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Welcome everyone to another episode of the Illusion of Consensus podcast with myself Rav Arora — independent journalist based in Vancouver — and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist at Stanford.
We are really excited today to have on Jeff Childers — a very successful attorney based in Florida, who's been on the front lines in court fighting cases on vaccine and mask mandates. He's done tremendous work throughout the pandemic, fighting for our personal rights and civil liberties.
Jay and him have collaborated on previous legal cases, so we're excited to get into some of that. Jeff is also the author of the fantastic Coffee and COVID newsletter, which I read every week, and I highly encourage everyone else to subscribe if you haven't already. It's a great read. Jeff does an excellent job there, just as he does in his legal work. So we're excited to talk about all of it.
Jeff’s legal work:
Spotify Link:
Apple podcasts:
Podcast Transcript Highlights:
Jeff Childers on why he joined Substack:
I focused only on reporting positive developments, right? And tearing apart the bad news narrative. Because what I realized was the market for bad news was completely saturated. And the market for good news was wide open. And so that combination of a little bit of adult humour with a positive frame was really successful.
And I say that, you know, kind of flippantly, and it seems obvious in hindsight, but let me tell you something. I will never forget this as long as I live. I was getting, and we're talking about like summer of 2020 and, and probably through 2021 every week, I would get one or two emails or direct messages along these same lines. They were long. They were heartfelt.
And then I got to Substack. The short version of that is I wrote a letter to the churches. It was basically a post called what the church needs to know about COVID-19 and what to do about it. And...
After all those that time, this is in the summer of 21, that's what got me de-platformed. So, you know, they didn't mind everything else I was doing about COVID. But when I wrote that letter to the churches, they pulled the plug on me everywhere. I lost my Patreon. We were on a different blogging platform. I won't say their name. And Facebook all, you know, killed me. So I immediately went over to Substack because Alex Berenson (
) had just gone there.
Dr. Jay asks Jeff whether colleges are liable for vaccine injuries in young students caused by vaccine mandates:
Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think the answer is yes, they're potentially liable. But we're still dealing with a very difficult legal arena here. Let me start in reverse. And so let me talk about the coercion thing, because this is an argument, another one, that's been going around that shouldn't be. So for example, the Methodist Hospital case in Texas, so one of the first cases where a federal judge upheld the hospital's vaccine mandate. He said, well, you know, you could, you did have an option. You weren't forced to take the vaccine. You could quit and go work somewhere else. And the strength of his decision was really on that, that logic. And that's absolutely wrong as a matter of law.
So there is well-established case law, notably in the area of drug tests. So federal courts for decades have been saying that employers can't force an employee to take a drug test and that a threat of firing someone for not taking a drug test is coercion. I mean, they even use that language. Those cases are out there. I don't know how those cases were not used in the Methodist Hospital case and all the subsequent cases. And then everybody started citing Methodist Hospital. All the judges that want to uphold these mandates. And so it just turned into this giant dirty snowball.
I cited all those cases in my brief in our vaccine case, because the city made the same silly argument and that didn't even come up at the trial. So yes, I agree. Threat of termination of employment is coercion. When you start looking at these school mandates, you have to divide schools into two categories, right? So you have a lot of state schools, and state schools enjoy sovereign immunity, as I'm sure you know. So that is a very difficult barrier to overcome right away. So you're dealing with an entity with sovereign immunity, and you have to show that it was something more than mere negligence. And in order to get there, you have a huge evidentiary burden, right? To prove that these people weren't just dumb, but they were malicious.
And maybe you can prove that and maybe that is true, but it's going to take a lot of money and a lot of time and work by lawyers to get there. So then you're down to private schools and that don't enjoy sovereign immunity, but they still will have the coercion argument. Even though, again, I disagree with the coercion argument, but I think the private schools is where the most fruitful ground for lawyers is right now.
Jeff on the inevitable liability of employers who mandated vaccines:
If I were a parent whose child was vaccine injured at one of these schools, I would sue every time. And we need to just keep suing until we get a case that wins somewhere. This is think about how the tobacco litigation went. There was a long period where nobody got any traction against the tobacco manufacturers and then the floodgates burst open after somebody figured out the formula. And I think that's what's going to happen here too. I mean, Even to the manufacturers, and I've said this for a long time, I think that they will be liable.
I think employers, unfortunately, a lot of small businesses and medium-sized businesses are going to be liable for vaccine injuries, and it's going to put them out of business. And it's going to be very destructive to our small and mid-sized business community, which is bad because we need those guys. The manufacturers, I think, ultimately, we will find a way to get there. And there are some even recent developments, like you may be aware of the IgG4 class switch phenomenon. I think it's now almost undeniable that the shots were adulterated with some DNA.
Episode 18: Jeff Childers On Fighting Covid Mandates In Court