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April 5, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

27:10

Pilots Sue CDC Over Mandates with Janviere Carlin

Pilot Janviere Carlin, lead plaintiff, discusses her lawsuit against the CDC with RFK Jr.

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	Hey everybody, my guest today is Jean-Bierre Carlin, who is a JetBlue pilot.
	She's been a commercial aviation pilot for 25 years.
	She's worked for JetBlue for 10 years.
	She is also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the CDC to block The never-ending federal transportation mask mandates.
	She is arguing, along with 10 other pilots in this lawsuit, that forced masking harms pilots' health, creates dangers to aviation safety.
	Jean Vier is the wife Of an active duty Navy pilot.
	He has been a pilot for 28 years.
	She is the mother of two teens.
	Welcome to the show, John Beard.
	Thank you very much, and thank you for your courage and for standing up.
	You said in your note to me that you're not a very interesting person, but your life has now taken an interesting turn, hasn't it?
	I'd much rather be in that cabin in the woods at this point in my life.
	How did it happen?
	Well, I would blame it on the vaccine mandate being brought to us in our employment, our employers.
	It kind of drove a lot of us that are anti-mandate or we have a religious exemption or medical exemption or whatever reason.
	It kind of drove us together to help support each other through those issues.
	And the extension of the mask mandate for the fifth time in January was when We're already like-minded, and then we start discussing that issue more thoroughly and finding out that we all kind of had the same thoughts and concerns about it, as it applies to pilots especially, that we probably needed to stand up and do something about it, or else it was never going to go away.
	And the way in which it came about was obvious that there's no end in sight.
	It doesn't matter if they say it's going to end on a certain date.
	That date comes and goes, and here we are.
	Going into April.
	How did you find the other pilots through internet chat groups?
	Well, it's a very small community, aviation is.
	And just within my own friends at JetBlue, when we were helping each other out, kind of navigating our paths in the vaccine mandate, when you start discussing other issues and you find out that everybody's similar-minded in those as well, and then you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, and you start collecting your people.
	So that's how we actually ended up with people from Southwest and American Airlines and PSA as well.
	We actually kept the lawsuit at 10 people so we wouldn't get too unruly because we're all type A and we all have a lot of opinions.
	So we definitely could have had other airlines and a lot more people involved.
	But that's how we got the initial group together.
	And were you talking directly to each other?
	And how did you educate each other?
	What resources were you going to?
	Well, everybody definitely brings a different experience to the issue.
	The networking portion of it actually led me to meet a couple of folks that you might even be interested in talking to that actually A little more persecuted than the rest of us actually being fined by TSA, harassed by their companies and put on medical leave or administrative leave for standing up to the safety concerns of the mask mandate.
	So that probably kind of lit our fire that, you know, we really do have issues and the fact that the mandate never Went through the proper legislative process in the first place.
	Gave us ammunition that our voices weren't heard in any of this.
	It's no longer an emergency issue like it was at first.
	Now it's been 14 months.
	It's had plenty of time to have been revisited and made these concerns known and gone through a proper process, but it hasn't.
	And I don't believe there was ever any intention of doing so.
	And we just get ignored and we get harassed.
	By government agencies and co-workers and passengers.
	And it's a very hostile situation for us.
	And what is your objection to the mass mandates?
	Are you objecting to the mass for the pilots or also for the passengers?
	Well, the lawsuit itself, and we have seven points in there.
	for health reasons for us.
	And that extends to passengers because we're all people.
	We all breathe the same exact way.
	The violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, that it wasn't lawfully enacted in the first place.
	We didn't have a comment period where we would have made these things known.
	The fact that none of the 50 states now has a mask mandate.
	So we're looking at 10th Amendment issues of states' rights.
	The conflict between the actual CDC order vice our regulations under the Federal Aviation Regulations, which are actual real laws that we 100% have to follow in order to be pilots and be safe, it puts us in conflict of the two, whether we Suffocate ourselves by masking vice, certifying ourselves as being fit and healthy to fly an airplane.
	And then there's issues with the informed consent as far as emergency use authorization of masking and the types of masks that are used.
