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Feb. 13, 2024 - Epoch Times
46:17
[FREE EPISODE] The Fight Against Government-Induced Censorship & Vaccine Mandates: Jenin Younes
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I mean, the CDC does not have rulemaking authority delegated by Congress.
Yet the CDC did, you know, the eviction moratorium, the federal mask mandate.
There's complete abuse.
And unless there's a real change, I'm afraid it's just going to happen again.
Today, I sit down with Janine Younes, litigation counsel for the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
She's led major cases against vaccine mandates and government-induced censorship on social media platforms.
You have two of the top epidemiologists in the world talking about their area of expertise, and it doesn't fit with the narrative of the Biden administration.
With the governor.
With the governor, yeah.
That video was taken down.
I mean, this is crazy.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kelly.
Janine Yunus, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you so much for having me here.
There have been many things that have happened over the last few years that have kind of brought you to this place.
But just for starters, tell me what you do now, why it might be relevant to Dr.
Fauci announcing his resignation.
Well, right now I litigate cases against the government.
So we really look at where the government is overreaching and especially where administrative agencies are concerned.
NCLA, the new Civil Liberties Alliance, is focused on administrative overreach.
And we believe that a lot of the constitutional violations that take place today have to do with agencies sort of usurping power that they shouldn't have.
So I've done a lot of vaccine mandate litigation, primarily on behalf of employees of universities who don't want to get the vaccine.
And then I'm also doing some cases about government-induced censorship of people on social media platforms.
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Okay, and so what's your reaction to Dr.
Fauci announcing his resignation?
Okay.
Well, that's a good question.
I mean, I really do not like Anthony Fauci.
I think he's been one of the most destructive forces in this country.
I'm afraid he'll just be replaced by somebody worse, which has seemed to be the trend, although I don't know if that's possible.
And, you know, it's sort of upsetting that he's probably going to get away with what he's done and just go into a cushy retirement or some other, you know, maybe go work for Pfizer or something and make plenty of money.
So it's, you know, I'm I'm glad he won't be there anymore, but on the other hand I don't think that he's going to get the consequences that he deserves.
Okay, so, you know, Dr.
Fauci has been accused of all sorts of things, right?
But you have some specific things in mind when you say you're not happy with them.
So why don't you explain that to me?
Of course, it's connected with the litigation that you do and so forth.
Well, there are so many things.
I mean, first of all, that he pushed lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates on very bad evidence, that he refused to take into account the harms that they have done to the American people.
In fact, he said yesterday that lockdowns didn't harm anyone.
But in retrospect, do you regret that it went too far?
Whatever your original intentions were, and it's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback here, but that it went too far, that particularly for kids who couldn't go to school except remotely, that it's forever damaged them.
Well, I don't think it's forever irreparably damaged anyone.
When, you know, kids are suffering tremendously, socially, educationally, deaths are up among young people, about 40%.
And then Fauci has really been responsible for a lot of the censorship that's taking place on social media.
So a lot of people aren't aware That the federal government is really involved in this censorship.
They think that the tech companies are acting on their own when they suspend people or otherwise censor them for spreading so-called misinformation about COVID, but also other things.
Anthony Fauci and a number of other officials in the Biden administration are really behind this.
So why don't we jump into this lawsuit, actually, that you just joined this lawsuit with Louisiana AG Landry and Missouri AG Schmidt.
Why don't you tell me about that?
Yeah, so it's, well, I'll start with the earlier lawsuit, actually.
So I had filed a lawsuit in Ohio in March, and on behalf of three Twitter users, some people may be familiar with, Mark Cengizzi, who's a cognitive theoretical scientist, Michael Sanger, who's a lawyer, and Daniel Coatsen, who was a lawyer and is now a stay-at-home dad.
They had all been highly critical of the government, COVID policies, government-induced COVID policies since the beginning.
But they had not been censored or suspended or anything on Twitter until the Biden administration took over.
And more noticeably, once the Biden administration began a public campaign where it was threatening tech companies with regulation or other legal consequences, they've even talked about criminal liability which is somewhat absurd.
If they don't censor people for spreading COVID misinformation.
Now, COVID misinformation, this is just a term that's used.
It's kind of insidious.
It's used to sort of discredit points of view that differ from those of the administration or those of the government.
So, you know, they've said things like masks don't work, vaccines don't stop transmission, lockdowns do more harm than good.
Things that are now, you know, the scientific consensus.
But So they were all suspended, and it was our contention that this was at the behest of the Biden administration.
