The Manual Behind the Mandates
An Essay on Paul Offit’s Bad Faith
Lies are Unbekoming | July 14, 2026
In June and October 1998, Paul Offit sat on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and voted twice in favor of Wyeth-Lederle’s RotaShield rotavirus vaccine: on June 25 to recommend it for routine childhood use, and on October 22 to add it to the federal Vaccines for Children Program.¹ Offit’s own rotavirus vaccine, developed at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in partnership with Merck, was under development at the time. On October 22, 1999, exactly a year after his second vote, ACIP rescinded the RotaShield recommendation after CDC identified an elevated rate of intussusception in vaccinated infants. Intussusception is a bowel condition in which one segment of intestine telescopes into another and cuts off its own blood supply; without emergency intervention, it kills. The surveillance data at the point of withdrawal included hospitalizations and infant deaths. Offit abstained from the withdrawal vote.² Seven years later, Merck’s RotaTeq, which Offit co-invented, received ACIP recommendation for the same schedule slot. The patent sale netted him at least six million dollars by his own account, with other public estimates running higher.³
In June 2000, the United States House Committee on Government Reform published Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making. The report named Offit specifically. It concluded that “conflict of interest rules employed by the FDA and the CDC have been weak, enforcement has been lax, and committee members with substantial ties to pharmaceutical companies have been given waivers to participate in committee proceedings.”⁴
In March 2015, Basic Books published Offit’s Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine. The book accuses religious parents of moral failure. It calls for the elimination of religious exemption from vaccination law. It endorses criminal prosecution of parents who withhold pharmaceutical products from their children on religious grounds, including, under the Oregon sentencing guidelines Offit presents as a model, terms of up to twenty-five years in prison.⁵
Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and directs the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He has written five previous books along the same lines, including Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All and Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. His public role for two decades has been to defend the schedule and to condemn parents who decline it. Book after book, he plays the doctor calmly explaining what the parents are getting wrong.
Bad Faith extends the position into religion. It was published five years before COVID. Its recommendations were substantially enacted between 2015 and 2022. Read now, it functions less as ethical inquiry than as a legislative operations manual whose program was executed.
The Method
The book opens with cases designed to overwhelm objection. A Wisconsin pastor performs an exorcism on an eight-year-old boy with autism and asphyxiates him under his own body weight.⁶ An ultra-Orthodox mohel in Brooklyn performs metzitzah b’peh, sucking blood from a circumcision wound with his mouth; eleven infants develop what medicine identifies as neonatal herpes, two die, and two suffer permanent brain damage.⁷ At a Texas ministry associated with televangelist Kenneth Copeland, sixteen people including a four-month-old become ill in what Offit calls a measles outbreak connected to a daycare center on church property.⁸ In Ireland, a Hindu woman named Savita Halappanavar dies after a Catholic hospital refuses to remove her miscarrying fetus while a heartbeat is still detectable; the coroner attributes her death to septicemia.⁹
None of these cases involves ordinary religious exemption from vaccination. What they share, at the level Offit uses them, is that religious belief was present at the scene of a death. What they do not share is the specific practice the book has been marshalled to condemn.
That is the book’s central rhetorical move. It builds a moral gradient from ritual mutilation and life-refusal to any parental decision that rejects a pharmaceutical recommendation on religious grounds. The gradient does not require the cases to be comparable. It requires only that the reader carry the emotional freight of the extreme cases into the ordinary one.
The move is announced on page xiii. Offit writes, in his own voice, that he began the book expecting to arrive where Dawkins and Hitchens arrived, at the conclusion that religion is illogical and potentially harmful, but instead found himself moved by the Old and New Testaments. “The reader will be surprised to learn that the hero of this book isn’t science or medicine or doctors; it’s religion.”¹⁰
The concession does specific work. It reassures the religious reader that the book is not hostile to their tradition, and it disarms the skeptical reader who has watched vaccine industry figures dismiss religious objections as backward. Once both are quieted, the book proceeds to recommendations that religious readers, warned properly, would reject on sight.
Rita Swan is the emotional engine of the book. Offit opens with her and closes with her. To understand what he does with her, it helps to see her before he found her.
She was raised in Christian Science. In 1977, her fifteen-month-old son Matthew died after his parents, following church teaching, refused medical care for what was diagnosed as bacterial meningitis.¹¹ A year after his death, still a Christian Scientist, she went to the medical library at Wayne State University in Detroit. She had heard about another Christian Science child, a boy named Danny, whose meningitis had reportedly resolved without medical treatment; she wanted to understand why God had saved Danny and not Matthew. She read the textbooks. Danny had one kind of meningitis, viral, which typically resolves on its own. Matthew had another, bacterial, which does not. Antibiotics would have saved him. She sat on the floor of the library stacks and read the paragraph over and over. In her own words: “I did not have to be afraid that Matthew had died because we were not right with God. I knew that I wasn’t giving up a magical, supernatural protection or any kind of protection from evil because Christian Science had no power. It hadn’t healed anything.”¹²
That is the moment before Rita Swan became a public figure. She left the church, founded an organization called Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, and dedicated her life to eliminating religious exemption from child abuse and neglect law. Everything after sits downstream of that library floor. What Offit builds on top of it in Bad Faith is a criminal-law regime under which the state prosecutes not only parents like Rita Swan’s former self, but parents who bear no resemblance to Rita Swan’s former self at all.
Swan’s grief is real. Her son died. Her devotion to what she now believes is real. None of that is at issue. What is at issue is the strategic use to which her narrative has been put. Offit takes a mother whose child died in 1977 after her family refused emergency medical treatment for a present, acute illness, and uses her story to justify the elimination, in the 2010s, of the religious right to decline pharmaceutical injection of a healthy child. The two positions are not the same. Nothing in Matthew Swan’s death establishes what the parents of a healthy two-month-old should be permitted to decide about a hepatitis B injection.
The emotional weight travels regardless. That is the point of putting Rita Swan on the first page and the last page of the book.
Once the extreme cases have done their work, the ordinary case follows. Offit writes: “On any given day in America, tens of thousands of children whose parents have chosen not to vaccinate them for religious reasons can be found in daycare centers, schools, playgrounds, and churches across the country.”¹³ The sentence sits between the paragraphs about the Copeland church and the paragraphs about the woman dying at St. Joseph’s in Phoenix. By the time the reader arrives at unvaccinated children in daycare centers, the frame is set. They are on a moral continuum with mohels who kill babies and hospitals that let mothers die.
The frame does specific violence to the categories. A parent who declines a rubella vaccine on religious grounds is not the parent who prays over a bowel-obstructed child until he dies. Collapsing the two into one policy target requires an argument. Offit does not make the argument. He performs the collapse rhetorically and moves on.
Standing Up
Chapter 12 is called “Standing Up.” It is the book’s operations manual.
The model case is Oregon. Between 1999 and 2011, Rita Swan and Oregon prosecutor Terry Gustafson worked to strip religious exemption from Oregon’s criminal code. In 1999, Representative Bruce Starr introduced a bill repealing all religious exemptions to child abuse and neglect statutes. The Christian Science Church lobbied against it. The legislature compromised, repealing five of the exemptions.¹⁴ Twelve years later, after further deaths among children in the Followers of Christ church, Swan and her husband moved from Iowa to Oregon and lived in Salem for four months lobbying for full repeal. This time the Christian Science Church withdrew opposition. Governor Kitzhaber signed the bill. Religious exemption in Oregon was eliminated.¹⁵
Offit reports these events approvingly. He notes that under Oregon’s mandatory sentencing guidelines, parents convicted of religiously motivated child abuse or neglect could face up to twenty-five years in prison.¹⁶ He offers this as a template.
