American Thought Leaders - How the Pharmaceutical Industry Captured Federal Health Agencies: Leslie Manookian

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

“When 2020 unfolded, I could see where this was headed. I actually said to my husband in early January, ‘Okay, we're here. They’re finally going to really go for it. They're going to use this as an opportunity to coerce and force vaccinations.’”Over two decades ago, Leslie Manookian was in London working in finance, when she unintentionally caught a glimpse of the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry.“He sat down and, sitting across the table from me, he says ‘Listen, in very, very rare instances, people have died from the drug.’ And he said, ‘The bad news is, the FDA is going to make us put a black-box warning on our packaging. The good news is: We still think we can do $7 billion in peak sales,’” says Ms. Manookian. “And I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh. This is the reality of what I’m doing, and I'm playing for the wrong team.’”Today, she is founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund. She has filed numerous lawsuits against the government to ensure bodily autonomy for all Americans, including the landmark 2022 case in which a federal judge struck down a nationwide mask mandate for travel.“The administrative state is all of these federal agencies that are headed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. And the whole administrative state sits underneath the executive branch of government. It was never envisioned by our founders,” says Ms. Manookian.”

When 2020 unfolded, I actually said to my husband in early January, we're here. They're going to use this as an opportunity to coerce and force vaccinations. Over two decades ago, Leslie Mnookin was in London working in finance when she unintentionally caught a glimpse of the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry. He sat down and he says, people have died from the drug. The bad news is the FDA is going to make us put a black box warning on our packaging. The good news is we still think we can do $7 billion in peak sales. And I just thought, oh my gosh, I'm playing for the wrong team. Today, she is the founder and

president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund. She's filed numerous lawsuits against the government to ensure bodily autonomy for all Americans, including the landmark 2022 case in which a federal judge struck down a nationwide mask mandate for travel. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Leslie Mnookian, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. So great to be here with you, Jan. You know, I've been thinking about you and your work ever since your organization helped basically end this first federal mandate. I heard from a lot of people being very inspired. There were images of airplanes, masks being tossed, if I remember correctly. I want to touch on that a little bit in your work since then. But before we go there, you have an interesting path to having gotten into health

freedom defense. Tell me about that. So I was just your average person working on Wall Street. I had actually gotten transferred to London. I'm working in finance there. And my job was at a company called Alliance Capital. It was one of my clients when I was at Goldman Sachs. And my job was to essentially interview the CEOs of multinational corporations to decide which European companies should be in our portfolios. I ran Alliance's European Growth Portfolio Management and Research Businesses. And so I got to meet all of these incredible people in my role there. And the CEO of one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world came into our offices. It's a name brand company. They were coming in to reassure investors. We owned a big chunk of their stock,

probably a billion dollars or something like that, because their new blockbuster drug, which was in phase three trials, was kind of having some stumbles. In fact, rumors were leaking out that some people were dying on the trial. So he came in. It was the CEO, the CFO, the head of R&D, and the head of investor relations. And he sat down, sitting across the table from me and he says, listen, in very, very rare instances, people have died from the drug. And he said, the bad news is the FDA is going to make us put a black box warning on our packaging. The good news is we still think we can do $7 billion in peak sales. I mean, I felt like somebody kicked me in the stomach. I couldn't believe it. I thought,

are you being serious? I just sat there stunned at his cavalier attitude about the trade-off between his profits and human life. And I couldn't believe it. And after that meeting ended, I went to my office and paced back and forth and walked down to the hallway to our pharmaceutical analyst's office, flung the door open and I was like, this is wrong. And she sort of shrugged her shoulders and looked at me like, yeah, I know lady, what do you want me to do about it? And I just thought, oh my gosh, this is the reality of what I'm doing and I'm playing for the wrong team. I think I had a front row seat that most people don't ever get, and I just realized that there's much more going on in the world of business

than most people realize, and that was one of the impetuses behind me actually leaving and dedicating my life to trying to do good on the planet and to playing for, I think, on the team of the people rather than the corporate captains. So I planned my exit. And what year was that? I don't remember the exact year. I should look it up because I could pinpoint it with the product. But it was around 2000, 2001 at the latest.

