I’ve come to the view that the answer to the question would be “it depends what you mean”, on the grounds that the definition of the term “vaccine” has been changed over the years. Not only that, there appear to be financial benefits from calling a novel drug product as one, compared with any other novel product.
Then again, it looks as if they have exploited the common understanding of it’s functionality, which is out of line with reality. I think there’s another legal term for that: fraud (“A deception practiced in order to induce another to give up possession of property or surrender a right.”).
Any case brought to Court on this will win. Not one of the companies ever said that the Death Jabs prevented catching Covid. Long before they were released there was a list of 14 companies and every single one stated their aim was to “Ameliorate symptoms” i.e. lessen the symptoms if you catch it.
In contrast, in the UK, on a Monday and a Wednesday, Johnson stated on live TV they gave immunity, on the Wednesday Javid stated exactly the same thing. Yet no company ever claimed that they gave immunity.
The key to this is to sue the Governments for lying. The companies, quite ridiculously, have immunity (something their Death Jabs did not provide) from prosecution. Prove one case and most of the world Governments are Dominoes.
Fauci said that “vaccinated” people were a “dead end” to the “virus”
He said way back that natural immunity was the best defence against an RSV….and that Chloroquinine (a precursor to HCQ) was an excellent early prophylactic for SARS…
Thanks for that. At some point I remember Mike Yeadon saying that all of these top “public health” officials had studied the same things he had, and that they cannot possibly not have known that what they were saying and what was being done about “covid” was very wrong.
Certain incompetent politicians did indeed sell it that way, but the only printed document I received in March 21 more or less said that they didn’t know, and it went on to sell more junk about useless methods that were popular at the time. See the copy below.
The British courts have always run away from these sorts of cases especially the issue of whether lock downs breached ancient freedoms.
Clearly, the experimental mRNA gene therapy shots were NOT vaccines…
Vaguely on topic
How the US supreme court could be a key election issue: ‘They’ve grown too powerful’ | US supreme court | The Guardian
For decades there was a “progressive” majority on the court that invented rights no-one imagined existed at the time the various clauses from the constitution used to justify those rights were ratified – abortion, gay marriage (even Brown v Board of Education was decided wrongly). Now that there is a “conservative” majority on the court and they are rolling back decades of judicial activism, the left are howling.
Not very surprising. The credo these people live by is best expressed by an old ABBA song: The Winner Takes It All. Their idea of moral is the exactly same as Boris Johnson’s idea of maritial fidelity: It’s sometimes nice to talk about it. But it must not get in the way of good causes.