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Editor’s note: This op-ed is based on remarks Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland delivered on Aug. 29, 2026, at the Brownstone Institute’s second annual conference at Polyface Farm.
I had the privilege of participating in the Brownstone Institute‘s second annual conference at Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. What a wonderful venue, and what a wonderful community of people seeking truth. Having taught in major universities for 20 years, with all the attendant stuffiness and hierarchy, it was truly a joy to be part of a community genuinely committed to better understanding the world and what we can do to improve it.
Without a doubt, the U.S. government shredded the Constitution during COVID, violating all the key provisions of the First Amendment: freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and the right to petition the government for grievances.
This outrage occurred despite no “pandemic exception.” And it’s not like government officials were unfamiliar with smallpox — with its fatality rate of nearly 30% — at the time of America’s founding.
Just a few years ago, the government shuttered religious institutions, censored and deplatformed truth-tellers, enacted lockdowns and ignored entreaties to courts and agencies. Government policy destroyed private property and shoveled wealth upwards to a global oligarchy.
So far, there has been no real accountability. Brownstone Institute’s new book, “The Covid Response at Five Years: A History of the End of Civilization,” accurately captures the continuing failure to reckon with COVID.
Undoubtedly, our freedoms remain fragile.
But the pushback mounted — by Brownstone Institute, Children’s Health Defense (CHD), FLCCC/Independent Medical Alliance, Health Freedom Defense Fund, Solari, Feds for Freedom, Stand for Health Freedom, X, Substack, many podcasts and more — made a huge difference. These sources of independent information helped lead people out of the catastrophe — but we are not yet out of the woods.
Still, let’s remember back five years. Let’s account for the things today that would have been unthinkable in 2021:
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Secretary of Health and Human Services, with deputies Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., and Martin Kulldorf, Ph.D., who helped write “The Great Barrington Declaration.”
- Dr. Anthony Fauci held in criminal contempt by a Senate Committee, with his vapid diaries exposed for the whole world to see.
- Dr. David Morens, Fauci’s long-time aide, awaiting a prison sentence after having taken a plea, and who has implicated Peter Daszak, Ph.D., and other co-conspirators.
- Vincent Munster, Ph.D., awaiting criminal sanctions for smuggling over 100 mpox samples through U.S. customs for “gain-of-function” research.
- Poul Thorsen, fugitive rogue doctor, arrested for money laundering and wire fraud committed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while he produced critical fraudulent studies about vaccines and autism.
- Jeffrey Epstein’s millions of files made available by Congress, with millions more records on the way.
- An Executive Order from the President outlining radical change to the childhood vaccine schedule and tasking the U.S. Department of Justice with going after states that fail to provide parents maximal autonomy in medical decision-making.
- A World Health Organization treaty to fully globalize “public health” in tatters through the concerted efforts of the health freedom movement.
None of these developments above could have happened in 2021.
As court of public opinion evolves, so goes the legal system
One of the hard lessons during COVID was that “courts follow culture.” Judges do not get in front of public opinion when panic reigns. Courts and judges are by nature conservative, and no judge wants to put his or her neck on the line during a period of social hysteria.
We saw judges duck most issues on grounds of “mootness” or “standing.” Most judges stood aside and permitted what Judge Terry Doughty in the landmark case Missouri v. Biden called arguably “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
But five years out, we see change.
CHD sponsored the case Kennedy v. Biden to hold administration officials accountable for violating the First Amendment and abridging speech by instructing social media platforms to censor disfavored speech. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration settled, acknowledging the harm the officials had caused and paying monetary damages.
CHD has won two preliminary injunctions against the state of California for unlawfully censoring medical speech. The bar to grant a preliminary injunction is high — the court must find that the party seeking the injunction is likely to prevail on the merits at trial.