Since, of course, all of this with the mandate decision that I referenced earlier, you actually introduced me to your film, which I think came out in 2011, The Greater Good, which was an absolutely wonderful film I had not been aware of. I thought it was a very reasonable treatment of a very, very difficult issue. I watched it at the time when we were making The Unseen Crisis, which is the documentary about, you know, vaccine injured by these genetic vaccines not being treated well by the system. And indeed, your film was a lot about previous recipients of vaccines who had been injured similarly, not being treated well by the system. It was just, it was interesting.

It was almost like ours was kind of a part two or something like that of your film. I'll recommend it to anyone. So tell me about that film. And you have some really interesting characters in that film as well. So I'm planning to be retiring, essentially. And I am sick. I'm struggling with my health. I don't know what's going on. And I keep going to

my very mainstream doctor in London and he says, you know, listen, I can't help you. Conventional medicine can't help you. I think you should go and see a homeopath or an acupuncturist. And I was like, okay, well, that's kind of strange, but all right. And so I actually went and saw a homeopath because homeopathy is very popular in London. In fact, it's very popular in Europe and around the world. It's the fastest growing system of medicine on the planet today. And I waited to get in to see this woman for three months and then I saw this homeopath and it resonated very deeply with me.

It just made sense and so much so that I actually enrolled in homeopathy college. I didn't tell anybody I was doing that. I just did it. And, you know, I'm still a director running this business and this is going on. And I go to orientation and the very first day the person leading orientation said, you know, over the next three years we're going to touch on many, many topics. We're going to talk about maintaining causes, the mind-body connection, nutrition. We're going to talk about vaccine damage. And I raised my hand and said, what are you talking about? Vaccines

are the greatest invention of mankind. And he said, well, that's one perspective, and we're going to learn another. After the class, he handed me a book and said, you've got to read this book. And I went home and I read that book and being the kind of analyst nerd that I am, I looked to the back of the book. There were over 960 footnotes documenting all these things in that book. Rheumatoid arthritis after vaccines, seizures after vaccines, learning disabilities after vaccines, death after vaccines. And I thought if this is true then somebody needs to do something about it and I literally felt called in that moment that I was going to make a movie on it and that was literally the impetus behind making The

Greater Good. I didn't believe everything that was in the book. I wanted to go and find out for myself and so I started interviewing anybody and everybody I could. I interviewed Dr. Paul Offit. He's still at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, but he was at the time chief of infectious diseases, I believe. I interviewed Dr. Stanley Plotkin, who was a vaccine developer. He was at the Wistar Institute. He was a developer of vaccines. Paul Offit's a developer of vaccines as well. His vaccine is on the market, intestinal issues in children. Institute. He was a developer of vaccines. Paul Offit's a developer of vaccines as well. His vaccine is on the market, intestinal issues in children. We interviewed Neil Halsey of Johns Hopkins. And I can't remember if he's connected to NIH. We interviewed Walter Orenstein,

who was formerly head of the immunization program at CDC, and Dr. Melinda Wharton, who was the deputy director of the immunization program when we were there. We interviewed all these people, and then we interviewed pediatricians, doctors, scientists, and activists like Barbara Lowe Fisher, who founded the National Vaccine Information Center, to get this whole spectrum of information to present to viewers. And we wove with all of that testimony the stories of families whose children had been affected by vaccinations. But we basically offered up all the information so that everybody could make their own decisions.

We showed that there's a national childhood vaccine injury act that actually recognizes that vaccines injure and kill some children and set up a program to try and help resolve this issue or adjudicate it and how it's backfired, essentially. We touched on the fact that the vaccine makers have no liability for their products. It's not just the COVID shot. This started in 1986. So the whole film unpacks the issues that surround the whole vaccine conversation and debate, which actually predated the COVID vaccine conversation by 40 years. What you saw happen with COVID was actually not that surprising to you based on the laws and policies which has been implemented over the last however many years? So once you start really digging into any subject, I think it then gives you a model to view the rest of the world by. And that's very much the case with vaccinations. And so 20 plus years ago, I started really digging deep into them. And what I started to find out was well actually our institutions have been corrupted.

