Originally published by California Globe on September 23, 2925. Reprinted with permission.
By Rita Barnett-Rose, September 23, 2025
California lawmakers just proved they learned nothing from the COVID years. In the final hours of session, they gutted and amended Assembly Bill 144 — handing the Department of Public Health unchecked power to dictate vaccines for all Californians, while stripping away the public’s right to weigh in through the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).
While states do have authority to regulate for health and safety, that is not the issue here. The issue is threefold. First, the legislature and governor removed the right of public participation at a time when trust in public health is already at historic lows because of the excesses and mistakes of COVID. Second, the FDA — not the states — regulates drug approvals. If the FDA narrows the scope of approval for a product, it is because it determined the evidence no longer supports broader use. A state should not be “recommending” or pressuring use of a drug the federal regulator itself has scaled back. Third, while AB 144 technically speaks in terms of “recommendations,” we all know how those recommendations were weaponized during the pandemic. Colleges, employers, hospitals, even school districts leaned on “guidance” to impose some of the harshest mandates in the nation.
AB 144 freezes in place federal vaccine recommendations from January 1, 2025 — including universal COVID vaccination for infants, pregnant women, and adults of all ages. Yet since then, the FDA has limited approval of COVID vaccines to (1) adults 65 and older and (2) younger people with underlying conditions. CDC no longer recommends them for healthy under-65s. For California to require coverage — and encourage uptake — for populations the FDA itself has ruled out is not just sloppy governance, it undermines medical integrity.
And we know how these “recommendations” play out in practice. During the pandemic, California institutions leaned heavily on CDPH guidance to impose sweeping mandates. Police officers, firefighters, and health care workers faced termination. Universities barred unvaccinated students from campus. Some school districts even attempted to mandate COVID shots for children in clear violation of existing California law — until courts struck those policies down. AB 144 opens the door for all of this to happen again under the guise of “soft mandates,” even though any broad requirement would likely run headlong into federal pre-emption issues: the FDA alone decides what drugs are lawfully approved — you cannot mandate use for populations that the regulator itself has excluded.
That is not just bad process — it is deliberate overreach. At a time when federal authorities are scaling back, California lawmakers are entrenching outdated rules and bypassing the public entirely. Public trust is already at a breaking point. If lawmakers want Californians to believe in public health, they cannot continue governing by secrecy and coercion. AB 144 should be repealed before it repeats the worst failures of the pandemic, this time by statute.
Rita Barnett-Rose
Rita Barnett-Rose is a medical freedom attorney and former legal writing professor at Chapman University School of Law. She advocates for informed consent, bodily autonomy, and children’s health.
This article was reprinted with permission from The California Globe.
Free Now Foundation is not a law firm and cannot offer individual legal advice. However, we recognize that resisting tyranny requires each of us to become better informed about the law, our legal rights, and how to use the law to respond to the illegal policies that are quickly spreading among our schools and places of employment.
“While states do have authority to regulate for health and safety, . . . ” DO states have the constitution al right to impose vaccine mandates on citizens? I think not, and have urged people to stand up for their Constitutional rights. I helped first hundreds and then thousands of Californians to refuse the mandates and NOPT be fired, for free, and without going to court.
It started with teachers at a small, school district, Chino-Montclair. I prepared form letters with five single-spaced pages of the Constitutional provisions that protect us from laws that protected us from the mandates, then each person signed such letter, stating that he or she would not be vaxxed, masked, or tested, and would not resign or quit.
When about 10% of a workforce (all school districts) did this, the districts could not afford to fire anyone. So it was the Constitution, plus solidarity (what helped Poland escape communism) that did the trick. This spread from that school district to seven other nearby districts )(that I know of) and may have spread to other areas of California (like Calaveras County).
The Constitution divides roles/rights into three categories: the States, the Central government, and the individual People.
When the Constitution was created, who made decisions about health care? The States? The Central Government? or the individual People? The People made their own health care decisions, and did so for their own children.
The Government has no Constitutional right to mandate vaccines.
The 1905 case, Jacobson, relied on recently to claim that the government can mandate vaccines, was based on the fact that Jacobson, the person against mandated vaccines, used, as his Constitutional argument, the “liberty” interest plus the Fourteenth Amendment. The proper basis for arguing against such mandates is the Ninth Amendment, which states that all right not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution, remain with the individual People.
The Constitution did not give the right to make healthcare decisions to either the States or the Central Government, so they remain with the individual People.
I have been an attorney since 1982, and know that the Constitution is the basis for all our legal rights. I highly recommend that people learn more about their Constitutional rights by watching https://jbs.org/constitution/video/
Letitia, we would like to hear more about the form letters that protected people’s vaccine rights when we were locked down. Can you email a copy of it to us at [email protected]? Thanks for doing this and for bringing it to our attention!
I agree with Rita Barnett-Rose. This SB 144 was sneakily pushed through behind closed doors with out a proper vote as it was piggy backed on a budget bill already approved and just before the government went on recess so nobody could oppose it. Our Governor and all the California legislators should watch An Inconvenient Study. They are listening to APA a trade organization for Big Pharma and profit is being put over people especially children, pregnant women and the elderly. This Western Health Alliance and the Eastern one are truly deluded about what health really is and its not pushing drugs and vaccines on everyone. So many are against RFKjr who is truly trying to make a difference and really testing vaccines as are the new Acip committee scientifically scrutinizing what is being routinely injected into children. How many doses of Aluminum and other toxins can little bodies take??? The Hep B at birth is ridiculous also the K both of which have aluminum. It seems the California government and Western Alliance are taking their actions to spite the positive changes happening at the Federal level, HHS, CDC, FDA and NIH. I sincerely trust SB 144 will be repealed, and at the very least religious and personal belief
exemptions will be restored in California, in fact no vaccines will be mandated before children can go to school or college and all these dangerous unsafe products especially the Covid shot will be taken off the market. And the bogus belief that they are for health and “Safe and Effective” will be shot down. Thanks for all Free Now does for the health, Well Being and Freedom of Humanity.