The Schaible case is the chapter’s central prosecution. Herbert and Catherine Schaible, members of the First-Century Gospel Church in northeast Philadelphia, lost their two-year-old son Kent in 2009 after choosing prayer instead of medical care; the coroner ruled the death due to bacterial pneumonia. The Schaibles were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years’ probation, with an order to seek medical care for their remaining seven children. In 2013, while under probation, their seven-month-old son Brandon died of the same condition. The Schaibles were charged with third-degree murder and sentenced to three and a half to seven years in prison. Their remaining children were removed to foster care.¹⁷
Offit reports the case as vindication of the prosecutorial approach. What the chapter does not report is the distinction between the Schaible position and the position of the parent who declines a hepatitis B or MMR injection for a healthy child. The Schaibles refused antibiotics for their acutely ill children. The parent refusing MMR is refusing pharmaceutical injection of a well child in the absence of any acute illness. One is refusal of treatment for present illness; the other is refusal of a product administered to a healthy body. Arguing for equivalent prosecution requires arguing for equivalence between the two positions. The chapter does not attempt the argument. It stacks the cases.
The children whose deaths Offit catalogues are real. Kent and Brandon Schaible are dead; more than eighty children lie in the Followers of Christ cemetery in Oregon; Matthew Swan was fifteen months old when he died in 1977. None of that is at issue here. What is at issue is the argumentative bridge: whether the deaths of children whose parents refused treatment for acute illness license the criminalization of parents who decline pharmaceutical products intended for a healthy body. Offit says yes. The book’s structural task is to make that inferential leap feel intuitive rather than argued.
In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics awarded Rita Swan the President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service. Robert W. Block, then AAP president, presented her with a plaque at the national meeting.¹⁸ The award marks a specific institutional turn. The largest pediatric medical body in the United States awarded its highest honor to a lay activist whose organizational mission is the elimination of religious exemption. Since then, the AAP has campaigned publicly for the removal of non-medical exemptions from state vaccine mandates.
The concession on page xiii is at this point difficult to sustain. The book that opens with “the hero of this book isn’t science or medicine or doctors; it’s religion” also contains, one hundred and eighty pages later, the sentence: “the American public’s instinctive tolerance for religion often exceeds reason.”¹⁹ Both sentences are Offit. Both are Bad Faith. The hero of page xiii and the tolerance-that-exceeds-reason of page 193 are the same subject in the same book. The concession was a hospitality. Chapter 12 is what waits behind it.
Offit’s resolution is to distinguish between religion properly understood, which is charity, and religion improperly performed, which is medical neglect. Charity is what he defends. Anything else is subject to statute. The distinction is convenient. It is also a claim no religious tradition would recognize as an outside authority’s to draw. Offit is not a theologian. He is a pediatrician with a financial stake in vaccine uptake and an institutional platform at the largest children’s hospital in the country. The book adjudicates which religious practices are protected and which are prosecutable. Parents disagree at their statutory peril.
From Print to Statute
Bad Faith was published in March 2015. Three months later, on June 30, 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown signed SB277, eliminating both religious and personal-belief exemptions from the state’s school vaccination requirements. California became the third state, after Mississippi and West Virginia, to permit only medical exemption.²⁰ The bill had been introduced in February 2015, roughly the same month Basic Books shipped Offit’s manuscript. Public advocacy for the bill drew heavily on the framing Offit had spent the previous decade establishing. Four years later, in 2019, California passed SB276, restricting the medical exemptions that had replaced the eliminated religious ones. What began as a policy conversation about religious refusal ended as a near-total mandate.
In June 2019, New York eliminated religious exemption by legislative vote. The bill passed in response to what the state described as measles outbreaks in Rockland County and Brooklyn, communities with large Orthodox Jewish populations. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill the same day it passed both chambers.²¹ Maine passed LD 798 in May 2019, eliminating religious and philosophical exemption; the law survived a March 2020 ballot referendum challenge.²² Connecticut eliminated religious exemption in April 2021.²³ Mississippi, which had never permitted religious exemption to school vaccination, was ordered by a federal court in 2023 to allow one under Bosarge v. Edney.²⁴
The COVID-era mandates of 2021 and 2022 extended the framework beyond state school law. Federal contractors, healthcare workers at facilities receiving federal funding, and workers at companies with more than one hundred employees faced injection requirements as conditions of employment. Military personnel faced separate mandates. Religious exemption processes existed on paper. Employers rejected them at scale, and litigation over denied exemptions moved through the federal courts for the next several years.²⁵
Family court applied the framework to custody. In October 2017, Oakland County Judge Karen McDonald sentenced Rebecca Bredow of Ferndale, Michigan to seven days in jail for contempt of court after she refused to vaccinate her nine-year-old son under a court-approved parenting agreement. Her ex-husband was granted temporary custody. Bredow’s son received four vaccinations while she was behind bars. She then lost primary custody permanently. Three months later, in a separate Michigan custody dispute, attorney Aaron Siri deposed Stanley Plotkin, Offit’s mentor and vaccine industry co-strategist. Plotkin had been recruited as expert witness for the father seeking to vaccinate his ten-year-old daughter over the mother’s religious objection. The nine-hour deposition on January 11, 2018 ended with Plotkin recusing himself the following day. The father nevertheless prevailed at trial.²⁶ Similar custody rulings have moved through American family courts since. The framework Offit established in Bad Faith, that religious or personal objection to vaccination is a category on which the state may act against the parent, is the framework these courts now apply.
Under the Siri deposition, Plotkin stated the position openly. Asked whether he believed anyone could have a valid religious objection to vaccination, Plotkin answered no. Asked whether he took issue with religious beliefs, yes. Asked whether he stood by his written statement that “vaccination is always under attack by religious zealots who believe that the will of God includes death and disease,” he answered “I absolutely do.”²⁷ The deposition is the sworn version of what Bad Faith had put in more polished prose three years earlier.
In 2014, forty-eight American states recognized either religious or philosophical exemption to school vaccination. Between 2015 and 2022, four eliminated non-medical exemption: California, New York, Maine, and Connecticut. They joined Mississippi and West Virginia as the states permitting only medical exemption. The injection mandate regime extended in parallel into employment, healthcare, military service, and family law. Whether the reader considers this a public health achievement or a civil liberties collapse, the trajectory is documented. The book’s program was substantially enacted.
The framework has not gone unopposed. Aaron Siri and the firm of Siri & Glimstad have led the litigation counterattack, exposing Stanley Plotkin under deposition in 2018 and pressing federal court challenges to the COVID-era mandates. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense has funded much of the legal and public education work. Bosarge v. Edney, the April 2023 federal ruling that ordered Mississippi to allow religious exemption to childhood vaccination, is one visible product of that pushback. In January 2025, West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey issued an executive order directing state health officials to implement a religious exemption process; the resulting conflict between the governor’s office, the state Board of Education, and the state courts is now before the West Virginia Supreme Court. The framework Bad Faith helped establish is now being tested in the same courts that first applied it.
The Document Exists
The record is a public one. In 1998, Paul Offit voted twice at ACIP to add a rotavirus vaccine to the childhood schedule. That vaccine was withdrawn a year later after CDC identified elevated intussusception risk and infant deaths. In 2006, his own rotavirus vaccine was added to the schedule under a subsequent ACIP recommendation. Merck paid him at least six million dollars for the patent, by his own admission, with other public estimates running higher. In 2000, the House Committee on Government Reform named him in a report on conflicts of interest at the CDC. In 2015, he published a book that opens by calling religion “the hero” and closes by endorsing prison terms of up to twenty-five years for parents who cite religion in declining pharmaceutical products for their children.
Between 2015 and 2022, states passed the laws the book recommended. California, New York, Maine, and Connecticut eliminated religious exemption from school vaccination. Federal COVID-era mandates conditioned employment, healthcare, and military service on injection. Family courts began ordering vaccination over parental objection and jailing mothers who refused. In 2014, forty-eight American states recognized non-medical exemption to childhood vaccination. By the end of 2022, forty-four did. Litigation and executive action since have partly reversed the direction of travel, and the story is not settled.