Unfortunately, that lawsuit was kicked out.
The judge basically said that we didn't have enough evidence that our plaintiffs were censored because of the government, which I think is the totally wrong analysis for a number of reasons.
But some good came out of it, which is the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana were considering bringing a similar lawsuit.
Let me just jump in.
What was the evidence that you presented?
You said you think the analysis was wrong.
Right now, obviously, there's a lot more evidence, especially with these new lawsuits.
But what evidence did you have then?
At that time, what we had was a lot of public statements where Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Alejandro Mayarcas, then spokesperson for Biden, Jennifer Saki, We're going out in public and seeing these tech companies are killing people by not censoring them.
If they don't do more, they're going to face legal consequences.
We're working with them.
We're flagging posts that they should be censoring.
Now, when the government gets involved in telling a private company what to do, that is no longer a private company's action.
That's state action.
And that implicates the First Amendment.
You know, the argument had been, well, the tech companies are censoring people on their own.
It's not a First Amendment violation.
But we know now that it is.
So part of the problem was, when you file a lawsuit like this, you're supposed to be able to get to discovery.
You're supposed to be able to get documents from the government to corroborate what we suspect to be going on based on these public statements.
But when the judge throws it out prematurely at this early stage, we can't get there.
So you're in a catch-22, basically.
No, and this is really fascinating, except that what you just said, right?
I mean, these are very public, extremely transparent statements kind of telling these companies what they should do, right?
I mean, this is your contention, I guess.
Exactly.
And this is all, you know, this is really new territory.
It's really novel because of the nature of social media.
We've just never been here before.
So this is all going to, whatever happens, and I hope it's good, but this is all going to create sort of new law.
If in the 1950s, the government had gone around saying the New York Times can't print X, Y, and Z, or they're going to face legal consequences, that would have been recognized widely as a First Amendment violation, I have no doubt.
So, you know, a lot of this is just political.
If you draw a judge who...
You know, thinks that misinformation is killing people, then you might not have the outcome that you want.
And then there's also this whole kind of realm of what, you know, misinformation and disinformation means.
I'm going to jump to the Missouri and Louisiana lawsuit in a moment.
But, you know, you have to deal with this as well, right?
To kind of defining these terms.
Right.
It's really insidious.
It's sort of a, you know, way to get rid of people and ideas without having to engage with them.
And the problem is, you know, some people are saying some things that are really a bit out there and I don't think are true, like the vaccines have microchipped.
But where do you draw the line?
That's the issue.
Once you have the government getting involved in deciding what's true and what's not, you run into some real problems.
And I think the framers of the Constitution, the founders of our country, understood that part of the price you pay to live in a free society is that sometimes people will say things that are not true.
Sometimes people will even act on that false information and it'll have bad consequences.
But it's far worse than when the government is deciding who gets to be heard and who's silenced.
So yeah, I noticed, you know, at the top of your Twitter, you have this quote, if the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.
Yeah, I believe that was a George Washington quote, although I can't remember exactly when he said it at this moment.
But I think it's really true.
I mean, freedom of speech is fundamental in a free society.
If people don't know what's going on, if people can't openly debate ideas and policies and the science, then you don't live in a free society anymore.
Well, so let's jump to this lawsuit that you've joined now with this Louisiana AG injury and the Missouri AG. So tell me about it.
So it's very similar to the Ohio one, but it's broader.
So this lawsuit alleges that the government is censoring misinformation of various kinds, not just COVID. It's about election, so-called misinformation, the Hunter Biden laptop story, Even goes into abortion and climate change.
The plaintiffs that we're representing who joined the lawsuit are Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, two of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, and then Aaron Cariotti, who was a professor at UC Irvine before he got fired for not getting the vaccine, and he brought a lawsuit that gained him some notoriety.
And then another, a woman named Jill Hines, who runs an organization called Health Freedom Louisiana.
So we're really, we're alleging that their First Amendment rights were violated by the government through the censorship on social media.
And for instance, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff had, their accounts have been censored on numerous occasions.
They had videos taken down from YouTube.
They were having a roundtable discussion with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, about the harms of masking children.
That video was taken down.
I mean, This is crazy.
You have two of the top epidemiologists in the world talking about their area of expertise, and it doesn't fit with the narrative of the Biden administration.
With the governor.
With the governor, yeah.
And we also have Francis Collins of the NIH and Anthony Fauci, who presumably everyone knows.
Had made public statements right after they wrote the Great Barrington Declaration saying, the Great Barrington Declaration, for people who don't know, was sort of a short document saying that the harms of lockdowns were greater than the benefits and we should end them immediately.
