Lawyer Mark Chenoweth breaks down a recent landmark settlement
Lawyer Mark Chenoweth details the landmark settlement for Brie Dressen, a vaccine trial volunteer diagnosed with injuries after the NIH ignored her claims. He explains how Facebook repeatedly shut down her support groups, an action Chenoweth attributes to White House pressure and the Stanford Internet Observatory monitoring COVID speech. While Dressen initially hesitated to speak out, she now advocates for injured individuals, noting similar cases where fundraising was blocked after vaccinations. The settlement concludes that a new executive order prohibiting censorship made it difficult to argue ongoing suppression, risking courts deeming such litigation moot. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Brie Dressen's Vaccine Injury00:02:04
Flaherty and some of the individuals in the Biden administration who were engaged in censorship against our clients on Facebook.
So, Brie Dressen was an individual who was vaccine injured, and she's not just saying this.
She actually volunteered for the vaccine trials.
She was injured in the trials.
So, she's not anti vax.
She volunteered to be one of the first people to get the vaccine, and she was diagnosed as injured by the National Institutes of Health during the trials.
So, this wasn't You know, this wasn't somebody who was biased in her favor who diagnosed her.
This was part of the trial process.
Technically, I'll just mention this for the record.
Technically, this was after she was basically the company kind of ignored her for a while.
And after great appeals, she actually was, yeah, she calls it the golden ticket.
She got the golden ticket, one of the few people that got to go to the NIH labs, I guess, and get a treatment.
Yeah.
Right.
No, that's fair.
I mean, it was, I was probably underselling what it took to get there.
Yeah.
But she was wanting to, at first, she didn't want to say anything because she didn't want to discourage anyone from getting the vaccine.
She didn't want to participate in something that might lead to vaccine hesitancy.
She thought, well, maybe that wasn't her role.
And then she realized as more people were being injured by the vaccine, even if it's a tiny percentage, she said, well, wait a minute, we need to have support groups for these folks.
Just like you might have a diabetes support group or a cancer support group, why can't you have a Facebook group online for people who?
Have been vaccine injured.
And as she tried to set these groups up, Facebook kept shutting them down, shutting them down, shutting them down.
Well, we have the evidence that they were doing that at the behest of the White House, at the behest of people in the administration, at the behest of an entity at Stanford that was monitoring some of this kind of COVID speech in Stanford.
It stands for Internet Observatory.
Yes, isn't that sort of an Orwellian name, isn't it?
It's a bizarre name.
Yes.
Ongoing Litigation and Funds00:01:30
And so that litigation is ongoing as well.
And so we're determined to stand up for the First Amendment rights of people like Brie Dresson and the other people who were trying to participate in her Facebook group.
One of the other clients in that case lost his son just a few days after his son got the vaccine and was not able to raise funds.
He wanted to come to Washington and testify, and he was trying to raise funds on one of these websites that allows you to.
To raise funds, like CrowdFundMe or something like that.
Crowdsourcing, exactly.
Crowdsourcing.
And he was shut down.
So there were definitely active efforts on the part of the last administration to prevent people's speech from getting out there on topics that were important to all Americans.
And so, like I say, those cases are ongoing and we're continuing to push, and we may be able to get different terms in those settlement agreements, or in some cases, we may take those all the way to a court judgment.
The tricky thing, people say, well, why did you settle?
Well, the tricky thing is once the president put out the executive order saying no more censorship, it makes it more difficult to suggest that it's an ongoing problem.
And so you run the risk that a court might decide, oh, your case is moot.
You know, you're not, there's no relief that we can give you that you haven't already gotten from the administration.