	And the fact that they ignored the studies.
	There were tons of studies early on prior to COVID that That illustrated that masking was not effective.
	And we have never been a masked nation.
	And back to the 1900s with the Spanish flu, where the masking actually was shown to be harmful with the pneumonia.
	Bacterial pneumonia caused by the mask.
	So those are our seven points in our lawsuit.
	And our concerns are legislative.
	There are human health issues.
	So it's not just pilots, but the fact that the mask mandate affects us a little bit differently.
	It's something that we were hoping to use to our advantage in order to get this resolved and hopefully just make it go away for everyone.
	Just so people know, the Administrative Procedure Act sets out the procedures that regulatory agencies need to, all of the regulatory hoops that they need to Jump through in order to promulgate a regulation.
	This was what the courts have said.
	If Congress wants to pass a law, they vote on it and it gets passed.
	There are no procedures that they need to go through because there are elected representatives.
	And we have a remedy, at least theoretically, which is voting them out of office if we don't like what they do.
	That remedy doesn't exist for regulatory officers.
	Somebody like Tony Fauci can stay in office for 50 years with no election, and he's pretty much impervious to public opinion.
	He does what he wants to do, and there's no public accountability or Accountability to our democracy.
	So what the courts have said, and Congress has also said, if the regulatory agencies want to pass a rule, they have to involve democracy.
	And there's a number of steps.
	One is they have to publish a proposed rule in newspapers of records and in newspapers that are likely to be seen by all the people who are affected by the law.
	They then have to issue an environmental impact statement and a regulatory impact statement and an economic impact statement.
	And those documents outline all the science that they relied on That underlie the new rule.
	They also have to do a cost-benefit analysis, saying who's going to be hurt by the rule, who is going to be helped, and showing that the benefits of the rule will, society-wide, exceed the cost.
	And then they have to also show that there are no less burdensome alternatives for accomplishing the same objective.
	None of that happened here.
	Literally, you just had one technocrat, Tony Fauci, who one week says masks don't work, and then two or three weeks later says everybody put them on.
	And he was saying that, by the way, publicly and privately.
	He wasn't just saying it to deter people from buying up a mask supply.
	He was telling it to his boss for her personal purpose.
	Conduct and protecting her family.
	He told her in a private email they don't work, but the science is overwhelming and masks don't work.
	There are very few, and I want to put this caveat on, there are very few studies that are peer-reviewed that look at coronavirus.
	Most of the existing study are flu studies, but we definitely need to study it.
	As you say, we should have the regulators after they publish the environmental impact statement.
	There's a notice and comment period where every member of the public can write a letter and a comment and say, hey, you didn't look at this.
	You didn't look at the impact on my industry.
	We need to do that.
	And there's a public hearing.
	Tony Fauci has to bring in his witnesses, his scientists, his experts.
	He has to lay out and explain the science that he relied on, and we can cross-examine them.
	And we get to bring our own witnesses, and he can cross-examine them.
	And then you have an administrative law judge that makes a finding that is based upon a rational interpretation of the evidence.
	if it is arbitrary and capricious, all of those safeguards are put in place to make sure that whatever regulation is passed in America, that it first is annealed in the furnace of democracy.
	Absolutely.
	And none of that happened.
	You just had one guy who says, put them on, and there's no challenging.
	So I'm very, very happy that you're standing up and making sure.
	I've spent 40 years doing regulatory agencies and big polluters for failing to go through these regulatory processes.
	I've been through it many, many times, and I'm really shocked by what they got away with.
	Let me ask you this.
	What are the entities?
	I know some of the flight attendant unions have been really strong on asking for masks.
	You know, when I fly, I fly two or three times a week.
	And a lot of times, almost every flight I get on, flight attendants will come to me and say, thank you for what we're doing.
	And we don't want to wear these masks.
	I'm glad to hear that.
	What are you finding?
	I mean, what is your impression about why the Flight Attendants Union is so strong on this issue?
	And what are you seeing among the flight attendants and other pilots?
	Well, I know that the support is bigger than the non-support.
	We've got 21 states' attorneys that are suing now.