It was written in about October of 2020.
So Fauci and Collins immediately jumped on it, called them a danger to society, and I believe are behind quite a bit of, you know, the censorship that happened to them.
There were actually whistleblower documents that kind of buttress this lawsuit now.
Yeah, we have a lot more evidence than we did when I filed the lawsuit in March.
So, in addition to these public statements, emails came out from DHS through a whistleblower that showed that the DHS had formed this Disinformation Governments Board, that it was clearly working with social media companies.
They make it look like they're working with them, but given the inherent power dynamic and these threats, there's a level of coercion that I think sort of eviscerates the argument that this is voluntary.
This is what the companies want to do.
And that's what defenders of these policies are saying.
The social media companies just, they want to accomplish the government's aim.
They're also lefties.
They like the Biden administration.
They're allowed to work together to do this.
I don't know that I buy that from a First Amendment perspective, but But I don't even think that's true.
I think it's extremely coercive.
And then, you know, that is a stronger First Amendment case.
Fascinating.
Well, okay.
And so now we also, Dr.
Anthony Fauci has announced his resignation.
This is around the time also when there's this new CDC guidance, which is, you know, quite, I guess, quite different from the previous guidance, would be the way to put it.
So what is your reaction to the new guidance?
It's a good question.
So the new guidance, I mean, basically, one of the most astonishing things is it says vaccinated and unvaccinated people should be treated the same.
There's no reason to treat them differently.
They seem to be actually embracing the focus protection, which is what the Great Barrington Declaration advocated, saying that we should protect the vulnerable and everybody else should go on with their lives.
Now, of course, what they would say is, well, things have changed with the vaccines and the virus becoming less virulent.
But I don't think that's true.
I think it's just clear that none of these tactics were working.
And so now they're coming around to the position they should have seen two years ago before they did so much damage.
The interesting thing about this is a number of universities, especially universities for the most part, are still continuing with vaccine mandates.
And their fallback has been, you know, when they've gone into court, well, the CDC recommends everyone get the vaccine.
And judges have said, well, we can't call that irrational because there's a sort of Something called a rational basis test.
We can't call it irrational to rely on CDC guidance.
So now if people bring lawsuits, it's going to be a bit different because the CDC isn't recommending this anymore.
Well, okay, so that's really interesting.
And something else that came out with the CDC guidelines was this acknowledgement of the existence of natural immunity, of, you know, prior infection to COVID conferring value in dealing with the disease, so to speak, right?
And so this was at best ignored, at worst, you know, called a conspiracy theory for quite a number of years.
So how does that impact your lawsuits?
Well, actually, all of my lawsuits have been on behalf of people with natural immunity.
Well, I want to say it's good for them.
It will be a question whether the courts are willing to look at the new science.
So what they may say—and this actually happened in a case I had against MSU in Michigan—the judge said, you know, if you had filed this lawsuit—because it went on for some time—so we had filed the lawsuit in July of 2021.
He ended up ruling on the motion to dismiss and dismissing the case in February of 22.
And he said in a footnote, if I was looking at the science today, I might find differently, but I have to look at it in July of 2021 because that's when MSU formulated their mandate, and then it was rational at that time.
So we are actually, as part of our appeal, is saying that's not the right way to look at it.
You should be looking at, you know, you don't have to be stuck in the time we brought the lawsuit.
You can actually look at the evolving science.
So that'll be a question.
You know, of course the science all along showed that natural immunity was better than the vaccines, frankly, but the CDC had been obfuscating that science.
So now that the CDC has come out and said this, that makes the case much stronger.
Okay.
So I guess you've already kind of answered my question.
You're appealing this original case.
Yeah, yeah.
So we're appealing to the Sixth Circuit.
And we're actually sort of finishing up the briefing, so it should be heard relatively soon.
So you weren't always doing this kind of litigation.
In fact, you were doing something completely different in the legal sphere.
So you were a public defender.
Yeah.
Tell me a bit about yourself.
How did you end up becoming a public defender in the first place?
Then we can talk about how things changed for you.
Yeah, well, I had sort of always wanted to...
I went to law school to be a public defender.
I wanted to...
I thought that the most powerless people in our society are those charged or convicted of crimes facing the power of the government.
They often don't get a fair shake.
And I... I was very interested in some of the inequities in the system, the fact that minorities, especially Black people in New York, are prosecuted so much more, go to prison so much more, face longer sentences.
