Free Now Foundation Sues to Stop Vaccine Mandates for California Schoolchildren, Parents Speak Out on Injuries

A preliminary injunction requests that the state temporarily pause its enforcement of vaccination mandates for schoolchildren.

A nurse draws out a vaccine at a drive-through COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Kingston, Ont., on Jan. 2, 2022. The Canadian Press/Lars Hagberg

Two organizations are suing the California Department of Public Health as well as Gov. Gavin Newsom to challenge the state’s vaccination requirements for students, alleging that current state policies limit parental choice and can lead to vaccine injuries among young children.

The medical nonprofit Free Now Foundation told The Epoch Times that the plaintiffs are working to file a preliminary injunction ahead of the July court hearing.

“The situation in California has become really grim for parents. They don’t have the right to make medical decisions for their children anymore,” said Alix Mayer, chair of the Free Now Foundation, which filed the lawsuit together with the group Brave and Free Santa Cruz in December 2024.

The preliminary injunction requests that the state temporarily pause its enforcement of vaccination mandates for children attending public and private schools, preschools, and day care centers, while the case is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.

“We just want to put parents back in the driver’s seat and [let them] make decisions for their children again. We believe that parents should always call the shots,” Mayer said.

According to the state’s Department of Public Health, students enrolled in transitional kindergarten through 12th grade are required to show a record of vaccinations totaling up to 16 or 17 doses.

Under current California law, children enrolling in a private or public elementary or secondary school, a child care center, a day care, a nursery school, or a development center must receive vaccination for 10 different diseases.

The CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule for the 10 diseases in a child’s first 4 to 6 years includes:

• Five doses of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTaP)
• Four doses of polio (IPV)
• Three doses of hepatitis B
• Two doses of measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR)
• Two doses of varicella​ (chickenpox)
• Three or four doses of Haemophilus influenzae type b

The lawsuit argues that parents have limited options for exemptions to this vaccination schedule under current state policies.

“In 2015, Governor Brown signed into law a bill that took away the personal belief exemption to vaccination, leaving us with only a medical exemption,” Mayer said.

Senate Bill 277, authored by pediatrician and then state Sen. Richard Pan, made California the third state to remove personal belief exemptions to vaccines. Currently, five states—California, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and West Virginia—deny personal and religious exemptions.

The bill, however, kept exemptions for homeschooled children and students “enrolled in an independent study program and who do not receive classroom-based instruction.”

Then, in 2019, California revised how medical exemptions are granted to students.

SB 276 and SB 714, both authored by Pan, established the California Immunization Registry–Medical Exemption (CAIR-ME) website.

Parents seeking medical exemptions to the vaccine schedule are required to create an account in CAIR-ME and fill out an exemption request form. Parents will then receive an exemption application number that their child’s doctor will use on CAIR-ME to issue the medical exemption.

After submission, the law requires a “clinically trained department staff member who is a physician and surgeon or a registered nurse to review all medical exemption forms” to approve or reject exemption requests.

“There’s no formal process to understand why somebody’s medical exemption was rejected. And the person who rejects the medical exemption isn’t even your child’s doctor. They’ve never examined the child,” Mayer said.

The California Department of Public Health declined to comment on ongoing litigation.

The Epoch Times has reached out to Newsom’s office for comment.

The lawsuit also alleges a violation of the “Procedural Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” saying that students who do not comply with the vaccine requirements “forfeit their constitutional right to pursue education in the public or private schools in California” and are denied “procedural due process rights.”

Parents Speak Out

Roughly 93.7 percent of California kindergarten students were fully up-to-date on vaccines during the 2023–2024 school year, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) shows that California has seen a fairly steady increase in reports of vaccine-related injuries since 1999, with a spike in reports between 2021 and 2023.

In the preliminary injunction, 12 parents provided accounts of adverse reactions to vaccines in their children.

One such set of parents was Shanticia Nelson and Dayon Carter of Rochester, New York, who lost their 1-year-old daughter, Sa’Niya, after she received six shots during a wellness checkup to catch up on missed shots. On the way home, Sa’Niya reportedly experienced convulsions, and her parents brought her to a hospital.

At the hospital, the young girl’s heart stopped, and “staff tried for forty minutes to bring her back” but were unsuccessful, according to the preliminary injunction.

