American Thought Leaders - The First Legislation in America Banning Medical Mandates: Leslie Manookian

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

“What happened during COVID is exactly a perfect illustration of the harms of sacrificing some for the many,” says Leslie Manookian, founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund.She played a pivotal role in getting her state of Idaho to pass the first legislation in the United States banning most medical mandates, including vaccines and masks.“One of my missions at Health Freedom Defense Fund, in founding this organization, was to educate the public and raise awareness about the importance of medical freedom, because I think it’s the most basic and fundamental of human rights—and then to codify that in law. And the Idaho Medical Freedom Act is the first step in that process,” says Manookian.In this episode, we dive into the volatile process of getting this bill signed into law, and discuss why Manookian believes Americans must be protected from being forced to undergo medical interventions—even if they are potentially lifesaving.“On the last day of the legislative session, we were able to insert … that no healthy, unvaccinated individual may be excluded from any educational entity or any business entity on the basis of a disease outbreak. So just because you’re unvaccinated, if you’re healthy, they can’t kick you out,” says Manookian. “In the last 50 to 70 years, somehow public health has started to intrude into private health, and I think that’s a mistake.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

What happened during COVID is a perfect illustration of the harms of sacrificing some for the many. Leslie Minuchin is founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund. She was instrumental in getting her state, Idaho, to pass the first legislation in the U.S. banning medical mandates, including vaccines and masks. One of my missions was to educate the public and raise awareness about the importance of medical freedom and then to codify that in law. And the Idaho Medical Freedom Act is the first step in that process. In this episode, we dive into the volatile process of getting this bill signed into law and why she believes Americans must be protected from being coerced into medical interventions,

even if they are potentially life-saving. In the last 50 to 70 years, somehow public health has started to intrude into private health. And I think that's a mistake. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Leslie Minuchian, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. So great to be with you, Jan. Legislation has been passed in Idaho, the Idaho Medical Freedom Act, first of its kind. And you played a big role in this. Tell me what this is, first of all,

and why it's unique and why it's important. Yes. So the Idaho Medical Freedom Act is the first legislation in the nation to ban almost all medical mandates. So the only exclusions are for hospitals that take CMS funds, Centers for Medicaid and Medicare. But basically what it means is that you as an individual, someone who lives in Idaho, cannot be forced to take a test, to wear a mask, any kind of a device, or submit to any kind of medical intervention like a shot, a drug, any kind of medical intervention or treatment that might affect your biological functioning in order to engage in a normal life. So you basically can't be forced by an employer, by a school,

by a business to conform to their views and their wishes for you to just live a normal life, to go to the grocery store or to hold your job or to get an education. And why is this so unusual? So you may remember that I made a documentary film on vaccines called The Greater Good. And during the process of making that film, I learned so much about some of the pitfalls of modern medicine, and how some of the things

that we thought were totally safe are actually not totally safe. But what the whole process of making that movie impressed upon me was the primacy of the individual. And so what happened during COVID is exactly a perfect illustration of the harms of sacrificing some for the many. And I can't believe that we as a nation are in this position,

and I certainly couldn't believe that my beloved Idaho was in that position. I have lived in Idaho since the 1970s, late 1970s, and it was just, you know, very much a free, individualist kind of a place to live. And so what happened during COVID was shocking. But having made the greater good and having been researching the whole vaccine industry and all of the legislation that

has been put in place in order to protect the vaccine industry from liability, but also to facilitate mandates of these shots, woke me up to the imperative of individual rights and freedoms. And also, witnessing what happened in COVID in my beloved Idaho was a wake-up call that we needed to get back to our roots as Americans, that we needed to go back to a place where we value each and every person's life, irrespective of their medical choices. And that was really the impetus behind making the film,

or passing the act, because I didn't ever want to see people thrown out of businesses. I mean, one of my friend's daughters was fired from a business, she was about 16 years old because she wouldn't take the COVID shot. Now, how did we get to that place where an employer thinks it's their right to dictate what you do in order to retain your job or earn a living?

That's crazy. My own father was escorted out of the grocery store for not wearing a mask when he was 82 years old, despite the fact that he has a heart condition and he shouldn't be wearing a mask and impairing his flow of oxygen. And some big guy in the store said, we don't care about your exemption. This is why we have to have the Idaho Medical Freedom Act. There was some intrigue actually with respect to getting this passed in the end. Do you have some insight into that to share?

What were the touch points? What were the problems? What happened was I wrote the legislation in the fall or actually in the summer of 2024. I took a bill called the Idaho Coronavirus Stop Act, which prohibited mandates of coronavirus shots in the state of Idaho. That was passed in 2023 and I used that as a kind of a template and then I expanded it to all medical interventions in the state. And what was really interesting to me is I just thought, this is straightforward, right? I mean, I and I alone have to know what my medical history is.

