NEW 3-in-1 Lawsuit Challenging CA School Vaccines

Free Now Foundation is overjoyed to partner with our board member, Richard Fox MD JD who recently filed a first-of-it’s-kind medical freedom lawsuit (here: Free Now Dr. Fox 3-in-1 Lawsuit) against seven Defendants – from California’s Department of Health Director Tomas Aragon to CDC Director Mandy Cohen.

This lawsuit joins Free Now’s legal portfolio as our second non-COVID era case, in addition to our two remaining COVID-era cases on appeal.

Three Suits in One Complaint

The first part of the complaint challenges the Constitutionality of the ten vaccines on California’s mandated school schedule. It also challenges Defendants to prove those vaccines are actually safe and effective at stopping transmission. Furthermore, the suit alleges that California has made no effort to narrowly tailor its immunization standards for the “unavoidably unsafe” vaccines to meet the standard of strict scrutiny.

Second, the suit alleges that California schools have repeatedly disregarded California and Federal law regarding the vaccine requirements for the 800,000 California students with integrated education plans (IEPs.) California’s Health and Safety Code and the Federal IDEA Act guarantee a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE,) yet parents of students with IEPs have been repeatedly told their children must have all school-mandated vaccines to participate.

Third, the final cause of action rests on the infringement of Dr. Douglas Hulstedt’s First Amendment rights to speak to his patients, and for his patients to listen to him. Dr. Hulstedt’s license was suspended by the California Medical Board for not following the CDC “guidelines” regarding vaccination in his pediatric practice, leading to some deciding not to get vaccines or to wait. Informed consent is required by law.

A Legal First in California: Vaccine Science Does Not Match Common Knowledge

Let’s first use healthy water consumption advice as an example, before discussing vaccine science versus common knowledge.

Drink Eight Glasses of Water Per Day: Evidence-based or Common Knowledge?

This author recalls that more than a decade ago, people began to question the advice to drink 8 glasses of water per day. Medical doctors routinely told patients that goal did not include water from coffee, tea, or foods. It became “common knowledge” that the healthy goal was to drink 8 glasses of water per day. However, it was revealed that the advice had originated from a study that did include the water naturally occurring in other foods and beverages, so the healthy daily intake of water is actually much less than 8 glasses per day. Though the consequences of this revelation were not dire, and this author drinks a lot of water herself, the medical profession was definitely caught with egg on their faces for peddling this incorrect “common knowledge” about water.

Common knowledge is not scientific, and can lead to much less benign outcomes than drinking the wrong amount of water. The weight of the scientific evidence is what matters.

Vaccines: A 200-year Blind Spot

When it comes to vaccines, there is a collective blind spot relying solely on common knowledge of vaccine safety and efficacy. It has been held for more than 200 years.

Vaccine mandates were first upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1905 in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a case involving the mandate of small pox vaccination. Lacking peer-reviewed science at the time, the Supreme Court simply assumed that the small pox vaccines of the day were safe and effective and the only question left to be decided was whether the government had the power to mandate such vaccination, which it decided the government did have.

As it turns out, there was great fear of smallpox vaccination at the time, as historical accounts indicate frequent outbreaks of smallpox following vaccination campaigns. A very detailed history of smallpox can be found in Dissolving Illusions, which cites medical journals, books and newspaper articles from the 1800s, revealing that smallpox was not eradicated by vaccines.

Surprisingly, after more than one hundred years, the Jacobson precedent is still the principal legal authority for vaccination mandates, with the court still simply assuming that all the new childhood vaccines are safe and effective because the CDC and the doctors who are well-paid to give those shots always say so.

But, due to the fiasco of the COVID vaccines, that not only don’t work but make people even more likely to get COVID, much of the public, and many doctors, are no longer willing to take the CDC’s word for it that all these childhood vaccines are safe and effective, especially since the rates of autism, learning disability, asthma, and eczema have skyrocketed as the numbers of vaccines recommended by the CDC has also skyrocketed over the past forty years.

Thus, this is the first time a school vaccine lawsuit in California will rely heavily on the science, instead of only on the law. “Judges have never seen the science before,” stated Richard Fox MD JD, “and without that, they assume, as everyone else does, that vaccines are safe and effective, but science cannot rest merely on presumed common knowledge.”

Two Federal Decisions Change the Legal Landscape for Vaccine Mandates

Decisions in federal courts on the 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts case, and on the so-called Chevron Deference majorly change the legal landscape for vaccine safety and vaccine mandate cases.

Jacobson Does Not Apply to Vaccines that Don’t Stop Transmission

In 2020 the U.S. Supreme Court decided a New York law aimed at controlling COVID by limiting attendance at churches. In a concurring opinion in that case, Justice Gorsuch stated several reasons why he thought that the Jacobson decision was out of date. Thus, the thinking of the Supreme Court seems to be changing.

Then, in 2024, the 9th Circuit court, the federal court of appeals for the western United States, found that Jacobsoncannot apply to a vaccine that does not stop transmission. This was a decision in a COVID shot mandate case brought by our colleagues at Health Freedom Defense Fund against Los Angeles Unified School District. In the 1905 Jacobson case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it was legal to mandate smallpox vaccination since it was presumed that the smallpox vaccine stopped transmission, therefore it was providing a public benefit. However, since it is now known that the COVID shots do not stop transmission of COVID, the court held that COVID shots could not be mandated to government workers.

Dr. Fox’s new lawsuit asks Defendants to prove the ten vaccines are safe for children, as claimed by the CDC. Because the CDC has never done placebo-controlled studies comparing adverse effects, like sudden infant death, autism, learning disability, asthma, and eczema in vaccinated children versus those not vaccinated, the CDC cannot show that its recommended vaccines are safe for children. However, the lawsuit cites numerous studies done by researchers outside the CDC that have compared vaccinated to unvaccinated children, showing much higher rates of all those adverse effects in the vaccinated children. Without studies showing that the CDC’s recommended vaccines are actually safe, California cannot meet the legal requirement to pass constitutional review under the applicable strict scrutiny standard of review.

Three-Letter Agencies Can Get It Wrong

In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that a legal doctrine called Chevron deference, under which judges deferred to government agencies as to how laws should be interpreted,should be discarded. Instead of deferring to our 3-letter agencies’ expertise, federal judges now have the power to determine what the evidence shows.

We saw this first-hand when we were locked down, as the CDC and FDA rapidly changed their guidance on COVID, often backtracking and contradicting themselves.

As our colleague, Brian Hooker says, “we need to test the science, not trust the science.”

Free Now Foundation is Committed to Defending Medical Freedom

Through this exciting case, and our other new case to compel all schools in California to accept the Federal Waiver from Vaccination, Free Now Foundation is working to regain health rights and freedoms for the students of California.

Our COVID-era work continues in the appeal of two cases. Our case against the Supervisors of Orange County accuses them of not assessing local conditions of the emergency to justify extended lockdowns and an influx of “COVID Cash” to the County. We also appealed our case against Yorba Linda School District for targeting student Aiden Palicke for not wearing a mask that the school decided wasn’t up to snuff. We hope Yorba Linda can produce the weight of the evidence showing the masks they sanctioned did work to prevent the spread of COVID.

With four active cases now in our portfolio — or should we say six, counting our new 3-in-1 case? — we could not be more thrilled to continue do this legal work on behalf of all Californians, for more than four years. Thank you for making it happen. We cannot do it without your support.

Read the complaint here: Free Now Dr. Fox 3-in-1 Lawsuit