Sa’Niya’s parents said they “want the world to know that routine immunizations can kill children and that no one at the doctor’s office told them this, otherwise they never would have consented to those shots,” the preliminary injunction states.

According to the CDC, vaccines of all kinds can cause side effects, such as a minor sore arm or a more serious fever or seizures.

“As with any medicine, there is a very remote chance of a vaccine causing a severe allergic reaction, other serious injury, or death,” its website states.

The lawsuit also cites a 2023 interview a former police detective named Jennifer provided to medical commentator Steve Kirsch regarding her experiences working in the police department’s child abuse division, which involved investigating cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). SIDS is when a baby 1 year old or younger suddenly and unexpectedly dies.

During the interview, the former detective said she estimated that around 70 percent of SIDS deaths she investigated occurred within a week of receiving a vaccine, adding that when information on shots is passed on to the coroner, it “never goes on an autopsy report.”

A study published in 2021 that looked at data from the VAERS database found a similar percentage of SIDS cases occurring within the same time frame after a baby received a vaccine.

“Of 2605 infant deaths reported to VAERS from 1990 through 2019, 58% clustered within 3 days post-vaccination and 78.3% occurred within 7 days post-vaccination, confirming that infant deaths tend to occur in temporal proximity to vaccine administration,” the study reported.

According to the CDC, “babies receive multiple vaccines when they are between 2 to 4 months old,” which is the “peak age” for SIDS, but reported that “studies have found that vaccines do not cause and are not linked to SIDS.”

However, the lawsuit alleges that “none of these [CDC] cited studies were done in the modern era.”

The CDC’s page for SIDS was last updated on Dec. 20, 2024, and currently does not list any studies on vaccines and SIDS mentioned in the lawsuit.

Another allegation is a connection between vaccines and the rise in autism.

The preliminary injunction alleges, “While genetics, an underlying cause that cannot be changed, may load the gun, vaccines, a proximate cause that can be changed, often pull the trigger.”

Meanwhile, the CDC states that “studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD [autism spectrum disorder].” Autism, regardless of what age a person develops it, can require a lifelong caregiver and health care treatments.

Sally Rubin of Oakland, California, said her 3-year-old son showed “sudden onset of regressive autism shortly after he received immunizations,” according to the preliminary injunction.

She said her son has difficulties with social cues, does repetitive motions such as rocking or hand flapping, and has delayed speech and language development, among other characteristics of autism.

“I had my own company at the time and closed it to be able to devote myself full time to helping my son. It has been financially devastating,” Rubin said.

One parent of an older child also reported negative reactions to a vaccine.

Grace Shain said her 15-year-old son was “in good health until he received the HPV vaccine recommended by the California Department of Public Health.” According to court documents, her son developed chronic fatigue syndrome, dysautonomia, and other neurological symptoms, forcing the teen to drop out of his school swim teams and placing an “immense financial and emotional toll on the entire family.”

“I call it a double bag. They’re holding a medical bag, and they’re holding the out-of-pocket financial bag of these medical injuries,” Mayer said.

The financial costs also impact the federal government. Under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, people can report their vaccine-related injuries and potentially receive compensation.

The government has spent a total of $5.3 billion on the program since 1989—a cost that combines both compensation and attorney fees, according to the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.

Federal Research on Autism

This case comes as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) plans to research and test various potential factors that cause autism in children.

The preliminary injunction cites an April 10 Cabinet meeting conversation between Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump, in which Kennedy said his department plans to publish a report by September on its findings regarding autism.

The most recently recorded autism rate is about one in 31, Kennedy told Trump.

“So they’re going up again from one in 10,000 when I was a kid,” Kennedy said.

The prevalence of autism for boys is roughly one in 20, and in California, the rate is one in 12.5, according to Kennedy.

An HHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email that Kennedy “supports finding the root causes of autism, as well as restoring transparency and public trust in all areas of health policy—including vaccine safety.”

Richard Fox, the lawyer on the case, told The Epoch Times that the new preliminary injunction alleges “irreparable harm.”

He said the goal of the lawsuit is to remove California’s vaccine mandates for school enrollment and allow parents to have more say in their children’s vaccination plans.