There is a version of this story a defender of the book would tell. In that version, the American vaccine mandate regime built between 2015 and 2022 is a public health triumph, and Bad Faith is the ethical volume that helped make it possible. In that version, Rita Swan on the floor of the Wayne State library reading about her son’s death is the founder of a movement to protect children, and Kent Schaible, Brandon Schaible, and the eighty-plus children in the Followers of Christ cemetery are the reason the state was right to act. That version exists. It is the version Bad Faith itself tells.
The other version is that the author of Bad Faith is a pediatrician who voted rotavirus vaccines onto the CDC schedule while his own rotavirus vaccine was in development at Merck, abstained from the vote to withdraw the failed predecessor after infants died, and sold his own version to Merck for at least six million dollars. In that version, the book that calls religion “the hero” is written by a man the House of Representatives named in a conflict-of-interest report fifteen years earlier, and its policy recommendations, enacted in state after state and then extended into COVID-era employment law, functioned to remove the last legal ground from which parents could decline the products his own industry manufactures. In that version, the mother on the library floor was leveraged into a criminal-law regime she never asked for.
The reader can pick the version. Both start from the same documents. The book calls itself an inquiry into religious belief. The record of what it did calls it something else. Everything is documented: Chapter 12 in the book, Offit’s financial history in the 2000 House committee report, the Schaible convictions in Pennsylvania court records, the state exemption repeals in state statute, the Plotkin deposition in sworn testimony. The elements exist for anyone to verify.
The document exists and says what it says.
How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old
Imagine there is a kid at school named Paul who sells cookies at lunch. He has been selling them for a long time and he is rich now.
One day Paul writes a big book. In the book he says that any kid who doesn’t buy his cookies at lunch is being mean, and that the teachers should send those kids to the principal, and that the principal should punish their parents.
The teachers read Paul’s book. Some of them agree. Soon there is a new rule at school: if you don’t buy Paul’s cookies at lunch, you get sent to the principal’s office.
But some kids have real reasons for not buying cookies. Some are allergic. Some don’t have any money. Some of their families believe cookies are wrong. Some kids just don’t want cookies today. The rule doesn’t care. If you don’t buy them, you are in trouble.
Meanwhile, Paul is still selling cookies. He is still getting rich. He never mentioned in his book that he was the one selling them.
That is the story of Bad Faith. Paul Offit is a doctor who made millions of dollars from a vaccine he invented. He wrote a book saying that religious parents who don’t want vaccines for their children should go to prison. Between 2015 and 2022, several American states passed laws matching what his book said. The vaccines his industry sells are now required in more places than they used to be. The parents who don’t want them have fewer places left to say no.
Paul’s book called religion “the hero.” It wasn’t.
References
¹ Offit’s ACIP tenure (October 1998 to June 2003) and the specific rotavirus votes (June 25, 1998; October 22, 1998; October 22, 1999) are documented in United States House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform, Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making, Majority Staff Report, June 15, 2000 (Section V, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, Exhibits 38-41 pertaining to Dr. Offit specifically). See also Handley, J.B., How to End the Autism Epidemic (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), Chapter 4, “The Reward Is Never Financial”; and Olmsted, Dan, and Mark Blaxill, “Voting Himself Rich,” Age of Autism, December 2009.
² Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Withdrawal of Rotavirus Vaccine Recommendation,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 48(43), November 5, 1999. RotaShield post-licensure surveillance findings, including hospitalizations for intussusception and deaths, are documented in CDC MMWR reports from October and November 1999. Offit’s abstention from the withdrawal vote is reported by Olmsted and Blaxill, op. cit., and by Handley, op. cit.
³ Handley, op. cit., quoting Offit’s own email correspondence acknowledging the six-million-dollar figure, and noting that “other public estimates have been far higher.” Handley’s citation is to Offit-David Brown correspondence, August 18, 2009.
⁴ United States House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform, Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making, June 15, 2000. Available via the Children’s Health Defense archive at childrenshealthdefense.org.
⁵ Offit, Paul A., Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine (Basic Books, 2015). ISBN 978-0-465-04061-2. Endorsement of Oregon’s mandatory sentencing appears in Chapter 12.
⁶ Bad Faith, Introduction, pp. ix-x. Terrance Cottrell Jr., killed August 22, 2003.
⁷ Bad Faith, Introduction, p. xi. See also New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, “Notes from the Field: Neonatal Herpes Simplex Virus Infection Following Jewish Ritual Circumcisions,” MMWR 61, 2012.
⁸ Bad Faith, Introduction, pp. xi-xii. The Tarrant County outbreak, August 2013, was traced to Eagle Mountain International Church.
⁹ Bad Faith, Chapter 6, “Dialogue of the Deaf,” pp. 82-85. Halappanavar died October 28, 2012, at University Hospital Galway.
¹⁰ Bad Faith, Introduction, p. xiii.
¹¹ Bad Faith, Chapter 1, “The Very Worst Thing,” pp. 1-18. Matthew Swan died July 1977.
¹² Bad Faith, Chapter 12, “Standing Up,” pp. 177-178. Rita Swan’s account of the Wayne State University medical library and her decision to leave Christian Science.
¹³ Bad Faith, Introduction, p. xii.
¹⁴ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, pp. 184-186. The 1999 Oregon legislative fight and Bruce Starr’s HB 2494.
¹⁵ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, pp. 186-187. Oregon House Bill 2721 (2011).
¹⁶ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, p. 186.
¹⁷ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, pp. 187-191. See also Commonwealth v. Schaible, Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas, Philadelphia County. Herbert and Catherine Schaible entered no-contest pleas to third-degree murder on November 14, 2013, and were sentenced February 19, 2014.
¹⁸ Bad Faith, Epilogue, p. 195. American Academy of Pediatrics announcement of the 2012 President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service.
¹⁹ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, p. 193. The full sentence in context reads: “the American public’s instinctive tolerance for religion often exceeds reason—in this case, resulting in a misguided respect for a belief that violates one of the most fundamental teachings of all religions: protecting the vulnerable.”
²⁰ California Senate Bill 277 (Pan/Allen), signed by Governor Jerry Brown on June 30, 2015. Codified at California Health and Safety Code § 120325. California Senate Bill 276 (Pan), restricting medical exemptions, was signed September 9, 2019.
²¹ New York Senate Bill S2994A / Assembly Bill A2371A, signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo on June 13, 2019, repealing New York Public Health Law § 2164(9).
²² Maine LD 798, signed by Governor Janet Mills, May 24, 2019. Upheld in a March 3, 2020 statewide referendum by a vote of 73 to 27 percent.
²³ Connecticut House Bill 6423, signed by Governor Ned Lamont on April 28, 2021, repealing the state’s religious exemption to school vaccination requirements.
²⁴ Bosarge v. Edney, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, 2023, ordering the state to allow religious exemption to childhood vaccination requirements.
²⁵ Federal COVID-19 vaccination mandate litigation includes NFIB v. OSHA, 595 U.S. 109 (January 13, 2022) (staying the OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard for large employers); Biden v. Missouri, 595 U.S. 87 (January 13, 2022) (allowing the CMS healthcare worker mandate to take effect); and numerous federal cases involving denied religious exemption accommodations.
²⁶ Rebecca Bredow’s jailing and custody loss are documented in contemporaneous news reports from October 2017 (Oakland County Circuit Court, Judge Karen McDonald presiding; Detroit Free Press, CBS News, Washington Post reporting). The separate Michigan custody case in which Stanley Plotkin was deposed by Aaron Siri (January 11, 2018) is described in Handley, J.B., How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 4. The deposition ran approximately nine hours.
²⁷ Deposition of Stanley Plotkin, taken by Aaron Siri, January 11, 2018. Transcript publicly available via the Informed Consent Action Network. The exchange on religious objection to vaccination appears at approximately pp. 42-46 of the deposition.