I and I alone am positioned to make my own medical choices. And very importantly, I and I alone have to live with my medical decisions, right? And so I thought, you know, I'll just take this existing legislation, expand it, and we will sail through. Well, what happened was the bill did sail through the legislature, both on the Senate and in the House. And when it got to the governor's desk, he issued a

veto at the 11th hour, literally an hour and hour and a half before the bill was set to take effect on Saturday morning, March 29th. And with it, Jan, he issued a statement. And this statement said that the reason that he was vetoing the bill was because he didn't think that we had protected healthy kids in schools from sick kids, that we did not mention that sick kids could be sent home. Well, the bill didn't actually say anything about sending sick children home because it's already in Idaho statute. And then on

Monday morning, Senator Dan Foreman, who was my sponsor of the bill in the Senate and the original sponsor, he met with the governor's office and he decided, I guess in consultation with the governor's office, that they were going to bring a new bill that was identical to my bill except it would exclude daycares, all daycares in the state of Idaho. And there were six different definitions of daycares written into the bill. And I thought what is going on with this? And thankfully we had some white knights in the house come to our rescue, but that's essentially what happened. So what bill was passed in the end? So basically, the first bill was Senate Bill 1023.

That's the one that the governor vetoed with the excuse that sick kids couldn't be sent home from school. So I told the original sponsor, just insert this language. I mean, I emailed him the language. I texted him, just insert this language, that this does not contradict. This legislation is not intended to contradict existing code code which allows sick individuals to be sent home. And instead he went and did this kind of carve out for day cares.

So what happened was he introduced a new bill, Senate Bill 1210, and then that was horrible language and I told him to stop but he went forward anyway. And then what happened was the assistant majority leader and the bill sponsor in the House, Rob Byswanger, they brought another bill that was identical to my first bill but addressed the governor's purported claims or concerns. So it specifically said that this bill doesn't contradict anything that's in the existing code. And that was House Bill 472. And so basically what happened was the Senate introduced a bad bill, the House introduced

a competing bill that was fantastic, and then they fought it out during the week. The House bill got pushed through very quickly on Wednesday, and then we heard the Senate won't hear the bill. And then the Senate bill, they amended it, and the House asked, you know, do you want us to kill the bill? And I was really put on the spot, as were my colleagues at Health Freedom Idaho, Misty Karlfeld and Sarah Klen-Denin, who have been kind of the ladies on the ground.

You know, it was just like this up and down. And then on Friday morning, April 4th, I was speaking with the sponsor and the House leadership at literally six o'clock in the morning and discussing what needed to happen in order to make the bill acceptable. And they were like, do you want us to kill it or do you want to move forward?

You know, what do you want? And something really amazing happened, Jan. In the morning, on the last day of the legislative session, we were able to insert two really important things. Number one is that no healthy, unvaccinated individual may be excluded from any educational entity or any business entity on the basis of a disease outbreak. So just because you're unvaccinated,

if you're healthy, they can't kick you out. And this is really important because healthy high school kids have taken their own lives who were unvaccinated because they were excluded and they lost scholarships and they lost their GPAs and they couldn't play their sports and things like this. This happened during COVID. And then the other thing that we inserted which was just fantastic was that no code may be or rules or regulations may be promulgated which contradict this code which means that even if the governor issues an emergency again,

no state entity may enforce it. So these two things happened on Friday morning at the 11th hour on our side to our benefit. And we win with the best bill that we had brought during the whole saga. What happens if there is a federal mandate that's instituted in the future sometime? How does that play with this Idaho legislation?

Well, federal law can supersede state law. However, the federal government can't promulgate health laws because health laws and health powers are restricted to the states by the Constitution. So I think we're very, very safe there. That's how you may remember that Health Freedom Defense Fund, the organization that I lead, defeated the federal travel mask mandate in 2022. And we did that on the basis of CDC exceeding its statutory authority.

And so I just don't see how any arm of the federal government is positioned or has the authority delegated from the Constitution in order to enact something that could contradict this law in Idaho. Are other states reaching out to you? This is like broken the dam open, right? I think when you look at history, there's all these things that are considered impossible until somebody does it. And then the floodgates open, and I think that's what's going to happen. I have so many people who want to help us to take this nationwide.

