Los Angeles Schools Drop COVID Vaccine Mandate — What’s Next for Fired Employees Who Sued the District?
In a 6-1 vote late Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education rescinded the district’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement for all district employees. But critics worry the move is an attempt to thwart a lawsuit that seeks justice for the more than 1,000 employees affected by the mandate.
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In a 6-1 vote late Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board of Education rescinded the district’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement for all district employees.
Mary Holland, J.D., president of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), commented:
“People can get discouraged with lawsuits — they take a lot of time and money — but this is an example of the payoff — the authoritarian actor LAUSD backed down. No one should think for a minute that without HFDF [Health Freedom Defense Fund] this would have happened. It would not have. Pushing back against unconstitutional, dictatorial acts is incredibly important.
“It is a huge credit to the health freedom movement as a whole that there has not been a single COVID vaccine mandate imposed in a public school district in the country that has stuck. This feat would not have been possible without grassroots activism and lawsuits.”
Leslie Manookian, president and founder of HFDF, agreed the vote was “another huge victory” for the health freedom movement.
Still, she said, the district’s choice to rescind the order now — more than two years after it was announced and after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission — is a “cynical attempt to evade justice as the judges signaled they believed LAUSD’s vaccine mandate was irrational.”
HFDF provides legal representation for LAUSD employees negatively affected by the vaccine mandate. On Nov. 2, 2021, HFDF and LAUSD employees with California Educators for Medical Freedom sued top officials of the LAUSD, including board members, alleging the district’s vaccine mandate violated employees’ 14th Amendment “rights of personal autonomy, self-determination, bodily integrity, and the right to reject medical treatment.”
After a U.S. district judge on Sept 2., 2022, dismissed the case, the plaintiffs appealed.
HFDF attorneys on Sept. 14 presented oral arguments before a three-judge panel in the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, arguing the case should be allowed to proceed. The panel’s decision is still pending.
According to an HFDF statement relating to the hearing, one of the three judges was “shocked” and “floored” by LAUSD’s ongoing COVID-19 vaccine employee policy, and the district’s “irrational” justification for the policy.
Manookian told The Defender it “really speaks volumes” that the LAUSD has maintained the policy “in the face of all the media coverage of not only vaccine failure but vaccine injury subsequent to the COVID-19 shots.”
“This is about authoritarianism, not about science or public policy,” she said.
Manookian said she wasn’t surprised by the board’s move because after the court adjourned the Sept. 14 hearing, LAUSD’s attorney, Connie Michaels, turned and asked the HFDF attorneys, “What are you going to do when they rescind the order?”
According to HFDF, Michaels “knew that the hearing had not gone well for LAUSD and, in the heat of the moment, she tipped her hand.”
Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD’s general counsel, said the timing of LAUSD’s vote “certainly raises eyebrows as to the district’s motivation in lifting the mandate.”
Rosenberg told The Defender:
“While we are pleased that LAUSD finally did away with this unjust mandate that should never have been put in place to begin with, we also hope that the court sees through this transparent attempt by LAUSD to render the lawsuit moot and allows the case to continue.”
The second-largest public school district in the U.S., the LAUSD enrolls nearly 575,000 students in kindergarten through grade 12 and has roughly 38,300 employees. The district covers 710 square miles and includes Los Angeles and sections of 25 smaller municipalities and unincorporated sections of Los Angeles County.
The district announced on Aug. 13, 2021, that all LAUSD employees had to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Oct. 15, 2021. Since then, LAUSD has fired about 500 employees and forced another 500 into retirement or unpaid leave for noncompliance with the mandate, Manookian said.
Manookian, who produced “The Greater Good,” an award-winning documentary about vaccine injuries, said LAUSD’s policy was “anti-science.”
“It makes no sense,” she said. “[The fact that] they’ve been maintaining this policy in the face of all the media coverage of not only vaccine failure but vaccine injury subsequent to the COVID-19 shots really speaks volumes about what this is about.”
She added, “It’s about authoritarianism, not about science or public policy.”
Laura Sextro, CEO and COO of The Unity Project, a nonprofit focused on medical freedom and parental rights with 200 strategic partners including CHD, agreed.
Sextro told The Defender that California, along with New York, has been at the “tip of the spear in terms of bad policy and bad legislation” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She said she watched footage from the Sept. 14 hearing in which one of the judges said he was “honestly shocked” by the argument made by LAUSD’s lawyer on why staff must be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Sextro said, “The LAUSD attorney cited the fact that they had the safety of their employees in mind. I just find that to be a ridiculous statement considering that it does not protect against the acquisition or transmission of the virus.”