	We've got 17 congressmen who are suing.
	We've got the Senate Resolution Act.
	Like I said, we had the 11 CEOs that wrote the letter to Biden telling them that it was done.
	We have a flight attendant lawsuit that we are not involved with, but we all know each other, so we're helping each other out with what we're learning.
	As we proceed, there's 21 lawsuits against the CDC right now.
	There might even be more.
	So I know, and even anecdotally, my personal experience is that majority of the feedback to our articles, all of our personal friends and family and acquaintances are supportive.
	And mostly because none of it makes sense anymore, especially because we're the only industry that's still masked.
	But the naysayers, surprisingly, one of the flight attendant unions, I think it's APA, I'm not familiar with all the flight attendant unions, but As far as I know, that's the big one that is lobbying against it.
	And I honestly, other than saying they enjoy their control a little too much, it escapes me why people are still holding on to that, especially in the environment of airplanes.
	You know, early on when all of this started, the airlines and the government, all of a sudden now they had a need to make the public feel ultra safe to get back into aviation so the industry didn't crumble.
	And, you know, Embraer, Airbus, Boeing, Harvard, DARPA, which are U.S. military, they conducted these very extensive studies on how safe the cabin air is, the exchange rate of the cabin air.
	You can't get on a flight and not hear that announcement, you know, three times telling you how safe the air is and are...
	Our HEPA filters are better than hospital grade, and they filter out 99.7% of viruses and pathogens.
	So the masks came later as an added measure.
	Taking them away doesn't negate that bottom line of safety.
	So I honestly can't answer your question, except that some people, and not just flight attendants, it's all over.
	They just like that extra control.
	I don't have a better answer than that.
	How do you explain that management is now supporting you?
	Well, I don't understand that myself, to be honest.
	I know that we have a letter from the CEOs, and it kind of touches on a lot of the points that we made in our lawsuit and that we talk about when 10 of us do interviews.
	But we have personal experiences among even just our group of 10 where we're still being harassed up the chain of command management.
	Where we're being brought in because a passenger complains that they may see us without a mask on and they're not happy about it.
	I'm not 100% sure, you know, what their motivations are and how they don't fall in line with the fact that the, you know, even the CEOs of our companies are in support of seeing this.
	Yeah, again, I don't have a good answer for that one either.
	How do you think the passengers feel?
	I mean, if you walked onto a fully loaded 747 and you said, we're going to take a pull, you Raise your hand if you want to keep the mask on and raise your hand.
	Who would win that vote?
	Well, I personally believe the way I would preface it is to say, hey, this flight's going to be a freedom of choice flight.
	If you don't want to wear one, take it off.
	If you want to wear one, keep it on and nobody pick on anybody.
	And that would be how I would handle it.
	And I personally feel that the majority of people would take them off.
	You can't breathe.
	It's very uncomfortable.
	And If somebody is sitting beside you and they're eating or drinking the whole time, they're technically eating or drinking, which is one of the times where you're exempt to wear a mask.
	So what difference does it make?
	The whole entire system is contradictory of itself.
	And that's what really drives critical thinkers crazy.
	It doesn't make sense.
	There's no more reason.
	There's no more purpose.
	It needs to go away.
	Has there been any retribution against you, either from management, I'm assuming the answer to that is no, or from other people, of people getting angry at you?
	Me personally?
	Yes.
	Yes, yes.
	I have not had an issue with management management.
	Airline management, personally.
	But we have to figure out ways where we can maintain the ability to stay healthy so we can continue to fly, as I mentioned before, about the regulations with maintaining our medical certificate.
	So, you know, it impacts each one of us independently.
	So somebody may be fine wearing a mask up to 16 hours a day, but the majority of people, not.
	So we would find ways to make it work so that we would still technically be in compliance but not suffocating ourselves.
	But personally...
	Give me some of your techniques for doing that.
	You don't knock yourself in trouble.
	I'm going to incriminate myself.
	Shut the curtain of the galley and just...
	Well, let's just say I always have a mask on my being and I do a lot of hydrating because it is very dehydrating to be a pilot.