So I really wanted to help represent those people.
And so that's where I was.
I worked for nine years as a public defender in New York.
Why the change?
What happened?
Well, COVID. So when COVID happened, I mean, I was, as you might imagine, a public defender in New York.
I was surrounded by people on the far left, the radical left, I would say.
And I had always had some differences of opinion.
I considered myself on the left, maybe almost as a default, because that's the people I was around.
I grew up in Ithaca, New York, which is like the most hippie place you can imagine.
But I had stronger, you know, free speech ideas.
So I got in some debates or arguments, sometimes turned into arguments.
About that.
I differed from a lot of the people around me on trans issues.
For instance, I did not believe that trans women should be playing women's sports.
I did not believe that we should be performing gender reassignment surgery on children.
So since about 2015, I had sort of had some big differences with the left, but still generally considered myself a leftist.
And then when COVID happened, I completely disagreed with everyone around me.
I was like, the government cannot tell people they can't leave their homes, they can't run their businesses, they can't send their kids to school.
This is completely insane.
They have to wear a piece of cloth on their face for an indefinite amount of time.
And I didn't understand why nobody around me saw the problem.
So I started doing quite a bit of research.
I didn't have anything to do.
I was locked down.
Everything was shut down.
You couldn't go out.
I'm a pretty social person.
And I don't have kids, so my life revolves around going to restaurants and going to bars at night.
And all of a sudden, I didn't have that to do.
So I just started We're doing a lot of research.
I looked into the history of pandemics, the fact that people, you know, historically had realized that lockdowns were not an effective means of quelling a virus that had already spread this widely, especially one that's contagious.
I stumbled across Martin Kuhldorf, Jay Bhattacharya, Jeffrey Tucker, Alex Berenson, some of the big anti-lockdown voices, and following them.
And I just found their work very convincing.
And, you know, I read the stuff on the other side, too.
And I checked myself a lot.
I thought, well, maybe I'm crazy, since 99% of the people around me I disagree.
Maybe it's me is crazy, but at every turn, I just realized that they were wrong.
So I began to write and speak out a little bit.
The American Institute for Economic Research published some of my articles.
I was there for the Great Barrington Declaration, so I sort of got to witness that.
And I I learned that a lot of my colleagues were saying I should be fired and what I was doing was horrible.
I didn't really want to go back to that environment.
And then at the same time, I really wanted to spend my time fighting this cause, fighting this government overreach and fighting for freedom, really.
As cliche as it sounds.
So I just saw this as the most important topic of our time.
So I was actually Jeffrey Tucker at AIER told me about the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
I looked them up.
I thought, wow, they're doing amazing.
They were at the time fighting business closures.
And so I applied.
I got the job, moved to D.C. And then by then it was April of 21.
So lockdowns were kind of a thing of the past and vaccine mandates were the new thing.
So I started with those.
So you were kind of cancelled?
Yeah.
So because you chose to leave, but you chose to leave under some duress as well, is that...
Yeah, I would say so.
I mean, I was certainly canceled by my friends.
I don't talk to any of them anymore.
And I had a couple, the summer of 2020, I had a couple of confrontations.
And it would start with me just saying something sort of timidly.
They'd be talking about how bad it was that someone had a party.
We'd all go to Prospect Park.
I lived in Brooklyn and sit like six feet apart on picnic blankets.
And they'd be like, oh, can you believe someone had a house party?
Just unbelievable.
And I'd sort of say timidly.
You know, there are some scientists who actually think that younger people should just be going out and living their lives.
And I was met with such hostility and a complete lack of interest in the ideas.
You know, we're talking about something that's more or less unprecedented, is hugely important in terms of the implications it has.
And there's a total shutdown of debate.
You can't even think about it.
You can't discuss it.
And that was a really big red flag to me, too.
You're just saying this is something I've been thinking about actually the last few days.
Just the idea that you might be thinking these weird, errant thoughts was a problem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And this strange conformity and this labeling of people as you're a bad person for even...
Contemplating whether this is the best way to go about things.
And I focused very heavily, although I do have strong views about the civil liberties aspect, as I mentioned, I focused a lot on the harms to the most vulnerable people.
Not physically vulnerable to COVID, but like children, people in developing countries, the working class, who I saw as really harmed by these policies.
I mean, children from poor families, for instance, they don't have a laptop per kid.
They might live five of them in a bedroom.
Shutting down schools is devastating for them and their education.
We had numbers from Oxfam saying that 130 million additional people Well, it would face starvation levels of hunger because of lockdowns, because supply chain disruptions worldwide.