“In addition to that, we’re seeing a lot of data now — really, really heavy data coming out — that people who have multiple times been vaccinated with the COVID vaccine are actually experiencing deeper illness,” Sextro said. “In fact, a majority of the deaths from COVID are actually … among people we would consider fully vaccinated individuals.”
Michael Kane, founder of the New York-based Teachers For Choice, said, “It’s shocking that it took this long for L.A. to drop this mandate.”
Kane was a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against New York City after being denied a religious exemption request for the COVID-19 vaccine. He was fired by the New York City Schools.
“Last February, New York City dropped its mandate on the evening of our appeal in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City,” Kane said.
After New York lifted the mandate, Kane said, the city tried to argue the lawsuit was moot because there was no more mandate.
“That is kind of the trend we’re seeing,” he said, adding that the New York City lawsuit was not declared moot and continues to move forward.
A similar situation played out this month when New York State ended its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, while a lawsuit was still working its way through the courts.
‘This whole ordeal has taken a tremendous toll on my health’
The California lawsuit against LAUSD’s employee COVID-19 vaccine mandate is about much more than just rescinding the order, according to Manookian, who said she hopes the court will see that.
“There are still somewhere around a thousand people who have lost their jobs, their benefits and everything,” she said. “You can’t just argue that it’s moot and dismiss those people as though they’re disposable.”
LAUSD social studies teacher Soni Lloyd told The Defender the mandate “upended” his career and his place in his community.
Lloyd, co-founder of California Educators for Medical Freedom, said:
“In October 2021, after 19 years in the classroom as a social studies teacher, I was forced off campus and placed into a tenuous virtual teacher position which ended in June of 2022.
“Without a position, I was placed on unpaid status only to be called back at the beginning of the 2022 school year to a different online position.”
The rescission of the mandate will secure his employment, he said, but not at the high school — just three blocks from his home — where he spent 15 years teaching.
“This whole ordeal has taken a tremendous toll on my health. I am lucky compared to hundreds of my peers who haven’t had a paycheck in over a year,” he added.
Teachers and staff like Lloyd who “held the line” were critical in the Los Angeles and New York City efforts to rescind unjust vaccination policies, Kane said, adding:
“Nothing happens without us being brave enough to lose our jobs, lose our pension. Some people have lost their homes. Some people have left their cities, their states, their country — I know people who have left America because of this.”
Kane said, “It all starts there — but we would really have nothing to stand on without principled organizations like Health Freedom Defense Fund and Children’s Health Defense.”
“We’re going up against such a big machine. We need our own machine to help power it and thank God for these nonprofits that provided legal representation for us,” he said.
‘COVID is not smallpox’
Even now that the mandate has been repealed, Manookian said the lawsuit against the LAUSD seeks to make important legal points. First, the case seeks to establish that natural immunity exists and, with regard to COVID-19, is superior to vaccines.
Second, the case demands that the jurisprudence, or case law, on this topic be updated. The LAUSD used a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, in its defense.
“Our case is saying that not only did Jacobson not apply here, but Jacobson is outdated and Jacobson must be updated to reflect more recent jurisprudence, which says that you and you alone get to decide what goes into your body,” Manookian said.
She added:
“Jacobson versus Massachusetts said that the state in extreme circumstances could mandate a shot that was believed to be safe and efficacious in an extreme emergency.
“Well, COVID is not smallpox — which is what Jacobson was about. Smallpox has a 30 to 40% death rate …
“Secondly, we know, and we knew before LAUSD issued its mandate, that natural immunity was robust and is good if not better than the shots. So again, it [Jacobson] doesn’t apply.
“Thirdly, we knew already that the shots do not stop transmission or infection. So that’s not efficacious. Natural immunity is superior. So again, Jacobson does not apply.”
Moreover, the Jacobson case “never said that the state could condition employment on a shot or that the state could plunge a needle into your arm.” Rather, the Supreme Court ruled in Jacobson that a person could pay a fine if they refused a smallpox vaccine, she said.
The lawsuit against the LAUSD has national ramifications, Manookian said, “because at issue here is whether or not Jacobson should still control our conduct and our policies.”
Manookian called it “outrageous” that such a case from 1905 would be deemed appropriate jurisprudence regarding COVID-19 vaccination policy.
She pointed out that the early 1900s was an era in which women couldn’t vote, African Americans were subject to Jim Crow and when the Supreme Court “had the audacity to rule that a young woman was too unintelligent to bear children and therefore the state could snip her fallopian tubes.”
“I don’t want to go back to 1905 and I don’t know any Americans who do,” Manookian added.
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