Dressen v. Flaherty: Vaccine Censorship Case Goes to Appeal
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | July 10, 2026
Federal officials set out to erase the online voices of Americans who said Covid vaccines had hurt them. A new appeal asks the Fifth Circuit to give those Americans their day in court.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed its opening brief on July 7, asking the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to revive Dressen v. Flaherty.
We obtained a copy of the brief for you here.
A federal judge in Texas had thrown the case out before a single document changed hands in discovery. The suit accuses the Biden administration of running a joint government and private censorship operation against people who went online to talk about vaccine injuries.
Brianne Dressen alleges she was injured after she volunteered for an AstraZeneca vaccine trial. Shaun Barcavage, Kristi Dobbs, Nikki Holland, and Suzanna Newell each reportedly suffered serious, debilitating injuries after Covid vaccination. Ernest Ramirez was vaccinated without incident and then lost his healthy 16-year-old son five days after the boy received his first Pfizer dose. The autopsy pointed to an enlarged heart and myocarditis.
They did what people in pain tend to do. They went to social media to trade medical research, look for treatments, share hopeful stories, and find others who understood. For many of them, closed online support groups became a lifeline.
The government treated that lifeline as a threat. The Surgeon General’s Office, the CDC, HHS, DHS, CISA, and the White House leaned on social media companies to flag this speech as “misinformation,” shadow-ban it, or delete it outright.
The operation reached across agencies and into the platforms themselves, coercing and colluding with the companies that decide who gets to be heard.
Stanford supplied the machinery. The now-defunct Stanford Internet Observatory and its “Virality Project” tracked posts and handed the platforms lists of speech to suppress.
The Virality Project targeted Covid-vaccine speech that broke from the administration’s preferred policies, whether or not that speech was accurate. Real accounts of real injuries got flagged because they were inconvenient, not because they were false.
The censors were specific about their targets. Their tracking called out Bri Dressen by name. A woman reportedly injured in a vaccine trial, describing what happened to her own body, became something a federal effort wanted the public not to see.
None of that was enough for the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas, which dismissed the case at the pleading stage. The plaintiffs had laid out a detailed factual account of a nationwide censorship conspiracy, and the court closed the door before discovery could begin.
NCLA’s brief says the district court got the law wrong in several ways. The judge set too narrow and exacting a bar on personal jurisdiction and used it to wave off the Stanford defendants and the individual government officials.
The court also misread the Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri, which weighed whether a different set of NCLA clients had shown enough to win a preliminary injunction. No injunction is being sought here, so that higher standard does not govern this case.
The brief argues, the court made a further error on the civil-rights conspiracy claim. It tossed the plaintiffs’ claim under 42 U.S. Code Section 1985(3) on the theory that they had not alleged racial discrimination. The statute never mentions race. It protects “any person or class of persons” stripped of their rights through an invidiously discriminatory conspiracy, and the Supreme Court has said the provision can reach non-racial classes.
“To call what happened to our clients ‘troubling’ is a massive understatement. After suffering devastating medical injuries following Covid vaccination, they turned to social media as a lifeline for support and connection with others who understood. Rather than compassion or aid, the Government responded with relentless censorship, maligning them as liars and conspiracy theorists and cutting off the lifelines that they depended on.
“Their only offense was that their lived experiences, pain, and even private conversations in online support groups contradicted the Administration’s preferred Covid-vaccine narrative. The cruelty and injustice are difficult to overstate,” said Casey Norman, Litigation Counsel at NCLA.
The appeal also presses a point the district court skipped over. Censorship harms more than the person silenced.
“We are confident the Fifth Circuit will correct the District Court’s numerous errors in dismissing the complaint, which included taking an inappropriately narrow view of personal jurisdiction and ignoring that not just speakers, but also potential listeners, suffer harm resulting from unlawful government censorship,” said Caitlin Moyna, Senior Litigation Counsel at NCLA.
The stakes reach past these six plaintiffs. If courts keep reading Murthy as a wall against every censorship suit, the government gains a template for silencing people with almost no risk of accountability.
“Lower courts are misapplying the Supreme Court’s Murthy v. Missouri decision, and the ruling below here is a prime example. The Murthy decision set a high bar for standing in the context of a preliminary injunction to stop future censorship. But no PI was sought here, so the Murthy standard is not applicable. If Bri Dressen cannot satisfy standing—when the defendants called her out by name in their censorship tracking—then no one will,” said Mark Chenoweth, President and Chief Legal Officer of NCLA.
According to NCLA, the campaign still burdens its clients’ ability to speak, to associate privately, and to exchange information with others in closed support groups.
The question in front of the Fifth Circuit is whether Americans silenced by their own government can even make their case to a jury, or whether the courthouse door stays shut before anyone looks at the evidence.
Doctor faces up to 50-year jail sentence — Is it because he promoted monoclonal antibodies instead of COVID vaccines?
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 7, 2026
In 2021, Dr. Ron Elfenbein, a physician who operated FirstCall Medical Center in Maryland, went on Fox News to criticize the Biden administration’s policies limiting access to monoclonal antibodies. Speaking during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Elfenbein insisted that monoclonal antibodies were effective in treating COVID-19.
Four months later, the federal government indicted Elfenbein on five counts of fraudulent coding and billing at his clinics, alleging that Elfenbein “upcoded” by billing for a higher level of treatment than provided.
But Elfenbein said he believes the charges were motivated by his support for monoclonal antibodies — and a federal judge agreed.
In August 2023, a jury found Elfenbein guilty. But in response to Elfenbein’s motion for acquittal, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar threw out the jury’s verdict and acquitted Elfenbein in December 2023.
In his 93-page ruling, Bredar said the government did not present enough evidence to convict Elfenbein, instead relying on “loose definitions” and an “imperfect” set of standards governing medical coding.
“The evidence weighs so heavily in favor of the defendant that it would be unjust to enter judgment against him,” Bredar wrote.
“That kind of post-verdict acquittal is extraordinarily rare,” said Dr. Kirk Moore, a Utah plastic surgeon who last year was acquitted on federal charges that he issued falsified COVID-19 vaccination cards. “Judges almost never overturn juries. Bredar did it because the case was just that empty.”
Yet, in the final days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) appealed. In July 2025, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the original jury had enough evidence to convict Elfenbein and sent the case back to the trial court.
“The government doesn’t get to lose, apparently,” Moore said. “They just get to keep swinging, bullying their way through a judicial system that is now built for this exact purpose.”
In December 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Elfenbein’s appeal.
In an interview with The Defender, Elfenbein said that his new trial is scheduled for January 2027. He believes he is unfairly being targeted as a “whistleblower” who was trying to help the public during a global pandemic and who was charged despite a lack of evidence against him.
He faces up to 50 years in prison if convicted on all five charges.
Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, said the case against Elfenbein is “inexplicable” and that there were no coding errors or any criminal intent.
“Nobody was harmed. No patient was harmed. No insurance company was harmed. The federal government was harmed,” Kirsch said — because promoting monoclonal antibodies undermined the government’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccines.
Government’s case ‘the height of bureaucratic arrogance’
According to Elfenbein, his network of clinics rapidly expanded operations early during the COVID-19 pandemic in response to “unprecedented” circumstances.
“No one really understood what to do. Everything was sort of ‘fly by the seat of your pants.’ So, we had to invent everything,” Elfenbein said. He cited the example of drive-up COVID-19 testing with provider evaluation, which he said his clinics were the first to offer in Maryland.
“At one point, we were seeing over 1,000 patients a day across six different or eight different sites. And we had to figure out how to accommodate that,” Elfenbein said.
Elfenbein said that at his drive-up testing sites and in his urgent care facilities, patients would communicate with practitioners virtually through a television screen and microphone. Their results would then be delivered electronically.