	So you can take your mask off when you're drinking water.
	Yes, so I may do a lot of eating and drinking.
	Do you think the pilots, when they go lock themselves in that bulletproof cabin, are they all keeping the mask on the entire flight?
	I have encountered a couple that do.
	Majority of us do not.
	Because that's one of the other things that's contradictory to the mandate.
	We aren't required to wear masks while we're operating the plane.
	Because it could cause a safety issue.
	So if that's the case, why would that not be the case when I'm walking through the airport on my way to the plane or when I'm walking around the airplane, checking the airplane for airworthiness of flight?
	So behind the door, we do not need to have it.
	And each company was left, the FAA left it up to the company to determine what their rules were.
	That's actually another interesting point is that the FAA has never said, What our guidelines are, except for oxygen.
	But in the case of oxygen, they left it up to the airlines to study it and decide what was the best practice.
	So in my own company, they determined that because of the time it takes to actually remove your mask and put on an oxygen mask, if you had a rapid decompression of the airplane, that it probably was a safety of flight issue.
	So the FAA then relaxed the oxygen requirements for us so that we don't have to test our mask.
	We don't have to go on oxygen if the other pilot leaves the cockpit and stuff.
	But that's the only extent that the FAA ever actually made a rule or a judgment pertaining to, you know, our ability to breathe or our safety for flight or the requirements of us to wear the mask.
	Which is interesting because none of the other issues have been studied at all.
	How about your husband who flies in the Navy?
	Are the pilots in the Navy generally against the mandates?
	He's actually been in 28 years, so he's out of the flying role right now.
	He's actually in an academic role, so it's a completely different environment for him.
	So I can't really speak to what the consensus is among military pilots right now.
	You know, one of the things that you've talked about a little bit is the social tensions that arise from these mandates and kind of the opportunity for difficulties between pilots with passengers, etc.
	Is that another issue?
	Absolutely.
	We call it chaos in the sky in our lawsuit.
	The amount of incidents that we have in the air that involve physical or verbal incidents Basically, where somebody gets a yellow card is what we call it.
	They're warned or they're escorted off the plane at the end of the flight or the flight returns to base and kicks people off.
	We had nearly 6,000 incidents last year and over 4,000 of them were directly related to masking.
	And this year is on course for being an even higher number.
	And over half of those are directly related to masking.
	So there's actually the flight attendants lawsuit that I mentioned goes into a lot more detail about how they're impacted.
	But even the CEO letter recognizes that it puts us in, it makes us federal mask police is what we say.
	You know, we're not federal mask policemen.
	We are pilots, and we're trying to fly the plane safely from point A to point B. And generally, it entails a certain level of stress as it is.
	So we don't need that extra stress.
	And dealing with passengers who are upset that somebody is not wearing a mask or a flight attendant is upset that somebody's got Words on their mask that they don't like and they want them kicked off the plane or the two-year-old who just can't seem to figure out, you know, what?
	This doesn't make any sense.
	I'm not wearing a mask.
	And now all of a sudden they're getting kicked off.
	It's a really horrible position to be put in.
	And that was actually one of the things I was getting to when you asked if there were other reasons.
	Is that chaos in the sky and the extra added stress that it causes us?
	But it's also even more important safety things like we can't understand each other if we're masked.
	You know, we can hear ATC talking sometimes and you can tell they have a mask on and it's hard to hear.
	And now you're having to ask them to repeat instructions that could be critical or time sensitive.
	Same thing goes for possibly smelling alcohol on a coworker or a passenger, you know, that decision.
	Lies with us whether or not a passenger is maybe too inebriated to go on a flight.
	Now we have olfactory is impaired.
	We actually have a gentleman in our lawsuit group who handled an electrical emergency above 18,000 feet where he actually, you know, had he had his nose You know, he wouldn't have been able to smell it and extra time matters in that kind of a situation.
	So there's a lot more safety issues that pertain to us with regard to masking and pilots.
	And the interesting part in our company in particular, I believe they're taking a wait and see approach with what's going on with the mandate, the vaccine mandate.