The people who rely on, you know, restaurants running for their paychecks, who aren't, you know, the laptop Zoom class, who just get to sit at home and get their entire paycheck, you know, and maybe go to Hawaii while they're doing it.
These are the people who are really harmed.
And because I thought I could reach the left with that.
And I was really surprised that they did not care.
And it was very telling to me, too.
This has been just something that's really disturbing and fascinating to me.
You know, obviously, people living in this locked-down way, you know, themselves, that had to be, you know, created through society changing itself quite radically, right?
And then there's a whole bunch of people who just couldn't live that way.
It's kind of obvious, right?
And those people are left on the margins.
And so how did people respond when you talked about these sorts of things?
You know, they didn't really respond in any real way.
It was, again, immediately shutting down debate.
People are dying of COVID. How can you even talk about it?
If you really want to talk about the harms to minorities, it's COVID. Black people are dying at far higher rates than white people.
So it's just deflecting from the issues.
And that was really what I saw.
And what was your...
You know, reaction, I guess, to this?
You just gave up after a while and focused on your work?
Yeah, I sort of gave up.
I stopped wanting to hang out with them.
I mean, honestly, you know, the friendships ended, and I tend to blame them.
But also, I didn't really want to be around them, I have to admit.
And I saw that a lot of these people who pretend so much to care about, you know, the poor, the working class people in other countries, really don't.
I think a lot of what motivated some of them, frankly, is that they enjoyed sitting at home.
They suddenly don't have responsibilities.
They don't have to go to work from 9 to 5.
They can go work from San Francisco or the Bahamas or whatever.
And a lot of them, over time, I thought that's what they were doing.
Oh, you're so scared of COVID, but you're traveling too.
Hawaii.
This doesn't make any sense.
So I think I saw a lot of people for who they were, and it sort of turned me off.
So, based on this quote from George Washington earlier, would you call yourself a free speech absolutist?
You know, that's a good question.
I'm not 100% sure.
I'm not certain where I stand on threats and the like.
And there are, sometimes it goes far enough I think perhaps the law should get involved.
I would cite someone like Alex Jones as an example where he really tormented the parents of Sandy Hook.
And, you know, by saying it was a fraud and he didn't directly do anything, but a lot of his fans were really drove these parents out of their home.
And these are the people who've suffered a horrible tragedy.
And he went after them relentlessly, just with complete lies.
So something like that, I that might be where I think the law could begin to get involved.
But other other than something pretty much that extreme.
And then, you know, of course, should somebody be able to go on social media and say, kill John Smith?
That probably is another point at which the law would get involved.
But other than that, I'm pretty much an absolutist.
I mean, this is kind of a, I guess, theoretical discussion.
I've been thinking about exactly these same sorts of questions.
Yeah.
Because I've been, I suppose, radicalized towards the side of free speech absolutism.
People say, well, so what, is Holocaust denial okay?
And these are important things to me, right?
But I see whenever we start creating these caveats, I see them being taken advantage of, as they have been.
And that's my concern.
That's true.
And right, to play devil's advocate to what I just said, people on the other side would say, well, if you say that the vaccines don't work, you are effectively killing people.
So that's just as bad as saying, go kill John Smith.
I mean, I would argue that you can carve out a pretty narrow exception, direct threats.
If you are talking about physically harming someone directly and encouraging people to do that in a specific person or group, maybe, that would fall into this.
But anything else, I mean, once you start getting into, well, this could indirectly harm somebody because they might believe it and they might not get the vaccine.
No, that's protected speech.
Why do you think you thought so differently from so many different people?
I don't know.
It's a good question, and I've thought a lot about it.
Probably my upbringing.
My mother was a very free thinker and had a strong libertarian streak, even though she tended towards progressive points of view on many things.
She did always have a libertarian streak.
My father...
Grew up in the West Bank, immigrated to the United States in his late 20s, had really lived in the Middle East and under various repressive regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, as well as the West Bank.
And I heard his stories, you know, and I understand what life is like when the government It has so much power and I don't understand why people object to a government saying women have to wear headscarves but think it's okay for the government to tell people they have to wear masks.
It's basically the same thing.
So I think I saw a lot of parallels and you realize if you've seen a repressive society, you understand how important it is to live in a free society.
This is something that, of course, will be the subject of much academic work in the future.
But so many people really had this very, very strong thought, which, as we've been discussing, didn't really make a ton of sense, to the point of discriminating against their friends and families and so forth.