In 2021, Elfenbein began offering monoclonal antibodies to COVID-19 patients. At the request of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, he set up a monoclonal antibody clinic at FedEx Field outside of Washington, D.C.
In an April interview with The MAHA Report, Elfenbein said the clinics performed 5,000 infusions.
Monoclonal antibodies are produced in labs and designed to replicate the immune system’s response to pathogens. Elfenbein said the treatments — and his test-and-treat model, where patients would be tested and treated at the same site — were successful and became “the model for the entire country moving forward.”
“It was like battlefield medicine, just trying to improvise and do as much as you can and as much good as you can in as little amount of time as possible,” Elfenbein said.
Elfenbein said that despite their success in treating COVID-19 patients, the Biden administration significantly curtailed the use of monoclonal antibodies in December 2021, making it much more difficult for practitioners in certain states to obtain the treatment.
That same month, Elfenbein told Fox News that people were “going to die” as a result of not having access to monoclonal antibodies. He made similar remarks in an interview with Newsmax during this period.
“It’s just the height of bureaucratic arrogance, and it’s … horrible,” Elfenbein told Fox News at the time.
The ‘government’s looking to put me in jail for 50 years … over $250’
Four months later, in April 2022, Elfenbein was out with his son when he received a phone call from his clinic, informing him that two federal agents wanted to speak with him. He later learned that the DOJ planned to indict him on healthcare fraud charges.
While the circumstances of his indictment were initially unclear, Elfenbein said he learned during the pre-trial discovery phase that undercover agents posing as patients had visited his testing facilities after his Fox News interview.
The DOJ alleged that, in the case of five patients who visited Elfenbein’s testing facilities, insurers were charged more than they should have been for the level of treatment provided, as a result of “upcoding.”
According to Elfenbein, there are “four different codes you can pick from when you’re doing evaluation and management” of a patient, ranging from level 2 to level 5. “Normally, in most cases, you should get a bell curve” among the different levels, Elfenbein said. But during the pandemic, this changed.
“There’s a pandemic going on. We’re not seeing ankle sprains. We’re not seeing elbow sprains. We’re not seeing lacerations. We’re seeing COVID and that was it.”
Most COVID-19 patients were coded as level-4 patients, which he said was the norm across medical facilities during that time.
According to Healthcare Law Insights, the codes are imprecise, which “makes for difficult federal prosecutions.”
“There is purpose in [the] codes’ imprecision in that it allows physicians flexibility to exercise their best judgment given the multitude of factors that go into medical decision-making,” Healthcare Law Insights reported.
In the case of Elfenbein, the initial judge found a lack of evidence that Elfenbein’s level-4 coding was “objectively false.”
In an amicus brief filed on Elfenbein’s behalf in October 2024, the American Medical Association (AMA) agreed, writing, “Clinicians must be able to exercise their judgment without fear of inadvertently facing allegations of wrongdoing.”
Elfenbein said this is significant because the AMA developed the ICD-10 medical coding system that’s currently in use.
Elfenbein said:
“The American Medical Association owns that. Everybody uses ICD-10. And, by the way, there are over 69,000 possible codes in ICD-10. And the government alleged we chose the wrong code out of 69,000, five charts out of over 100,000, in the timeframe of the indictment during a global pandemic.”
Elfenbein said prosecutors couldn’t identify which code should have been assigned to those five patients instead of level 4, but that the difference between level 4 and level 3 amounts to approximately $50.
“The government’s looking to put me in jail for 50 years, destroy my life, take away my livelihood, over $250,” Elfenbein said.
“The … definitions for level-4 evaluation and management codes are inherently subjective — they depend on ‘medical decision-making’ complexity, not a stopwatch,” Moore said. “If you’re going to charge a man with fraud for using the wrong code, you should probably be able to say what the right code is. They couldn’t, wouldn’t and ultimately, didn’t.”
‘This is a case of shoot first and ask questions later’
Elfenbein told The Defender that while he does not have hard evidence proving that the DOJ’s case against him is retaliatory, the timing of his indictment shortly after his Fox News and Newsmax interviews is likely not coincidental.
“Temporally, I went on Fox News, and I got indicted almost to the day, four months later. Putting the two things together, it seems to make sense in my mind that this is what set them off,” Elfenbein said.
He suggested that the government’s case against him appeared to have been hastily constructed, further suggesting that the DOJ was targeting him on retaliatory grounds rather than on the strength of the evidence.
“They indicted me before they had the [patients’] charts. They didn’t even know what was in the charts,” Elfenbein said. Federal investigators did not speak to his business partners, who were responsible for billing, and never cross-examined a professional medical coder.
According to Elfenbein, the government’s own witnesses also undermined the DOJ’s case during the first trial. While prosecutors alleged that the five visits in question were too quick for the number of procedures that were coded, a government witness testified that “time is irrelevant for coding” and that the tests were “medically necessary.”
“This was a case where even the chief judge said, ‘This is a case of shoot first and ask questions later.’ No real investigation had been done,” Elfenbein said. “That’s pretty telling, for a federal judge to say that to the prosecution.”
Promotion of a non-vaccine treatment ‘posed a huge threat’
Elfenbein said he believes his public statements about the effectiveness of monoclonal antibodies threatened the COVID-19 vaccine enterprise.
The COVID-19 shots were issued under emergency use authorization, which is customarily revoked once other effective treatments are identified and licensed.
Elfenbein said his clinics had become the largest supplier of monoclonal antibodies in the mid-Atlantic region, which “posed a huge threat.”
“It was a direct threat to the emergency use authorization of the vaccine,” he said. “I think I was the easiest fall guy … I was out all the time beating the drum, answering phone calls, talking to people, answering Facebook messages, taking questions, anything I could do to help.”
Moore agreed. “The monoclonal antibody ban was transparently about clearing the field for the vaccines. If there’s an effective early treatment available, the urgency to get jabbed drops considerably.”
By making monoclonal antibodies available despite government efforts to curtail their use, and by subsequently criticizing the government on that front, Elfenbein said he, in effect, became a whistleblower.
“I went on Fox News and I said, ‘The government doesn’t know what it’s doing, and it is gonna kill people.’ If that’s not a whistleblower, I don’t know what is.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
BMJ Probe Into Excess Mortality Study Drags On for Two Years With No Resolution
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 17, 2026
Controversy over a BMJ paper examining excess mortality trends during the COVID-19 pandemic remains unresolved more than two years after publication, Steve Kirsch reported on Substack.
Dutch researcher Saskia Mostert, M.D., Ph.D., led the study, which was published in BMJ Public Health in May 2024.
Mostert’s team analyzed excess mortality data from 47 Western countries and reported that elevated death rates persisted through 2022 and 2023 despite the end of pandemic restrictions and the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines.
The authors argued that the findings warranted further investigation into potential contributing factors, including pandemic-era policies, healthcare disruptions and mass vaccination programs.
The paper was attacked on PubPeer and Retraction Watch, two platforms that have become the driving force behind many recent retractions of peer-reviewed scientific papers whose findings challenge the mainstream narrative on vaccines, COVID-19 treatments and aluminum, among others.
Critics did not dispute the paper’s core findings that excess mortality was high and remained elevated in many Western countries during the study period. Instead, they criticized the paper’s discussion of the COVID-19 vaccines, saying it implied there was a causal link between the shots and excess death and encouraged readers to infer causation.
Several critics called for the paper to be retracted.
In response to these and other mainstream criticism of the paper, BMJ Public Health issued a statement saying that media reports had misrepresented the findings. However, in mid-June 2024, the journal stamped the article with an “expression of concern.”
The journal said its “integrity team and editors” were investigating issues “regarding the quality and messaging of this work.” It also said the Princess Máxima Center, where three of the four study authors were based, was investigating the study.
BMJ Public Health added that the study does not support the claim that vaccines are a major contributor to excess deaths.
