Former Wall Street Employee’s Path to Defending Medical Freedom

Leslie Manookian is the founder and president of Health Freedom Defense Fund.

Leslie Manookian, president and founder of Health Freedom Defense Fund, in Connecticut on Sep. 9, 2023.Patrick Mauler/The Epoch Times

A former Wall Street employee fights for the bodily rights of all Americans, suing the federal government for mandating the COVID shots and other measures.

Leslie Manookian is the founder and president of Health Freedom Defense Fund, battling the erosion of Americans’ freedoms in courts and having a major victory in 2022 against the nationwide federal travel mask mandate.

She sat down for an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” to discuss her path from Wall Street to defender of bodily rights, and her current work.

The Dark Side of Business

Ms. Manookian was working on Wall Street in the 1990s when she was transferred to London, working in the investment industry at a company called Alliance Capital.

Ηer job was to interview European CEOs and decide which companies should be added to her company’s portfolio.

One of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical CEOs came to her company in about 2001 for an interview, she said. He told her that some people had died in the trials of a new drug that his company produced. 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 make $7 billion in peak sales,” Ms. Manookian recalled.

“I felt like someone kicked me in the stomach. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘Are you being serious?’ You know, I just sat there, stunned at his cavalier attitude about the tradeoff between his profits and human life, and I couldn’t believe it.”

After the meeting, she said, she went to her office and began pacing until she walked down the hallway to her company’s pharmaceutical analyst’s office to tell her what happened and said it was wrong, but the analyst just shrugged her shoulders.

Ms. Manookian said she then thought, “Oh my gosh, this is the reality of what I’m doing and I’m playing for the wrong team.”

This was one of the events that lead Ms. Manookian out of the world of corporate captains and made her join the “team of the people,” as she wanted to start doing good on the planet, she said.

“I just realized that there is much more going on in the world of business than most people realize,” she said.

A New Understanding

The next step for her was planning to retire. At that time she was feeling sick and her conventional doctor could not help her. To her surprise, he recommended that she go to a homeopathy doctor or to an acupuncturist. In that way Ms. Manookian learned about homeopathy, and it resonated so much with her that she even enrolled at a homeopathy college without telling anyone.

During her study there she read a book about adverse effects after vaccination, which included seizures, learning difficulties, and even death. That lead her to do her own research and eventually produce a documentary about vaccination adverse effects in 2011, titled “The Greater Good.”

She mentioned the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 which allowed federal agencies, which run on taxpayer dollars, to retain the patents of the products they develop. This incentivized them to push products they might profit from, such as vaccines, Ms. Manookian said.

This is why researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) own half of the Moderna vaccine patent, she said.

“This actually really facilitated the corruption, essentially, of our federal health agencies,” Ms. Manookian said.

Moderna also received a $483 million grant in 2020 from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a division within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In 1992, Congress passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act to allow the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to collect fees from pharmaceutical companies to fund the drug approval process, but Ms. Manookian said this allowed “the pharmaceutical industry to capture FDA.”

The act was initially a way to fast-track drugs for people in dire straits and had a budget of $100 million. Last year it reached $2.66 billion as payment for user fees. That accounts for about 50 percent of the FDA’s budget.

With this act the pharmaceutical industry directly pays user fees to the FDA, the agency that’s supposed to regulate those companies, according to Ms. Manookian.

“These two pieces of legislation really changed the shape of our federal health agencies,” she said.

Then, after 9/11, extraordinary powers were given to governors and state health departments in the event of a public health emergency.

No Liability

Ms. Manookian mentioned that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of children were “catastrophically injured or killed by their DPT shots,” because the vaccine was not attenuated or weakened like the one on the market today, which does not work, she said.

“As a result of that, juries awarded millions and millions of dollars to families whose children were injured or killed by the shot. And the pharmaceutical industry went to Congress and said, ‘We are not going to make vaccines anymore, unless you protect us.'”

Congress obliged, passing the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which takes liability off the pharmaceutical companies almost completely.

This act gives no incentive to pharmaceutical companies to produce a safer product as it takes all liability from them. At the same time, a special court designed to hear claims of vaccine injuries is not impartial and may take as long as 10 years to decide a case, Ms. Manookian said. Four-fifths of all cases are dismissed.

The court is funded by the federal government and by a tax of 75 cents on every dose of vaccine sold.

“There is no due process, there is no discovery, there is nothing independent” in the court, Ms. Manookian said.