We are in the process of drafting a model bill and creating a package of information that's going to help, and I'm considering who we might partner with in order to do that. But, yes, people are fired up and so excited about this and bringing this to their own states. And I want to say this, Jan. I think it's so important for people to really think about this. If you look at the 20th century, public health measures,

meaning getting clean drinking water to people, getting the sanitation out of the streets, getting fresh food to people, getting the sanitation out of the streets, getting fresh food to people. Those measures reduced the mortality from infectious diseases by about 90 percent before the advent of antibiotics or vaccines or anything. Those were not widely used at all when this 90 percent decline had been achieved in the United States. Public health was doing what it should be doing, public health

issues, things that are in the commons, things that affect us all. In the last 50 to 70 years, somehow public health has started to intrude into private health. And I think that's a mistake. We have a family friend at home in Idaho, a man named Doug Cameron, and his boss coerced Doug into getting the COVID shot. Doug didn't want the COVID shot. He told him,

I don't want the shot. I'm not planning on getting it. And his boss was like, well, you know, you're going to be setting a really good example for the hundred people underneath you. I want you to get the shot, Doug. He basically didn't really have much of a choice. And it was a job that he loved. He ended up relenting and getting the shot. He's paralyzed from the diaphragm down. He was a strapping man, super fit and strong. He will live in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, while his boss has since died.

And I think this illustrates how no one should claim the moral authority to dictate what we do in our own personal private medical matters in order for us to just earn a living or to engage in normal life. This is insanity. And how we got to this place is really, I think it reflects a kind of greater ill in our society that we've drifted more towards socialism and away from our original founding principles.

And I think it really needs to be corrected. And the Idaho Medical Freedom Act is one of the first steps in that direction. I think there's people that would respond to saying, no, if I make medical choices for myself, some of them actually might very much impact people outside of me. Like, it's not just me that experiences the effects of my bad choices. Sure, but do we actually dictate that you're excluded from life?

I mean, if people eat a lot of sugar, or they eat a lot of junk food, they're far more likely to be sick. They're far more likely to spread illnesses because they are actually ill. We know that just eating a small quantity of sugar suppresses the immune system for hours afterwards. So are we going to start regulating how much sugar people can eat? I mean, you know, it's so nuanced. And then the flip side of it is people say, well, you know, if you don't get a vaccine, for instance, then you're threatening everyone else. The problem with that line of thinking is that vaccine-induced immunity is not permanent.

The only lifelong immunity that we know of is natural immunity derived from a natural illness. And so if you look at different vaccinations, the Pertussis shot or whooping cough vaccination, within a few years, I think it's within four or five years, most individuals, something like 80% of people who took the shot don't have any residual immunity. So why in the world, how could you ever justify it on a public health basis? But even if they were perfect, even if they did actually effectuate permanent immunity, lifelong immunity, are they perfectly healthy

for every single individual? Can you name one food, one substance, one medication that's perfectly healthy for all individuals? Doesn't exist, because we're all unique, and all of us react to things differently for different reasons, and even at different points in our lives. And so, how can you look at someone like Dub Cameron, who's paralyzed from the diaphragm

down for the rest of his life, and tell any human being that you or anyone else has the moral authority to dictate what they do in their life? Basically, what you're describing is a slippery slope, right? A scenario where basically someone can decide they have moral authority to dictate ever increasing kind of interventions. Where would it stop? It's not clear. So you're suggesting that the only way to do it is really to make the individual, the primacy of the individual key and build everything around that and make people as, you know, create a safer world for people as possible within that reality. 100%. And also encourage people, eat healthy,

right? Do a better job. We need to get the money and the politics out of our food system and out of our medicine because our food systems and medical systems are not really truly about health. And so those are things that can be changed. But the bottom line is, you know, if we can force vaccinations on people, can we force people to be chipped in order to identify them? Can we force them to take,

our employees to take ADD medications because they're more productive and more focused? Can we force them, I don't know, can we force women to take birth control pills so that they don't get pregnant, which, you know, detracts from the promotion of the business, right, for pursuit of the business objectives?

Where does it stop? And some of these things actually do have an effect on other people, right? If someone has a, I don't know, an irritating personality trait, can they be forced to take some kind of psychotropic medicine? I mean, some psychiatric medicine, rather. Where does this end?

And if someone can force you to undergo a medical intervention against your will, why not chip? Why not connect you to the internet of bodies? And this isn't just a theoretical conversation, right? This is happening right now. People are being chipped in Estonia and Sweden and other places.