The BMJ typically waits for the home institution’s findings before taking action, according to Kirsch. He said the Princess Máxima Center hasn’t yet sufficiently explained what was wrong with the study.
BMJ updated the expression of concern in January 2025, stating that it was awaiting the findings and that the institution had no update regarding when the information would be sent. The Princess Máxima’s website says the investigation is “complete but not yet finalized.”
“After more than two years, the ‘issues’ with the paper have not been revealed,” Kirsch wrote. He said that the center’s investigation revealed that the data and methodology are real and the authors committed no fraud.
“The institution just didn’t like the political implications of being associated with a paper that called the safety of the COVID vaccine into question.”
Princess Maxima Center did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
Study used proper methods, reported valid findings
All-cause mortality expert Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., told The Defender that the authors conducted their analysis, “using a correct method and without error.”
“Those results are robust and are corroborated and expanded upon by others,” Rancourt said. All-cause mortality is an important metric that is valid regardless of different opinions about what drives that mortality, he added.
Rancourt said the researchers discussed their results in relation to a broad range of published studies.
The push for retraction was based on how the media and social media commenters interpreted the discussion — not based on what the authors actually did in the paper.
“This is a regressive reason to start unpublishing papers,” he said, adding:
“The large industry of unpublishing shows that our society has moved away from independent thought (intellectual literacy) and towards excessive reliance on the pronouncements from high-status sources. I include scientists themselves in the said society.”
All-cause mortality identified in the paper ‘unprecedented and raises serious concerns’
The original paper showed that excess mortality in 2020 was documented in 41 of the 47 countries the authors analyzed. Over the next two years, that number increased to 42 and 43 countries in 2021 and 2022, respectively.
Overall, there were 3,098,456 excess deaths from Jan. 1, 2020, to Dec. 31, 2022, with just over 1 million of those occurring in 2020.
“This is unprecedented and raises serious concerns,” said researchers, who analyzed all-cause mortality reported in the Our World in Data database.
“In 2021,” they wrote, “the year in which both containment [i.e., lockdown] measures and COVID-19 vaccines were used to address virus spread and infection, the highest number of excess deaths was reported: 1,256,942 excess deaths.”
They reported that in 2022 — “the year in which most containment measures were lifted and COVID-19 vaccines were continued” — there were 808,392 excess deaths.
The authors pointed out that during the pandemic, politicians and the media emphasized: “on a daily basis that every COVID-19 death mattered and every life deserved protection through containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines.”
“In the aftermath of the pandemic, the same moral should apply,” the authors said. “Every death needs to be acknowledged and accounted for, irrespective of its origin.”
The authors called for government transparency in cause-of-death data so researchers can do “direct and robust analyses to determine the underlying contributors.”
This also means that autopsies need to be done to determine the exact reason for death, they added.
The authors noted that the data they analyzed may not have recorded all actual deaths because “countries may lack the infrastructure and capacity to document and account for all deaths.”
Record-keeping mishaps or delays may also cause deaths to go unrecorded.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
CDC Awards Pfizer $1.24 Billion for COVID Vaccines for Kids and Adults
By Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW | The Defender | June 12, 2026
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recent decision to award Pfizer $1.24 billion for COVID-19 vaccines has renewed debate over the government’s continued investment in mRNA technology.
The contracts, awarded on June 1, include about $735.7 million for pediatric COVID-19 vaccines and nearly $505.3 million for adult doses for fiscal year 2026-2027.
Critics say the funding reflects a continued commitment to vaccines associated with high rates of serious injuries and deaths, and a lack of adequate safety testing and monitoring.
Public health experts argue the investment is necessary to protect vulnerable populations and prepare for future outbreaks.
The latest contracts come as mRNA technology expands beyond COVID-19.
A recent review in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics found that mRNA-based therapeutics were identified in more than 550 registered clinical trials. The authors reported that more than 90% of the projects involved mRNA vaccines and that most products remain in early-stage testing before broader adoption.
‘Unnecessary and often harmful injections’
The procurement of monetary resources signals that federal officials intend to continue investing heavily in mRNA technology despite declining public demand and ongoing controversy over vaccine safety monitoring, critics say.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, told The Defender there was “no scientific justification” or “market demand” for the latest mRNA vaccine funding.
“This raises a serious question concerning how these captured agencies really work,” Tucker said. “We are talking about vast amounts of tax dollars flowing to support unnecessary and often harmful injections.”
“This is $1.24 billion for what is essentially a cold in minor children,” said Children’s Health Defense Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker.
Daniel O’Connor, publisher of TrialSite News, which covers global biomedical and clinical research, told The Defender Americans “better start asking the hard questions.”
“If demand is falling, safety questions remain contested and many reporting vaccine injuries say they’ve been left behind, why is Washington committing another $1.24 billion to vaccine procurement instead of first providing a transparent accounting of need, benefit, risk, and responsibility?”
‘COVID-19 has not disappeared’
Public health experts disagreed, saying their support of vaccinations is supporting the prevention of future pandemics.
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, told The Defender that the monetary installments will help stave off another public health crisis because “COVID-19 has not disappeared.”
“While the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, the virus continues to cause significant illness, hospitalizations and deaths each year,” she said. “This investment reflects the reality that vaccines remain one of our most effective tools for preventing severe disease, particularly among those at highest risk. Maintaining access to updated vaccines is an important part of ensuring the country remains prepared for future COVID-19 surges.”
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, said the contracts will ensure “continuing availability of safe and effective COVID vaccines through the next two years.”
“COVID vaccines have repeatedly been demonstrated to provide protection against the most severe manifestations of COVID infection: hospitalization, intensive care unit admission and death,” Schaffner said. “This is particularly applicable to those persons at increased risk of becoming seriously ill: persons age 65 and older, anyone with a chronic medical condition, persons who are immunocompromised and persons who are pregnant.”
However, some studies suggest claims that the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives are based on flawed models and incorrect calculations.
Legality of funding in question
The contracts also raise questions about federal vaccine spending.
Under the CDC’s Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program, the federal government agrees to buy and provide free vaccines through negotiated contracts for eligible children.
Current CDC price schedules list Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines at roughly $69 to $91 per dose, depending on the formula, while Moderna doses range from about $78 to $83.
Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer and expert in mRNA vaccines, however, questioned the legal authority to use federal funding for the Pfizer contracts because the purchase wasn’t approved by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
“Use of VFC funds requires ACIP authorization,” he said. “But there is no ACIP.”
Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued an injunction blocking many of the recent ACIP appointments made under U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The injunction stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) against Kennedy and the U.S, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The AAP accused Kennedy of violating procedures when he fired previous ACIP members and replaced them.
The ruling effectively paralysed ACIP and cast doubt on the legitimacy of its membership structure.
Requests for comment from ACIP went unanswered.
‘We are a long way from reckoning’
The CDC has maintained that authorized COVID-19 vaccines underwent extensive safety review and that the benefits outweigh known risks.
However, during a Capitol Hill meeting this week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) referred to reported COVID-19 vaccine injuries as the “biggest government scandal in my lifetime.”
“What about all the injection-injured?” he said. “Until this government and this administration acknowledge those injuries, acknowledge the harm caused by these injections, and I would say federal health agencies also acknowledge the harm done by childhood vaccines, we are a long way from reckoning.”
In April, Johnson released a report revealing that Biden-era health officials rejected a state-of-the-art statistical tool for detecting COVID-19 vaccine safety signals — and instead deliberately continued using a broken method because they didn’t want to “feed in to [sic] anti-vaccination rhetoric.”
During an April 29 hearing, Johnson revealed that a longtime U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical officer, Ana Szarfman, M.D., Ph.D., repeatedly warned colleagues that the agency’s approach to safety monitoring could miss serious safety signals due to a problem known as “masking.” Masking occurs when other vaccines obscure risks tied to a specific product.