The medical journals have been corrupted. Our journalism has been corrupted, right? Media outlets have been corrupted. All these things. How did that happen? Well, you go back to 1980 and you had passage of the Bayh-Dole Act. The Bayh-Dole Act was the act of Congress that allowed scientists working in NIH on the backs of taxpayers' dollars, taxes, to retain the

patents to the products that they developed. So it actually pays them money to keep them in government. But the problem is it incentivizes them to then push products that they might profit from, like vaccines. And this is why Fauci and his team at NIAID own half the Moderna patent, because of that law in 1980. So this actually really facilitated the corruption, essentially, of our federal health agencies, NIH in particular, but all of them. And then in 1992, you had the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which was passed. And that act allowed the pharmaceutical industry to capture FDA. Because what happens is originally this legislation was to enable the pharmaceutical industry to say, well, we have this special drug.

There's no way to treat this, whatever the need might be, and this special drug will treat it. So we want to fast track this product, get it to market for people who are in dire straits and need this product right away. So initially, it sounded like a really good idea. I think the product started out at about $100 million, or the program. It's now, last year, $2.655 billion. That equates to 65% of the drug approvers' salaries at FDA and about 45%, 50% of FDA's budget. So the pharmaceutical industry is paying user fees directly to the FDA, essentially capturing the agency that's supposed to regulate it.

Okay, so these two pieces of legislation really changed the shape of our federal health agencies. Then what happened in, you know, we had 9-11. Two weeks later, Model State Emergency Health Powers Act legislation was introduced, and this legislation accorded extraordinary powers to state governors and state health departments in the event of a public health emergency. That has been passed in whole or in part by about 43 states. If I can just jump in, I don't know if you're still going to mention it, but in 1986, the sort of the big one, right, that I keep hearing about was where essentially vaccine makers were indemnified from liability.

Yeah, I didn't mention that. What happened was in the late 1970s and early 80s, a lot of children were catastrophically injured or killed by their DPT shots, diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. It was a whole cell pertussis shot, meaning it was not attenuated or weakened like the shot is that's on the market today, which still has issues, but it's not as dangerous as the original was, but it also doesn't work. But anyway, as a result of that, juries awarded millions and millions of dollars to families whose children had been injured or killed by the shot. And the pharmaceutical industry went to Congress and said,

we're not going to make vaccines anymore unless you protect us. And so Congress obliged, and they passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which indemnifies the pharmaceutical industry, the vaccine makers, from financial and legal liability almost completely. It's a little bit more complex, but that's basically it. And so now, if your child is injured by a vaccine, you have to go to vaccine court. There's a special court that's funded by the federal government and by a 75 cent tax on every vaccine administered in the United States, manned by these judges called special masters.

There's no due process. There's no discovery. There's nothing independent. It's like a rigged court, essentially. And I believe it's either three-fourths or four-fifths of all cases are dismissed. So a very, very small minority actually ever make it through. It was supposed to be no fault. It was supposed to be easy for these grieving families. And instead, it's morphed into this just horrendous process that can take 10 years.

And these people are not treated as though they have no fault. They're treated just horrifically by the federal government. So it's one of these externalities, right? They've taken this damage that's happening, and they've put it into this federal bureaucracy that's not actually serving the people at all. I know people whose children have died from shots. I know people whose children have seizures and who've been paralyzed. I have friends whose children are still in diapers in their 20s who will never speak because of the catastrophic injuries from vaccinations. And this program essentially allows

the pharmaceutical industry to continue producing vaccines without any liability. So they have no incentive whatsoever to make a safer product. That's insane. There's a few more, I think, key pieces of legislation I've heard about. Then in 0 2005, you have the PrEP Act. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act provided immunity to the vaccine makers of childhood vaccinations. But now you've got all this infrastructure in place for an emergency, for a health emergency. And the PrEP Act in 2005 provided immunity to any company that makes what's called a medical countermeasure in the event of a public health emergency. So anybody who made a mask, a test or a vaccine under the COVID emergency declaration was

shielded from any kind of liability for their products. And then, of course, the government is actually paying for the shots using our tax dollars and printing money to do it. It's a license for these people to do whatever they want with no liability. And then in 2012, they rescinded the Smith-Munt Act, this act that prohibited the CIA, the federal government, from propagandizing American citizens. So people have probably heard of Radio Free America and other programs like this.

