By Leslie Manookian at Brownstone dot org.

On July 31, 2025, the Ninth Circuit issued its ruling in Health Freedom Defense Fund et al. v. Megan K. Reilly et al., vacating the earlier ruling of a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit in favor of plaintiffs Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF), California Educators for Medical Freedom (CAEMF), and several individual plaintiffs.

The reasoning of the court in its latest ruling, as represented by Judge Bennett's majority opinion, is an affront to all who value truth, justice, the United States Constitution, and logic. Incredibly, the court concluded that as long as a government official believes a vaccine will protect public health, it is irrelevant whether the vaccine actually works.

Armed with this rationale, a state government, simply by uttering the words "This is for public health," can force any individual to submit to a medical treatment, even if that medical treatment does not benefit that individual - and perhaps harms him. The implication of this line of thinking is clear: Government is our absolute ruler, our master, and we are its chattel.

Here is the context of the ruling: In November 2021, the plaintiffs sued the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for mandating Covid injections for all employees. We argued that the Covid injections do not stop transmission or infection and therefore lack any public health justification. We contended that Jacobson v.

Massachusetts, a Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) case from 1905, did not apply to our case because Jacobson was predicated both on the extreme emergency posed by smallpox - its death rate was 30%, whereas Covid has a 1% rate of death - and on a safe and effective smallpox vaccine that was believed to actually stop the spread of the dreaded disease based on decades of use, therefore providing a public health justification.

Nearly a year later, in September 2022, the district court ruled against the plaintiffs. But in January 2023 plaintiffs appealed that decision. In June 2024 a three-judge panel ruled in favor of plaintiffs, overturning the district court and remanding the case to the district court. The next month - July 2024 - the defendants filed a petition for an en banc review by the Ninth Circuit.

That petition was granted in February of 2025 and oral argument was held in front of the 11-judge panel, on March 18, 2025. On July 31, 2025, the Ninth Circuit issued its ruling in favor of the defendants and dismissed the case.

It bears mentioning that the SCOTUS has overturned decisions rendered by the Ninth Circuit more often than it has any other circuit court in the US. This case amply serves to illustrate precisely why the Ninth has earned such an ignominious reputation.

Indeed, the recent ruling is so egregious that it warrants a thorough breakdown of the main issues:

1. The Ninth Circuit asserted that the right to direct one's own medical treatment is not a fundamental right. It cited several precedents, including Mullins v. Oregon, 57 F.3d 789, 793 (9th Cir. 1995), in which the court held, "Only those aspects of liberty that we as a society traditionally have protected as fundamental are included within the substantive protection of the Due Process Clause." To be clear, nowhere does our Constitution empower the state to dictate any medical intervention.

On the contrary, the Constitution serves as a restraint on government, not on the people. Moreover, there is not a single case in the 105 years since Jacobson when a locality mandated a vaccination or otherwise directed the medical treatment of the people in general. Thus, the Ninth Circuit's insinuation that our society routinely accepts vaccine mandates for adults in general is patently false. By this metric and Jacobson's holding in 1905, women would still not be allowed to vote.

In actuality, Jacobson did not allow the state to condition employment or engagement in normal life on receipt of an injection. Instead, it merely allowed the stat...