Johnson said FDA officials brushed aside Szarfman’s warnings.
The CDC, HHS and Pfizer did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the contracts.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
EU court adviser delivers another ‘Pfizergate’ blow to von der Leyen
RT | June 11, 2026
The European Commission should have revealed the details of its Covid-19 vaccine contracts with drugmakers to the public, an adviser to the EU’s highest court has declared. Among the contracts was a deal with Pfizer that commission President Ursula von der Leyen negotiated via text message.
In an opinion published on Thursday, Advocate General Athanasios Rantos argued that the commission’s insistence on secrecy made it impossible to know whether its vaccine negotiators had any conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical companies that they procured the shots from.
The commission signed six advance purchase agreements with pharmaceutical companies – including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna – between 2020 and 2021. The contracts were worth a combined €71 billion ($82 billion).
When Green MEPs and more than 3,000 members of the public demanded information about the negotiation process, the commission redacted the names of all of its negotiators and many of the contract clauses. The commission’s lawyers have argued that these redactions were made to protect the negotiators from “conspiracy theorists.”
The commission lost a legal battle to keep these details secret in 2024, but appealed the decision up to the Court of Justice of the European Union. Rantos’ opinion is not legally binding, but will inform the court’s final ruling.
Last year, the court ruled against von der Leyen in the ‘Pfizergate’ case, which centered around her negotiations with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. In 2021, von der Leyen told the New York Times that she had been negotiating a €35 billion deal for 900 million Covid vaccine doses with Bourla via sms messages.
The newspaper sued for access to the messages, arguing that von der Leyen could have used sms messaging to bypass EU transparency laws. The commission claimed that the messages had been lost, but the court ruled last May that the EU’s executive body failed to provide “credible explanations enabling the public and the Court to understand why those documents cannot be found.”
Von der Leyen survived a no-confidence vote initiated by right-wing parties in the European Parliament over the scandal last July.
SCIENTISTS REVEAL mRNA SHOTS MAY TRIGGER CANCER
The HighWire | June 4, 2026
Sen. Ron Johnson convened physicians and researchers for a hearing on possible links between COVID mRNA injections, cancer, and scientific censorship. The testimony raised explosive questions about immune suppression, oncogenes, and why some of the most urgent safety concerns are still being pushed to the margins.
Trump Administration’s DOJ Filing in Supreme Court ‘Sharp Betrayal’ of Religious Freedom
By Jefferey Jaxen | May 27, 2026
In a stunning reversal the Department of Justice under President Trump has filed a brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to deny review in John Doe et al. v. Kathy Hochul, No. 24-1015. The case involves former New York healthcare workers fired for refusing COVID-19 vaccination on religious grounds under the state’s now-repealed Section 2.61 mandate, which allowed medical exemptions but barred religious ones.
The move is in stark contrast to the COVID-era legal momentum across the board seeing courts rule in favor of employees fired for religious vaccine refusals.
The Second Circuit upheld the employers’ refusal to accommodate, citing “undue hardship.”
The DOJ’s Call for the Views of the Solicitor General (CVSG) brief argues the petition is a poor vehicle for review—no circuit split, a repealed law, and petitioners who sought only a full exemption rather than alternatives like reassignment—while defending the policy’s consistency with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
This position, however, draws sharp criticism for weakening core protections against religious discrimination. Aaron Siri, a leading litigator who has represented numerous affected healthcare workers, called out the filing in an X post stating:
The brief’s analysis hinges on semantics and procedural technicalities. It acknowledges that petitioners claimed New York’s mandate conflicted with Title VII by foreclosing reasonable religious accommodations. Yet it frames their requests as demands for an “exemption” prohibited by state law, rather than the “accommodation” federal law requires.
Siri dismantled this in a follow-up post:
“Instead of defending these wrongfully terminated workers, the DOJ nonsensically and shamefully plays word games to characterize their requests as seeking an ‘exemption’ (which New York law prohibited) instead of an ‘accommodation’ (an option federal law requires). It then relies on this semantic nonsense to argue that the Supreme Court should not review the Second Circuit’s holding that a policy providing for medical but not religious exemptions is legal.”
Siri, who is perhaps the most experienced lawyer defending Americans who experienced COVID-era oversteps of basic liberties and freedoms, described the practical outcome bluntly: the mandate “permitted only a medical exemption and did not include a religious exemption.”
Healthcare workers with sincere religious objections were fired en masse. He continued,
“Having dealt with scores of religious employees in New York that lost their jobs under this policy, the Trump administration’s position is a sharp betrayal. The DOJ should have simply argued the obvious – that Section 2.61 foreclosed any religious exemption and hence should not stand under federal law. Period. That would have taken one or two pages. Instead, it spends over 20 pages creating a word salad of nonsense to justify New York’s and the DOJ’s unjustifiable position.”
This approach is dangerous because it normalizes differential treatment: medical exemptions are permissible, but religious ones trigger “undue hardship” claims tied to state penalties. Under Title VII, as clarified in Groff v. DeJoy (2023), employers must accommodate religious practice unless it imposes substantial increased costs. Yet the DOJ’s brief effectively blesses a regime where religious belief is disfavored, allowing employers to hide behind preempted state rules.
If a law bars religious accommodations outright, Title VII should preempt it—yet here the filing accepts a policy that functionally did exactly that while claiming otherwise.
The stakes extend far beyond healthcare. A Supreme Court denial, influenced by this brief, could embolden employers nationwide to impose vaccine or other medical mandates while dismissing religious objections as unreasonable.
It undermines the free exercise principles reinforced in cases like Fulton v. City of Philadelphia and signals that post-COVID religious liberty battles remain unwinnable in court. Workers facing future mandates—for flu shots, boosters, or novel therapies—would find their faith subordinated to bureaucratic convenience.
Siri’s critique highlights a missed opportunity for the administration that campaigned on restoring freedoms eroded during the pandemic. By playing procedural games instead of forcefully defending Title VII’s mandate to accommodate sincere religious practice, the DOJ risks setting precedent that treats faith as second-class. As Siri warned, this is no minor technical brief; it is a “sharp betrayal” that could erode religious freedom for millions. The Supreme Court must recognize the broader threat and take the case to reaffirm that no employer or state can lawfully force a choice between livelihood and conscience.
CHD Scientist: CDC, FDA COVID Vaccine Safety Monitoring ‘Insulting, and Many People Are Injured’
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 29, 2026
Federal health officials under the Biden administration failed abysmally to look for COVID-19 vaccine safety signals, according to congressional testimony delivered today by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski.
The government’s vaccine safety monitoring “over the past several years has been insulting, and many people are injured,” Jablonowski wrote in his written testimony.
History repeats itself if we don’t learn our lessons, Jablonowski warned.
“The COVID-19 pandemic created over 100 billionaires in the United States and over 1,000 billionaires around the world,” Jablonowski wrote. “Anything that profitable is going to repeat.”
Jablonowski, who holds a doctorate in biomedical and health informatics from the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, spoke as a witness at the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing, “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.”
Hours before the hearing, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), subcommittee chair, released a report detailing how Biden-era federal health officials refused to use a state-of-the-art statistical tool for detecting COVID-19 vaccination signals in VAERS — even though they knew the tool they were using was too broken to pick up on safety signals, including sudden cardiac death.
Johnson’s report, which cited roughly 600 pages of emails, revealed that in 2021, officials with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told an FDA researcher to “cease and desist” using the state-of-the-art tool to analyze COVID-19 vaccine injury reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Johnson obtained the emails after he subpoenaed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in January 2025 for COVID-19 vaccine safety records and pandemic-related communications.
FDA was ‘blind’ to COVID vaccine injury reports in VAERS
In his testimony, Jablonowski detailed how each of the federal government’s three vaccine safety monitoring systems — VAERS, V-safe and Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) — had “pitfalls” and “failed” to adequately assess safety issues with the COVID-19 vaccine and other vaccines.