How do you think that happened?
Do you have any sense?
Well, there was, I mean, I would say it came from the top down.
There was, I would say, a campaign early on, and I don't know exactly who I would blame.
The New York Times and certainly media like that, that sort of took the stance that if you question things, if you question the lockdowns, you're a bad person.
For instance, Trump, he was not particularly anti-lockdown, but he sort of waffled early on.
He objected to masks.
He clearly didn't want to wear one.
So he was so reviled by people in the progressive circles that I think a lot of it was, well, whatever Trump says is obviously wrong.
And if you don't like lockdowns, well, you're like Trump.
Just this very simplistic, narrow thinking.
And so I think that had something to do with why this became so politicized and why it became a moral thing.
It was sort of a moralization of scientific questions or policy questions, which was very odd to me.
For instance, It very quickly, the question of natural immunity, if you believed in natural immunity, it was like a moral question.
And it's not.
It's a scientific question.
Whether masks work, again, was a scientific question.
But once, for some reason, this became a symbol of allegiance to the Democratic Party, you were a morally bad person if you didn't want to wear a mask.
Very strange.
I want to talk a little bit about some of these, you call it kind of responses to, for example, vaccine mandates, right?
People will say, traditionally, with non-genetic vaccines pre-COVID, there were expectations that people be vaccinated, for example, to travel to certain places, to go to school.
Of course, there's various types of exemptions around that.
But Are these mandates any different from past mandates?
Hugely.
I mean, first of all, there have never been vaccine mandates for such new vaccines.
Vaccines that are mandated are typically, you know, have been tested for decades.
These vaccines, once they started being mandated before they'd even been around a year, and certainly before they'd been tested, you know, or used widely on a population.
Another difference is that it's for a disease that doesn't pose a risk to most people under 70.
So you're mandating a vaccine for people who don't really face a risk from the virus itself.
And, I mean, mandates in the past were very narrow.
Okay, we have some for school children, and then maybe you get a yellow fever vaccine if you get a Zimbabwe or something, but to sort of these widespread employer mandates to get in many cities, as I'm sure you're well aware, living in New York, for a while you had to show a vaccine card to go to a restaurant or a theater.
We've never had that before, never.
So the sort of such broad mandates that affect so many people and with such a new vaccine is totally unprecedented.
Yeah, and it's interesting because this was a common response.
Hey, vaccines have always been mandated, right?
Yeah.
And so it often would take a bit of research for someone to figure out how to talk about these things.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's, I mean, we'll see.
I don't, you know, I think the jury's still out on exactly...
How dangerous these vaccines are.
We know they have side effects.
We know they're causing myocarditis in young men.
They're having effects on women's reproductive cycles.
We know that.
We don't know the long-term effects.
We don't know the effects of giving boosters, endless boosters.
It looks as though that may actually have a sort of negative effect, especially after too many.
There was a study from Israel showing that, I think, fourth booster, you started to actually have less immunity.
So, you know, and it's funny, I don't know if you saw this clip, I tweeted it.
There are 60 Minutes had interviewed Fauci in 1999 about the AIDS vaccine, a potential AIDS vaccine.
And he said something like, you wouldn't want to mandate it, you know, or you wouldn't want to mass vaccinate the population because it might look fine after a year, it might look fine after two years, but then maybe 12 years you start to see side effects manifest.
And that's something we've always understood, that side effects can take time to manifest.
If you take it and then a year goes by and everybody's fine, then you say, okay, that's good, now let's give it to 500 people, and then a year goes by and everything's fine.
You say, well, now let's give it to thousands of people, and then you find out that it takes 12 years for all hell to break loose, and then what have you done?
I think the vaccines that are in use in the US are all still emergency use authorization, actually.
It's a complicated question.
The Pfizer and Moderna now have ones that have been fully approved.
So emergency use authorization is typically for treatments that haven't been fully approved by the FDA, but so people can get them.
And it was really about Patient empowerment, right?
Like, if you're dying of cancer and there's some experimental treatment, we don't want to prevent you from getting that if it's your last hope.
But, weirdly, this was used in the opposite, you know, to force people to get this vaccine.
Well, it's a UA approved, now you have to get it.
There's a weird twist to it, which is that both in the case of Pfizer and Moderna, the vaccines that are the exact brand or I don't know what you call it that's approved is not the one that's in distribution.
So with Pfizer, the Comirnaty is fully approved, but it's the BioNTech they're using.
The community is not widely available for distribution for some reason.