	But our manuals have already been changed and we are beholden to Abide by our manuals and the manuals actually talk about if you're not vaccinated that the masking rules are more stringent in the cockpit.
	So now we're back to the fact of do we have to wear a mask while we fly the airplane?
	Do we have to wear a mask when the door is closed?
	Do we have to wear a mask when we're a jump seater up front?
	So it's going to get a little interesting to see how this progresses and that's why I said it's kind of a cornerstone This lawsuit is the cornerstone of the bigger issues that hopefully it will all crumble.
	That's why we're starting where we are.
	Let me ask you about a side issue, which is the vaccines, which is the issue that you just had.
	How are you involved with this?
	Those of us who are kind of plugged into the community hear a lot of horror stories about pilots getting injured.
	You don't know how much of that is true and how much of it is just rumor.
	What are you hearing and what are you experiencing?
	Well, first of all, my opinions are my own, obviously, and definitely separate from JetBlue.
	And we all of our group of 10 are representing ourselves and our own opinions.
	And the vaccine issue is not something that I really talk about publicly, but I will tell you for 100% that there are people that are impacted by it and have lost their medical certificates and are on medical leave because they're unable to fly.
	That's a 100% fact.
	And are the airlines recognizing that that might be a problem or are they just in total denial?
	Like I said, I don't have good insight on that because we've been focusing on the masks as kind of the cornerstone.
	We feel like once we tackle that monster that the rest will come down, hopefully, but we'll kind of cross that bridge when we get to it.
	I don't know.
	Honestly, when we filed our lawsuit just for the masks, we didn't even have company support at that time.
	But very shortly after that, I'm sure you're aware, the 11 CEOs of the Major airlines wrote a letter to President Biden telling them that they needed this to end.
	It was time.
	So we know we have their support now, but nobody's ever reached out to us except for one person in the group.
	Her management actually did reach out and give support to her, but everybody else were just kind of doing our own thing.
	John Deere, how can our listeners find you and support you?
	Well, a gentleman that I mentioned, I think I mentioned him.
	If I didn't, I should have.
	Lucas Wall was actually the first person to try to sue the CDC and the TSA. He's a disabled American veteran, and he has kind of taken it upon himself to build up a little coalition, the Americans Against Mask Mandates.
	So we're all putting our brain power together.
	So Lucas has been key in helping us as far as we've gotten in this.
	So we do have a GoFundMe set up.
	We're pro se, so we don't expect and we hope not to have too many legal battles, but we don't know yet.
	There could come a point where we need to hire a lawyer so we can help make this go away.
	But we do have...
	Let me just tell you the website.
	Yeah, please.
	Okay.
	It's bit.ly forward slash mask lawsuit.
	And Lucas is real good about linking all the articles and any updates to the various lawsuits.
	He's working 13 lawsuits with disabled Americans right now who are whole other issues of discrimination and civil rights violations.
	It's really disgusting how these agencies are treating...
	Americans in so many ways.
	So I actually encourage all the listeners, if you're fed up, that you need to practice civil disobedience peacefully.
	You need to get educated on...
	I've learned so much over these past two years.
	I am so not interested in politics and government, and now I feel like, ugh, if I have a degree...
	But we all need to get educated.
	We all need to get involved.
	And if it's just calling a lawmaker and making your opinions known, definitely, at a minimum, do those kinds of things.
	But to know what your actual rights are and to start exercising them when these kind of overreaches happen to us.
	And it becomes obvious that...
	They're nefarious, and they're not any longer for the common good.
	Everybody needs to be a patriot right now, and I appreciate you, Mr.
	Kennedy, for all the work you do.
	I'm 100 pages into your Fauci book, and my God, I just never knew that we had so many problems in our country.
	It's terrifying, and I appreciate that your podcast gives hope, because I've actually enjoyed listening to a lot of your guests, to the trucker, convoy, and And JPCers and whatnot, and people who are fighting in different ways, but that's the point, is everybody has got to get involved, especially if you have kids.
	You don't want your kids dealing with this down the road.
	It's terrifying.
	John Vieira Carlin, thank you so much for your leadership and your courage.

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