It's been legal for decades for the CIA and the federal government to disseminate propaganda to foreign citizens in order to influence their social fabric and their cultures, right, in order to support democracy, to support uprisings against dictators and things like this. But what happened in 2012 was that they rescinded the Smith-Mundt Act. So it legalized our CIA disseminating knowingly false information to the U.S. public.

And the critics were clearly very concerned when this happened, and what ended up happening as a result of that was the people who passed it said, don't worry, don't worry, we're not setting up a program, and we don't have any funding for it. In 2013, they set up the program, and in 2016, they funded the program. And so what is the upshot of this yawn? Essentially, anything that you see in the news could be propaganda, and it could be coming straight from the government, and that's legal. At what moment did you kind of, because the Health Freedom Defense Fund is a relatively

new thing, right? Basically, what happens is, first of all, in 2011, so all this stuff is going on in the background. I'm doing all this research, and I'm starting to realize that things aren't quite right here. And so this is while I'm making the movie. I'm thinking about, well, why would they pass this Model State Emergency Health Powers Act legislation? Who needs this? And then you have the swine flu. Swine flu comes out in 2009, and the federal government's declaring an emergency, and yet the data don't support that. Cheryl Ackeson did some amazing investigative journalism uncovering this, which you can find on our website.

So I'm piecing all this together. Some of this makes it into the movie. The movie comes out in 2011, but I keep doing my research. In 2009, California started attacking parental rights and exemptions to vaccinations. They ultimately took away the philosophical. They never had a religious specific exemption, but they had a philosophical one that covered religious. They took that away.

They allowed children 12 years old to submit to vaccination without parental knowledge or consent. But the parents were barred for knowing about this. In 2015 or 2016, what year was it? I forget, it was somewhere around there. In New York, you had a legislator introduce quarantine laws that would allow the state of New York to quarantine a person indefinitely for unspecified diseases and take them someplace without anybody's knowledge or any power to get

out of it. There was no proof that they were sick, that they were a threat to anybody or anything like this. Do you understand what I'm saying? There's all this stuff going on where our individual rights and parental rights are being eroded. And so as a keen observer and researcher of the whole vaccine paradigm, when 2020 unfolded, I could see where this was headed. I actually said to my husband in early January, okay, we're here. They're finally going to really go for it. They're going to use this as an opportunity to coerce and force vaccinations. And he thought, oh, you know, don't be silly. It's never going to get to that. And I was like, no, it's here. This is what I've been saying for now 20 years.

It's here. And so by the spring of 2020, I was contemplating what I was going to do about what I saw was happening. And I tried, you know, bugging anybody who would listen to me. Most people weren't interested in listening, but I just decided I was going to start a nonprofit. I actually was prodded by someone who had supported the movie and said, you know, you should start a nonprofit. And so I did. I founded Health Freedom Defense Fund. And we filed our first lawsuit in March of 2021, which was challenging the Los Angeles Unified School District's emergency use authorization mandate. So they've mandated the emergency use authorized shot, which is actually prohibited by federal law. But they did it anyway. They didn't seem to care. Anyway, the point is

that having all this knowledge, 20 years, it just really opened my eyes. You know, the veil was ripped from my eyes. And I could see that there was, you know, there were certainly forces with an agenda that were eroding the integrity of our institutions and causing major problems for the average American. And the other thing that it gave me, Jan, was this awareness that the CDC didn't have the power that it was claiming. So when CDC issued its federal travel mask mandate, I said to our attorneys, this is not right. CDC can't do this. CDC is mostly an advisory agency. CDC can create, for instance, a recommended vaccination schedule for children, but it

cannot enforce it. It cannot implement it because health laws are state laws. Health laws are part of what are called the police powers, and the police powers are reserved to the states. And this is why every individual state has different laws surrounding health issues and, in particular, vaccinations. So when they mandated that, I was just like, we need to look into this. And our attorneys said, you know, you're right. And so we filed suit in July of 2021 to challenge the federal travel mask mandate. But we didn't go for an injunction. We didn't try and stop it right

away. We just said, let's just work its way through the courts and see what happens. And I think it was about nine months, April 18th of 2022, the district, the federal judge in district court in Tampa, Florida issued her ruling vacating the mask mandate to nationwide celebrations and videos and photos of people literally jubilant that the face rags were no longer mandated to go on a plane or a train or a bus or anything like that. Number one, it was a blow to this behemoth that plagues society, in my view, and that is the administrative state.