There are conspiracy theories, or there are theories, I shouldn't dismiss them as conspiracy theories, about why that is maybe having to do with liability, and it's unclear whether they're exactly the same or not.
The fact sheet says that they're legally distinct, but formulaically the same, but apparently that could involve different inactive ingredients, which can affect the safety and efficacy, so we're not sure.
Yeah, well, no, and this is, and just so many complications, right?
Everything, it's almost like this fog of, fog of complication that prevents you from being able to just kind of sit down and make good decisions for yourself.
That's, yes, that's absolutely right.
Yeah.
And people just, I mean, I think people understandably don't think that they're getting accurate information because there's been such a campaign to, who was it, Anish Jha just said the other day, the COVID czar in the White House, the vaccines have no adverse effects.
That's absolutely ridiculous.
All vaccines, all medical products, carry some risk of adverse effects, and we know that people have had adverse effects from these.
Now, whether that outweighs the cost, you know, the benefit or risk analysis for anybody or any particular person, we don't know.
That doesn't mean that nobody should get them.
But to claim that there are no adverse effects at all is a lie.
That's misinformation.
I would not call myself right-wing.
I don't know how to define myself, I guess.
Well, no, I'm, of course, joking, right, when I say this, but it seems like everyone who takes this position that's not the apparent mainstream position is called A right-wing person now, right?
Yep.
And that's another insidious tactic that's sort of used to discredit people.
They sort of put something before your name.
It's a Koch-funded, right-wing conspiracy theorist.
And then when some people Google you, that's what they see.
And then you're automatically dismissed.
And it's highly effective.
I actually noticed that I Googled somebody the other day who's on our side of things.
What they put before his name was something like...
I'm a Trump defender, conspiracy theorist, whatever.
And I had a moment where I was like, oh, this person's not credible.
And I was like, no, I'm just falling for this.
They do the same thing to me and to so many people I know.
But it's highly effective.
And it's, again, a way of discrediting you and making sure the public doesn't take you seriously without having to engage with your views at all.
I feel like there's some kind of Rubicon that's been crossed with these new CDC guidelines, which I would argue most of which were known a couple of years ago.
And then also, of course, Dr.
Fauci resigning.
I don't think it's by accident that it's happening now.
I guess the question is, Do you think there is some shift?
Are you seeing any sense of a shift in the way the information is being narrated in the mainstream, so to speak?
No.
I mean, this doesn't make me hopeful at all.
First of all, the CDC has not said, you know, we made a mistake, or we should have listened to Dr.
Kulldorf and Bhattacharya.
They're just pretending, you know, they're doing this sort of about-face.
But, of course, if they were pressed on it, they would say, oh, no, it's just with the vaccines, and the variants aren't as bad, and that's why we can go back to normal life, and that's why we don't need mandates and masks.
I mean, other than the acknowledgement of natural immunity, that's a little bit hopeful.
But I think the fact that they haven't had to account for their lies and deceit of the American public is really troubling.
There's also, frankly, Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, has been talking about how the reason the CDC went wrong is because they didn't do enough.
They didn't lock people down harder.
She didn't use those words, but that's reading between the lines, that they should have really consolidated their power and done more, which they already abused.
I mean, the CDC does not have rulemaking authority delegated by Congress, yet the CDC did, you know, the eviction moratorium, the federal mask mandate.
They don't have this authority, yet they just did it.
It was complete abuse.
And unless there's a real change, I'm afraid it's just going to happen again.
What do you think that change would need to be?
Well, I think courts need to start recognizing that the CDC doesn't have this power.
Now, part of the problem, so the CDC eviction moratorium, I don't know if you're familiar with it, where the CDC basically said landlords couldn't evict people during COVID because it would spread COVID. I mean, this sounds really nice and warm and fuzzy, but a lot of landlords are mom-and-pop landlords.
This really harmed a lot of people who are lower middle class.
We're not talking all about really rich landlords.
And then there were people, like lawyers and doctors, who were like, oh, I don't have to pay my rent.
I can just go to Abu Dhabi.
Have a nice trip on that money.
And also, the CDC simply doesn't have the authority to do this.
And it's really important, for separation of powers reasons, that agencies don't just run amok and start making laws that they don't have the authority to make.
So what happened was people sued.
We sued, actually, before I joined my organization.
It ended up going up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, yeah, the CDC can't do this.
But They got away with it for like a year and a half, because that's how long it takes the court case to go on.
Someone said something at some point like, yeah, we know we can't really do this, but we're just going to do it until the court tells us we can't.