Legislation

Then came the PREP Act in 2005, which provided immunity to anyone making a “medical countermeasure” in 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,” Ms. Manookian said.

“And of course the government is 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,” she continued.

Another piece of legislation passed in 2012 might have a synergistic effect with the above, as state-funded propaganda was allowed to be disseminated to American audiences. This kind of programming was only allowed in other countries, propagandizing American narratives for the purpose of overthrowing a tyrannical government, for example, Ms. Manookian said. In 2012, it became legal to target Americans with these programs, so “essentially, anything that you see in the news could be propaganda, and it could be coming straight from the government, and that’s legal,” Ms. Manookian said.

She gave examples of new laws enacted in 2009 that seem very well suited for the COVID campaign in 2020. California, for example, nullified the philosophical exemption from vaccination—that covered religious exemptions—and also made it legal for children as young as 12 years old to get a vaccination without parental consent.

New York, at the same time, passed a law that made it legal for the government to quarantine a person indefinitely for an unspecified disease, without proof of being sick, or of being a threat to anybody. Excess vaccinations were also seen, without any evidence of their necessity, in the past swine flu. Ms. Manookian collected these findings from her research for her book.

Health Freedom Defense Fund

When 2020 came, Ms. Manookian understood, having studied the state’s mindset all these years, that COVID was the event they were waiting for to coerce mass vaccinations.

Few people would believe her in the beginning, but Ms. Manookian tried to persuade the people who would listen to her, to follow her in running the Health Freedom Defense Fund.

Having all this knowledge for 20 years, “the veil was ripped from my eyes,” she said, and she saw that there were “forces with an agenda” eroding the major American institutions and causing trouble for the average American.

She said that the legal victory the Health Freedom Defense Fund had against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mask mandates on airplanes, buses, and trains gave hope to people, and many people reached out to the nonprofit to express their appreciation.

When the CDC announced its federal travel mask mandate, Ms. Manookian immediately thought that something did not seem right, based on her previous experience. She said that the powers of the CDC only allow it to make recommendations of vaccinations but it does not have the power to enforce them. This power could lie only in state laws.

She then filed a lawsuit against the CDC in 2021, which took nine months of going through the courts until a federal judge in Florida decided that the CDC’s federal mask mandate was illegal and had to be voided.

Legal Victory

The decision was welcomed with nationwide celebrations, as people were no longer under the burden to be covered by a mask when traveling. Ms. Manookian said that this gave inspiration to people, as they understood that there are people listening and fighting for them.

It was also a big blow to the administrative state “behemoth,” in other words, all of the federal agencies headed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, Ms. Manookian said. This bureaucratic state was never envisioned by America’s founders.

“Health Freedom Defense Fund has a mission, ultimately, to enshrine in the public consciousness the idea that each and every one of us owns their bodies. And the idea that we have to ask government for an exemption is upside down. We and we alone make choices about our bodies,” Ms. Manookian said.

The nonprofit has filed over a dozen lawsuits in the past few years, suing the federal government three times, the Los Angeles Unified School District twice, and currently is in two cases against Nike and Disney.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is still mandating the COVID injections today, even after the federal government announced in the summer of 2021 that the COVID vaccines do not stop transmission or infection.

“Why would any business, school district, government body continue with this insanity?” she asked.

Former Case Law

Ms. Manookian said that a 1905 Supreme Court case called Jacobson v. Massachusetts has been used to justify the erosion of people’s rights. That ruling said it was legal to mandate vaccinations that are believed to be safe and effective in extreme public health emergencies, such as smallpox, with a 30 to 40 percent death rate.

However, there exists another body of case law in the United States related to privacy around the human body, the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions, and the right to refuse life-extending or life-saving treatment.

“Those two bodies of law are at odds,” Ms. Manookian said, and in her organization’s case against the Los Angeles school district, it said that the COVID shot is not a vaccine but a therapeutic drug with 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,” she said.

“What really needs to happen is this disparity between the recent case law and Jacobson must be reconciled, and this case, I believe, would be instrumental in doing that, to the benefit of all Americans. So that’s a really important case.”

The cases against Disney and Nike are about employees who were bullied or even fired, in the case of Nike, for exercising their religious freedoms or medical rights.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that a company cannot refuse to accommodate someone’s religious exemptions, unless that would cause substantial financial harm.

These companies have trampled on Americans’ rights, Ms. Manookian said, and “we are going to keep fighting and doing our work and we are super grateful for anybody who wants to support us.”