The administrative state is all of these federal agencies that are headed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, and the whole administrative state sits underneath the executive branch of government. It was never envisioned by our founders. So that was one thing. It really struck a blow because CDC was, let's just say, playing outside its sandbox in a big way. But I think it did something much, much more fundamentally on.

And that was that it inspired people. It gave Americans hope that they were not helpless. I just can't tell you how many people called us and emailed us and reached out. I just think that it was one of those moments that actually provided a tremendous amount of inspiration to people who felt like there was no one listening and no one fighting for them. And that was probably the biggest, biggest success of it. Why don't you tell me just what you're working on these days? So Health Freedom and Defense Fund has a mission ultimately to enshrine in the public confidence, in the public consciousness, sorry, the idea that each and every one of us owns our bodies,

and that the idea that we need to ask government for an exemption is upside down. We shouldn't have to ask anybody for an exemption because we and we alone get to make choices about our bodies. So that's our long-term mission. Okay. And in order to achieve that, we try and educate people about their rights. We help teach them how to advocate. We provide all sorts of resources on our website which is healthfreedomdefense.org. You can click on there's a tab called resources to help people fight for their rights and then we litigate when necessary and so even though we've only been around for a few years we have filed over a dozen lawsuits and we have better than a 500 batting average which

is pretty fantastic. We've sued the federal government three times, the Los Angeles Unified School District twice. We're in two cases right now against Nike and Disney, and one against LAUSD, and we're still in one against the federal government on behalf of federal employees. But the most important ones I think that we're working on right now that are unique, number one is the Los Angeles Unified School District. This school district is still mandating the shot today, despite the fact that we've known since August, July, August of 2021, that the shots don't stop transmission or infection. We also know that they're dangerous. Why would any business,

school district, government body continue with this insanity that you're actually pushing people to potentially harm themselves by submitting to the shot? And especially children. Yeah. It's statistically zero risk from COVID for children. And yeah, it makes no sense. For young people, it makes no sense. Even for young adults, it really doesn't. But the biggest thing is we have a body of law in the United States.

There's a case called Jacobson. Jacobson versus Massachusetts. And that case essentially said that a city could mandate a vaccination that was believed to be safe and effective in an extreme emergency, such as smallpox, 30 to 40 percent death rate. So in an extreme emergency, they could mandate that, or they could find people who didn't want to take the shot. That lawsuit, that ruling from the Supreme Court has been used for a century to justify the erosion of our rights. The problem is that ever since the Nuremberg trials and the

Nuremberg Code, there's been a growing body of law, case law in the United States, which says that you have a zone of privacy around you, that you have the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions, that you have the right to refuse life-extending treatment and life-saving treatment. So those two bodies of law are at odds. And our case against Los Angeles Unified School District says that this drug is not a vaccine. It's a therapeutic. It has no public health benefit. And as such, it's imperative that people have the right to make their own choices. And you cannot use Jacobson to justify this because Jacobson does not apply. What really needs to happen is this disparity between the recent case law and Jacobson must be reconciled.

And this case, I believe, will be instrumental in doing that to the benefit of all Americans. So that's a really important case. And then the other two important cases that we're doing are Disney and Nike, which are in defense of employees who've either been bullied and discriminated against, or in the case of Nike, fired for exercising their First Amendment protected religious freedoms and their medical rights. I mean, one employee had a medical disability, and Nike fired them. These were senior employees Nike fired. And the Supreme Court has recently ruled that you cannot fire someone, you can't refuse to accommodate their religious exemptions

unless it's a substantial financial burden on the operation of the business. So these are incredibly important lawsuits that we are fighting and they are all in the public interest because these people could be anybody, right? They could be any person in America. You could be a school teacher or an employee in a business. You could work at Nike or Disney or any one of these corporations that have trampled American rights. And so, you know, We're going to keep fighting and doing our work and we're super grateful for anybody who wants to support us. Well, Leslie Mnookin, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.

Thanks so much for having me, Jan. Thank you all for joining Leslie Mnookin and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. Kellick.