On June 3, Free Now Foundation updated its massive legal attack on California’s mandated shots required for children to attend schools, either public or private, preschool, even day care, by filing an amended lawsuit against the California Department of Public Health on behalf of four named children who were either excluded from their schools on account of their immunization status or are currently threatened with such exclusion, as well as all other California children.

The goal of the lawsuit is to eliminate California’s requirements for any children to get any shots in order to attend school, leaving it up to their parents to decide. 

Our Legal Grounds: Constitutional and Ethical Violations

Up to now, both federal and state courts have, for more than one hundred years, upheld the power of state and local governments to require immunizations for children to attend school. By and large, those court decisions have been based upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in the Jacobson vs. Massachusetts case in which Henning Jacobson challenged a Massachusetts law that required all adults to be vaccinated against smallpox or pay a $5 fine. The Supreme Court decided that Massachusetts had the power to require those smallpox vaccinations in order to protect the public health. 

One noteworthy aspect of the Supreme Court’s Jacobson decision is that Jacobson challenged the safety and effectiveness of the smallpox vaccines of the time with his own observations and those of some doctors of the time. But, the Supreme Court brushed those objections aside, claiming that it was the “common knowledge” of the public and of the legislature of that time that enacted the vaccination requirement that smallpox vaccines were safe and effective, and that the Court could rely upon that “common knowledge” to dismiss Jacobson’s allegations against those vaccines. 

To its credit, the Jacobson court seems to have anticipated that further experience with smallpox vaccines, or other future vaccines for other infections, might show them not to be so “safe and effective,” so it wisely limited its ruling to the specific vaccine and facts before the Supreme Court at that time. 

However, recent court vaccine decisions have upheld vaccination requirements without making any inquiry into the safety and effectiveness of current vaccines, apparently relying on general assurances of safety and effectiveness made by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and without allowing any opt-outs for personal or religious beliefs, or by just paying a modest fine. 

The Real Harm: Vaccine Injury and Death

Our lawsuit argues that such reliance on the CDC is misplaced because the U.S. Congress has already determined that childhood vaccines cause injuries to children when it passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986. The Act provides monetary compensation for children injured and killed by childhood vaccines under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP). To date, that program has paid out more than $5.3 billion in injury compensation to more than 11,600 persons. More than 1,440 claims have been filed for deaths related to vaccines with the largest number (698) filed for death subsequent to DTP vaccination. Most of those deaths are likely related to Sudden Unexpected Infant Death syndrome (SUID (“crib death’). All these vaccine-related injuries and deaths, confirmed by the federal government, are now, sadly, the new “common knowledge,” especially for the parents of those injured and deceased children.

The CDC argues that all these injuries and deaths are “rare” and shouldn’t be taken seriously, considering the hundreds of millions of doses of these vaccines that have been given. But, hundreds of millions have ridden airplanes and school buses and if 11,600 children had been injured, and 1,440 killed, in school bus or airplane accidents, parents would not be mandated to put their children on airplanes or school buses. 

Nor are vaccine injuries and deaths all that rare. Regarding vaccine injury, the most common is likely autism, now at a national rate of one in thirty-one of all children and an astonishing one in twenty in vaccine-mandating California. For vaccinated California boys, the odds of autism are a staggering one in twelve!

While the CDC stoutly denies that there is any link at all between vaccinations and autism, the parents of autistic children know better. They know that the majority of those children had the onset of that condition within the first hours and days after those vaccinations. The CDC’s own data back that up, showing that the majority of autism cases reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) occurred within the first twenty-four hours after a vaccination. 

As for deaths, most were Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths, most occurring within the first three days after a vaccination. 

What about the measles outbreaks that we are reading about?

First, we now have treatment for measles, which is ordinary vitamin A, 200,000 units per day for two days for children above the age of one. Properly treated, most children will recover uneventfully at home and deaths of healthy children with healthy vitamin A levels will be very rare. Lifetime immunity to measles is much better following natural infection than after immunization. For those parents who still want to vaccinate their children for measles, that should be their decision, not the decision of politicians taking money from drug companies. 

The important legal question here is whether the government has the power, under the Constitution, to mandate that children be injected with vaccines that the government knows, to a certainty, from its own records, will injure and kill substantial numbers of them? After all, even convicted killers get a fair trial and endless appeals over decades, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in each case, before even a few of them can be injected with drugs that will kill them. 

The Future of Education and Bodily Autonomy

Our lawsuit argues that, under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, completely innocent children cannot be mandated by the government to be injected with drugs that the government knows, to a certainty, will injure, and even kill, many of them. Nor can parents be coerced into consenting to those often harmful and sometimes lethal injections under threat of forfeiting the child’s constitutional right to attend school.

The next day after we filed our Second Amended Complaint, we followed it up by filing a Motion for Preliminary Injunction. That motion asks the federal court to immediately stop the California Department of Public Health from enforcing its immunization mandates for school children because of all the injuries and deaths that they cause, injuries and deaths determined by the federal government to require compensation, as if anything could compensate a family for a permanently injured or deceased child.

If our Motion for Preliminary Injunction is denied by the federal district court, we can immediately appeal it to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. If we win in the federal district court, the California Department may well appeal to the Ninth Circuit to reinstate the vaccine mandates. And, if we lose at the Ninth Circuit, we will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling in Jacobson 120 years ago. A win at the Supreme Court would put an end to mandated vaccinations of children, and likely adults, in every state in the country.

How You Can Help: Action Steps for Parents and Advocates

Please consider making a donation to Free Now Foundation to support this important work for the protection of your own and all other children and grandchildren, whether they are in California or elsewhere. 

Our Second Amended Complaint is available as a PDF download: (link)

Our Motion for Preliminary Injunction is also available as a PDF download: (link)

Our Opposition to Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss is available as a PDF download: (link)

July 30, 2025 Opposition to the Motion to Dismiss,

August 8, 2025 – ECF #59 Supplemental Opposition To Motion To Dismiss 8 22 2025

ECF #60 Defendants Supplemental Response 8-22-2025