They're volunteering for it, but that's where it's headed. And in the United States, there's so you may recall that there's a lawsuit from 1905 called Jacobson versus Massachusetts. And in this lawsuit, it was all about the smallpox vaccine and whether or not Pastor Jacobson could be forced to take the shot or pay a fine. He refused the shot, he was allowed to refuse the shot,

but he was forced to pay a fine. And he appealed that all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said that in a super narrow situation like a smallpox outbreak, the state had a rational basis for mandating the shot because the shot was believed to be effective. The Supreme Court said, you have to pay the $5 fine, which is about $180 today. The Supreme Court didn't say that this lawsuit

affords a broad sweeping authority to any state entity to issue mandates for medical interventions. Didn't say that. In fact, it said just the opposite. Justice Harlan said it shouldn't be construed to a court of broad or sweeping authority. But it was for decades. And then in the last 50 to 60 years, the Supreme Court has issued new laws, or new rulings on cases before it, such as Washington versus Harper, Washington versus Glucksburg, Cruzon versus Missouri.

These cases, and Connecticut versus Griswold, there are a bunch of them. There's at least a half a dozen that have gone before the court. And the court has ruled that you have a liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical interventions, even if they might save your life. So essentially, what's happened is we, as a society, in refusing unwanted medical interventions, even if they might save your life. So essentially what's happened is we as a society have moved on from 1905 when I couldn't

vote, I'd like to remind people, I couldn't vote and Jim Crow laws were in place, to a place where we actually do recognize the primacy of the individual. This is now Supreme Court caseloads, jurisprudence on the federal level. But there's this thing from 1905 that's still at odds with it. And I think we as a culture, we need to reconcile those disparate opinions and also really embrace this as a society. One of my missions at Health Freedom Defense Fund in founding this organization was to educate the public and raise awareness about the importance of medical freedom,

because I think it's the most basic and fundamental of human rights, and then to codify that in law. And the Idaho Medical Freedom Act is the first step in that process. And Ryan Cole, I think you've interviewed Ryan Cole, haven't you? So Dr. Ryan Cole is a friend of mine, and he and I spoke at an event at the Capitol a couple of weeks ago in Boise.

And he gave a fantastic illustration of this. If someone takes your house and you're homeless, and someone takes your car and you don't have a car, and someone takes your clothes and you don't have clothes, all you have left, you don't have any possessions left. You have one piece of property. And what is that? It's your body. You know, the Constitution says we have the right to protect our property. If there is anything more fundamental and basic than our bodies as a form of property, I can't think of it. And if someone can force me to undergo a medical intervention against my conscience, then no one in this country

is free. One of the things that took a hit over the past years is doctors applying the Hippocratic Oath, the concept of do no harm. And it strikes me that this legislation, while not explicitly focused on this, probably helps doctors to enact that more seriously once again, if indeed their ability to do that was compromised in the past. I think there's no doubt that their ability to do that was compromised. Because we know that federal funds were tied to the hospitals and medical staff adhering to these federally dictated protocols, right? The standard of- Well, guidelines, technically. Guidelines, yeah.

Thank you. Yes, it was guidelines. It was kind of a standard of care that was issued by the federal government, by the CDC, in fact. And so those entities were in a difficult position. They got $40 for every COVID shot that they administered. And that's not right.

That is going to affect the ethical decision, the moral decision about what they're making, how they're treating patients. So that's one thing. But I think that the way that this bill has a broader effect is in terms of just reasserting that each and every one of us derives our rights from our creator, not from the government, that

the government is of, by, and for the people, not to oppress the people. And so I think that this elevates that conversation. And to me, that's what's the most important thing to have, is that we need to be engaging in this dialogue about who ultimately really owns us, who owns my body? For me, it's very clear. It's me as the individual. And it's me as the parent for children who are minors. And no one should ever claim the authority otherwise.

And the one thing people will say is, well, you can get another job. Well, you can go and shop somewhere else. You can if you live in a big city. And if everyone is not complying. But we know from COVID that in cities like New York and D.C. everybody complied almost. It was nigh on impossible to go anywhere or do anything. Places where I live, it was impossible. I could not go to lots of places. I couldn't attend events that were held at the Argyros Event Center, unless I showed my papers.

Papers, please, at the door. So this isn't just some kind of like hypothetical. This happened. It seems like it brings us back to the Hippocratic Oath. 100% because ultimately, who's the arbiter of doing no harm? The individual is. And the physician should be there to support, to educate, to give the patient the opportunity to make educated choices. If the physician is in a position

where they're pushing or dictating, then I think that we've stepped over. We're actually violating the Hippocratic oath at that point. And here's the other piece of it, Jan, is that all medical interventions carry risk. All of them. And if you are actually pushing medical interventions on your patients, then you are, by definition,

violating the ethical principle of informed consent, which says that every single medical intervention requires prior voluntary informed consent. And by extension, that violates the Hippocratic Oath as well, because if there's any element of force, then there's no informed consent. And this reminds me of this story that's happening. It's actually in the news right now of this family who declined vaccination for their ninth month old.