The first time around, a federal court struck down California’s law forcing doctors to toe the line on government COVID speech. More recently, after the state had attempted an end run by making dissenting COVID speech a violation of “standard of care,” the court — based on a recent Supreme Court precedent in Chiles v. Salazar — rejected California’s attempt to rebrand the offending law.
The District Court stated that doctors’ professional speech is not “some ‘separate category of speech’ subject to ‘diminished constitutional protection.’” The court acknowledged that because the medical board was discriminating against “viewpoints disfavored by the state, there is an especially compelling public interest in enjoining its enforcement” while the case proceeds.
The right to assert religious exemptions to school-based government policies is also gaining traction. Last year, the Supreme Court decided Mahmoud v. Taylor, upholding the right of parents to withdraw children from school classes about same-sex marriage that violate their religious convictions. The court wrote:
“It is both insulting and legally unsound to tell parents that they must abstain from public education in order to raise their children in their religious faith, when alternatives can be prohibitively expensive and they already contribute to financing the public schools.”
The court explicitly connected the decision in Mahmoud to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit decision in Miller v. McDonald, arising from the unwillingness of Amish parents and schools in New York State to subject their children to the required vaccine schedule.
The Supreme Court sent Miller v. McDonald back to the 2nd Circuit with the instruction to review it in light of Mahmoud. The 2nd Circuit essentially reissued the same decision, without reevaluating whether the state could lessen its burden on parental and religious rights while still satisfying its objectives.
Several Amish schools in New York have suffered crippling fines for failure to observe vaccine mandates. A recent article in the New York Post asserts that the New York Amish community of 25,000 people may move out of the state over this issue.
I expect the Supreme Court to take up the Miller v. McDonald case when it reconvenes in October. By June 2027, it may well issue a decision finding that the First Amendment requires the right to a religious exemption nationwide. Even Professor Lawrence Gostin, a dedicated colleague of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post, “I expect the justices to reverse the appellate court’s decision” if the court takes up the case.
Dr. Meryl Nass just won a critical victory for medical independence against the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine. CHD supported Nass’ lawsuit against board members in their individual capacity for having improperly required her to get a psychological examination in their efforts to censor her.
The board used the tactics of Soviet psychiatry to paint Nass as crazy. The chief judge of the U.S. District Court of the District of Maine wrote, “The Medical Board was misapplying their power to make ex parte adjudications based on a predetermined perspective that Dr. Nass must be of unfit mind to speak out as she did.” Further, he wrote that their approach was “alarmingly out of step with anything like the judicial process” and that “the proceedings lacked any safeguards to protect against agency zeal.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s measles outbreak narrative crashed and burned last week, showing how the new media environment is freer than it was five years ago. The governor’s “two measles-associated deaths” story collapsed within days, with the Lancaster County health commissioner and coroner calling him out almost immediately.
Excellent investigative reporting showed that the measles narrative had been concocted as an election ploy, just waiting for a news trigger. The speedy decimation of the official narrative would have been unthinkable five years ago.
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What we need to do next
We have many wins for which to be grateful. But our work is hardly done. Here’s a short list of what we should aim to achieve in the next five years:
- A Supreme Court decision finding the PREP Act unconstitutional.
- A Supreme Court decision finding a First Amendment right to religious exemption to vaccination.
- A vastly revised and de-escalated childhood vaccine schedule maximizing parental choice and acknowledging vaccines’ massive contribution to the chronic disease epidemic.
- Compensation to the victims severely injured by vaccines.
- A new or revised international treaty to greatly limit or ban bioweapons research, development and manufacture.
Change is possible and happening — now is not the time to ease up. Specifically, please comment on the Aug. 10 Executive Order promising vital changes to the childhood vaccine schedule.
And please come to the CHD Conference, Sept. 17 in Washington, DC — come support the senators and representatives championing the issues that will protect our children’s future.
Although there is so much more to do, good things are possible. Stay the course. And as Polly Tommey, CHD.TV director, tells us, “Pray Big; Stand Firm; Never Settle!”