The failures of vaccine safety monitoring “can be, and were, catastrophic,” he said.
For instance, the FDA insisted on monitoring COVID-19 vaccine reports using a method that it knew didn’t work. The FDA knew the method was likely to give inaccurate results if similar vaccines — such as the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines — were included in the dataset. This is called masking.
“The FDA was completely blind to COVID-19 vaccine adverse events,” Jablonowski wrote. He said the FDA could have used an improved statistical method accounting for masking.
A 2022 peer-reviewed paper in Drug Safety showed that the improved method detected roughly 25 statistically significant COVID-19 vaccine safety signals — including sudden cardiac death, Bell’s palsy and pulmonary infarction — that the FDA’s older method missed.
In an earlier interview with The Defender, Jablonowski explained why it was so harmful for the FDA to continue using the older method:
“Imagine a night watchman has to find something on the ground. But instead of holding a flashlight, he is wearing sunglasses. In the morning, he says he didn’t find anything. That’s true, but it’s because he was using a tool that impeded his ability to see.”
As of March 27, 1,675,590 adverse events were reported to VAERS following COVID-19 vaccination, according to OpenVAERS. That number includes over 39,077 reports of death, 29,200 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis, and 18,009 reports of Bell’s palsy.
A national survey conducted in November 2025 found that roughly 1 in 10 U.S. adults who received the COVID-19 vaccine experienced “major” side effects.
V-safe was designed to collect ‘inconsequential’ data
Jablonowski told lawmakers that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring tool, V-safe, was designed to collect only “inconsequential” information that no one really cares about.
The V-safe app invited COVID-19 vaccine recipients to check off boxes to indicate what, if any, side effects they experienced after getting the shot.
However, the box options were for common short-term vaccine side effects that most people would consider “inconsequential,” such as chills, headache, joint pain, muscle or body aches, fatigue or tiredness, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain or rash.
If a person experienced a more serious problem, they had to manually type it into the “other” text field, Jablonowski noted. He said:
“It is with horror that we find 366 individuals typed ‘myocarditis’ in the ‘other’ free-text field, a condition requiring a medical diagnosis. The horror is amplified by the nearly 50,000 registrants who typed ‘chest pain’ into the ‘other’ free-text field.”
Vaccine Safety Datalink is off-limits to independent researchers
Jablonowski also detailed how VSD, a collaborative database of patient information from 13 integrated healthcare organizations covering over 15.5 million people, also fails the public.
VSD data can ostensibly be used to detect vaccine safety issues in near-real time, Jablonowski said.
The problem is that only a small handful of scientists are ever allowed to look at the data. Jablonowski said:
“This many million-dollar taxpayer funded resource is not available to any scientist outside of the 13 Managed Care Organizations (MCO) or the federal government without independent IRB [independent review board] applications approved by all 13 MCOs, an estimated $250,000 per project.”
In other words, independent researchers are realistically barred from analyzing the data. “Transparency is simply unattainable,” Jablonowski said.
Watch Jablonowski’s opening statement here.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
COVID Conniving Receives First Federal Indictment
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | May 1, 2026
David Morens, a former top advisor to COVID Czar Tony Fauci was indicted this week and “charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting,” according to the Justice Department press release.
Morens allegedly helped top federal health officials cover up the potential role of federal grants in spurring the COVID pandemic. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires federal agencies to preserve and disclose federal records with some narrow exceptions. In early 2021, Morens emailed a colleague, “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe.”
Morens added, “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.” In a previous email, he assured his collaborators, “I have spoken to our FOIA folks” and “I should be safe from future FOIAs. Don’t ask how…”
Fauci doesn’t need to worry about getting indicted since President Joe Biden, on his last morning in office, pardoned any crimes that Fauci might have committed in the previous decade. Fauci justified COVID mandates because average citizens “don’t have the ability” to determine what is best for them. Congressional investigations revealed that Fauci was at the center of string-pulling to shirk responsibility on COVID.
Top federal officials scrambled to erase the federal role in bankrolling reckless gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, the most likely source of the COVID virus that killed more than seven million people around the world. That type of research seeks to genetically alter organisms to enable the spread of viruses into new species. As MIT professor Kevin Esvelt asked in 2021, “Why is anyone trying to teach the world how to make viruses that could kill millions of people?” The risks were compounded because the Wuhan Institute had a very poor safety rating. Two years earlier, the State Department confidentially “warned other federal agencies about safety issues at Wuhan labs studying bat COVID,” but the public disclosure of that alert was delayed until 2022—long after President Biden illegally mandated COVID vaccines for a hundred million American adults.
If COVID-19 had been initially recognized as the result of one of the biggest government boondoggles in history, it would have been far more difficult for American politicians and government scientists to pirouette as saviors as they seized sway over daily life. Instead, politicians, bureaucrats, and the media stampeded most of the American public with the notion that total submission to boneheaded decrees was their only hope to survive.
Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a statement on the indictment of Morens:
“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most—during the height of a global pandemic.”
Luckily, there haven’t been any “profound abuses of trust” since Trump took office again—at least according to his Justice Department. Blanche added, “Government officials have a solemn duty to provide honest, well-grounded facts and advice in service of the public interest — not to advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”
Be still my beating heart. Is this a subtle signal that the Trump team will disclose the other three million documents on the Epstein scandal?
FBI chief Kash Patel announced at the indictment press conference, “Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI.”
Has the FBI turned over a new leaf or what? The FBI is one of the most notorious FOIA violators in Washington. When FOIA was first passed in 1966, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agency to totally refuse compliance with the law. A federal judge slammed the FBI in 2017 for claiming it needed seventeen years to fulfill a FOIA request on surveillance of antiwar activists in the 1960s. The FBI deleted the names of Clark Kent and Lois Lane from a letter that made reference to the famous Superman characters—because disclosing them in a FOIA response would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Louis Freeh, director of the FBI from 1993-2001, repeatedly denounced my articles on Ruby Ridge; but when I filed a FOIA, the FBI claimed to have no records of those published letters to the editor. They sent their response to “Mr. Brovard” so maybe that helped them not find anything.
FBI FOIA trampling is par for the Bureau covering up its destruction of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. As federal judge Terry Doughty declared in a 2023 decision, “The FBI [acted] as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
Morens may be the first federal official to ever be charged with a crime for actions to evade FOIA requests. Certainly, in more than fifty years, no federal FOIA official has ever been jailed for violating the law by refusing to disclose information. I’ve received so many BS responses from FOIA officers over the decades that I have lost count. When I filed a FOIA with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to see what information they had on me in their files, they replied in 2010, “We have no records on Kevin Bovard.” But I wasn’t asking about my cousin.
In 2015, I heard scuttlebutt that the Justice Department pressured USA Today to cease publishing my articles bashing Attorney General Eric Holder. I filed a FOIA to get the department’s official emails to my editors, but DOJ FOIA claimed it had nothing. I only got the damning emails after I filed a follow-up FOIA request and made a lucky guess on the exact day, hour and minute the emails were sent.
For too long, deceiving the American people has been treated like a victimless crime in Washington. If the Morens indictment can set a precedent leading to more such criminal investigations of bureaucratic cover-ups, that will be a booster shot for American democracy.
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From the Archives
Babi Yar: The Einsatzgruppen Killings
By John Wear | Inconvenient History | May 19, 2018
One of the worst atrocities attributed to the Einsatzgruppen was the Babi Yar massacre, which allegedly occurred in a large ravine outside Kiev in the Ukraine. The allegation is that Einsatzgruppe C rounded up 33,771 Jews in Kiev and shot all of them over the period September 29-30, 1941.[1] German Reserve Police Battalion 45 and Police Battalion 303 are said to have assisted in the operation.[2] This article will examine the veracity of these allegations. … continue
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