They claimed a religious exemption in the state of Massachusetts. And the physician threatened the family and said that he would report the family to the Child Protective Services. I think it's a Department of Children and Families in Massachusetts, but it's basically Child Protective Services. They hunted this family down across state lines in Texas, arrested the father, I think the mother too,

and took the children, and they arrested the parents for kidnapping their own children, for making their own medical choices. Like, how have we gotten so insane in this country that we think that that's acceptable? And how did that physician get so separated from his Hippocratic oath and from the ethical principle of informed consent that he deemed that acceptable.

That is frightening. Well, because in his mind, he didn't want to see the children harmed and he felt the parents were doing that. I mean, I imagine he didn't do it because he wanted to be cruel or something. Most likely. I don't know. But talk about overstepping, right? And until we decide that the state gets to dictate what's best for children, which I hope never happens, then parents and parents alone get that responsibility.

And no physician should be able to do that strictly on the basis of declining a vaccination. This was a healthy child. And the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 says very clearly that vaccines harm and injure or injure and kill some recipients. This is federal law. It's not a question of whether or not they cause harm and kill some. And so I mean maybe this physician doesn't know that, isn't aware of that, but the parents clearly are. Or maybe it was their faith. They said it was that they were choosing a religious exemption.

And it just happened in North Dakota as well. A child, a newborn baby, the parents submitted a birth plan about what they did and didn't want, what interventions they did and didn't want for the newborn baby. And the hospital referred them to CPS and took the child for four days and administered all of these medical interventions against the parent's will. I didn't allow any of those medical interventions. I did not put erythromycin in my son's eyes because you know what, breast milk will clear it up and there are lots of other issues if a child

develops any kind of infection in their eyes. I didn't allow vitamin K shots because there are troubles associated with those shots as well. I didn't, he didn't get the hepatitis B vaccine, he didn't get any of these things because I didn't believe it was what was best for him. How can we actually justify this kind of action by people just because they're medical people? They don't know everything. So you experience some resistance to getting this law passed. Now that it is passed, are you experiencing anything else of that nature?

Well, one of the things that was a concern, obviously, was these people saying that children who were sick, that they had pink eye or lice or something, couldn't be sent home. They could be sent home for any reason, and then the parents were free to choose how they were going to take care of it. But what's interesting is that all of these legislators were using those same arguments, and those arguments seem to be coming from an organization called the Idaho Educational Association. They are very opposed to this and they fought it. And someone who's connected to that organization is connected to the New Horizons Daycare.

And there's a lawsuit against them right now in Idaho for unenrolling a child whose parents claimed a vaccination exemption for their two year old. And that case is gonna be heard in front of the Idaho Supreme Court on May 5th of this year. So that's one thing. I haven't gotten much feedback personally from it yet. I've had just thousands and thousands of people supporting us, applauding us, and all that. What people say are many of the questions that you've asked.

Well, there's a public health issue, public health, public health. But I have to say, I think the people of Idaho and the people of the country are very aware that they were misled during the COVID era, that the guidance to stand on dots six feet apart was not science-based, that the masking science wasn't, that science wasn't science-based at all either. There was CDC science in May of 2020 that said that masks didn't do anything

for influenza-like illnesses. That people were misled, that we were told that the shots would stay in the arms, that it would be rid from the body within a short period of time, a couple of days, and we now know that almost two years afterwards, people's bodies are still making... Some people's.

Some people's, absolutely. I'm not saying every single person, but this is clearly an issue. My point is that we were misled. And so all of those arguments that you hear about public health and what is your private decision intrude on public health, that's the number one thing they say.

But I just, I mean, I think that this is so fresh in people's minds that there's not a lot of pushback because we have actually seen authoritarianism under the guise of public health in the last five years. And most people, all but the most truly committed to the whole scenario, want to put it either in the rearview mirror or to make sure that it never happens again. So by and large, the response has been extremely powerful and positive, I would say.

A final thought as we finish? I think it's really important that we understand that we come into this world alone and we go out alone and that each and every one of us has to live with our choices. And unless we're going to literally dictate every aspect of our lives, what we can and can't eat, how much exercise and sleep we get,

then we shouldn't be intruding into people's personal and private medical matters. And I hope, more than anything, that this begins a conversation on a national level about medical freedom, health freedom, and bodily autonomy, because I think it's sorely needed and I think it's a place that most Americans want to go. Well, Leslie Mnuchin, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much for having me on.

Thank you all for joining Leslie Mnuchin and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.