I mean, that is unconscionable.
For government officials to say that they're sort of abusing the system and abusing separation of powers, I mean, courts, there has to be some accountability.
And I don't exactly know what it looks like, but...
I remember seeing a tweet from you at some point where you had put up a screenshot of how long, I think it was the CDC or possibly HHS, was going to take to get you your FOIA request on something that...
You would kind of need pretty quickly.
I don't know if you remember what I'm talking about.
I do, yes.
We have a FOIA request pending.
This is sort of related to the lawsuit in Ohio, the Cengizy lawsuit.
We asked for documents related to this and specifically for their names to see if they had been targeted and also just correspondence between the government and Twitter to see what had gone on there.
We made the FOIA request and they said it might take two years Well, they have like 20 days to respond.
They can ask for another 10 days for complex requests.
But this is just because, I mean, you're just violating our statutory FOIA rights and sort of being brazen about it.
So we sued.
That lawsuit is pending.
Just so many lawsuits.
Yeah, yeah.
But they keep getting away with it.
As we kind of finish up, just tell me a little bit about this organization that you're working for.
Where did it come from?
Yeah, so the New Civil Liberties Alliance, as you can tell from the name, we're sort of seeking to fill a gap that has been lashed by organizations like the ACLU. Philip Hamburger is the founder.
He's a professor of law at Columbia University, and he identified a number of years ago this sort of problem of administrative agencies infringing on Americans' rights.
And a lot of people don't even, you know, realize how far it goes.
So the SEC, for instance, has a lot of proceedings where the Constitution gives you a right to a jury trial in criminal cases.
The idea is if you're going to suffer severe adverse consequences, you get a jury, not one judge.
They have these administrative proceedings where you don't get a hearing, but you can lose your entire livelihood, your entire savings, and it's tried by a judge in the SEC. They're all within the agency.
There are just various other ways in which agencies exploit the power that they have.
And so COVID kind of made that writ large, I would say.
We really, a lot of us who, I hadn't realized this before.
And when I looked at it, I was like, oh, my God.
So, you know, I really like what the organization is doing.
And I think we've been sort of at the forefront for this reason, challenging a lot of these issues.
I don't even know what you call them, rules, laws, mandates.
They're not supposed to be anything.
Given the reality you just described, what do you think like-minded individuals should be doing at this point?
Well, that's a good question.
I mean, writing, speaking, talking to the people around them.
I mean, one way of putting it that I, you know, sort of thought of is, and I see this from a lot of my friends and relatives on the left, is that they want their policies in place and they don't really care how it gets there, you know, whether it's abortion or climate change.
That's the wrong way of looking at it, in my opinion.
The fundamental principles we have for free speech, for separation of powers, those are more important than any particular policy.
That's what makes us American.
That's what's supposed to bring us together.
And so that's actually caused me to reassess a lot of my ideas about things.
And I've sort of, you know, there were points where I would have actually advocated for that.
I wanted my policy in place.
I would have been okay with Whatever it took to get there.
And now I've sort of realized that that's wrong.
The most important thing is to maintain the principles that are intrinsic to our Constitution.
And so I think that's an important message to get out.
And so what's next for Janine Yunus?
Well, I'm sure the government will keep me busy.
I mean, right now I'm really busy with these censorship cases.
And unfortunately, I'm getting a lot of letters from college students or emails from college students about the booster mandates.
So I might be doing some of that.
Actually, it was contacted by the family of a 19 year old kid at MSU who had got the two doses of Pfizer last fall because he had to to go to school as a freshman.
Got a blood clot in his leg two months later.
So we don't know.
You know, I don't want to jump to conclusions could have been caused by the vaccine.
Maybe not.
Had been healthy with no health, you know, no health problems prior to that.
He got an exemption for the booster mandate for the spring semester.
But now they won't let him onto campus or take his classes unless he gets the booster, which is absolutely absurd.
So there are just these sorts of scenarios.
And just not to belabor this, but even under this new CDC guidance?
Yeah.
Yeah.
MSU has said that they're not planning to change, which is, so this makes for some, for the lawyers out there, this makes for some good lawsuits because since the judge is one of the bases for finding against us has been, well, we can't say the CDC recommendations are irrational.
Well, now it's not the CDC recommendations, so what are you going to fall back on?
So there should be some lawsuits forthcoming if these universities want to keep this up and keep oppressing these young people like this.
Well, Janine Younes, such a pleasure to have you on.
Oh, thank you so much.
Thank you all for joining Janine Younes and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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