After the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, I wrote about Idaho’s low COVID-19 vaccination rate and, later, how that contributed to deaths and the near-collapse of our hospitals.
As a journalist, the debate over vaccine policy and the rationales of the people behind the anti-vaccination movement fascinate me, even as the work comes with the weight of reporting on what can be, in some cases, life-or-death stakes. But I’m not just a journalist. I’m an Idahoan with a family, including a young child in school.
This week, I held both of those identities as I published a story about Idaho becoming the first state in the nation to ban vaccine mandates. The Idaho Medical Freedom Act makes it illegal to require almost anyone to take a vaccine, test or other “medical intervention.” The law’s author, Leslie Manookian, is a finance executive turned practitioner of homeopathy who became a leader in the “health freedom” movement.
I first heard Manookian’s name in the mid-2010s, when she was part of a group seeking to change Idaho’s school vaccination laws and rules, among other things. She went on to create the Health Freedom Defense Fund, which brought several lawsuits over vaccine and mask mandates during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. She lives in one of the few Idaho communities that wholeheartedly embraced COVID-19 precautions, and she has described feeling ostracized.
In our interview and follow-up calls, Manookian told me about her stance on vaccines, what she believes the role of public health should be and her longtime desire to pass the Idaho Medical Freedom Act.
In the background of our conversation: a national measles outbreak that is larger than the U.S. has seen in decades.
One big change with the Idaho Medical Freedom Act is how schools and day cares can respond if, or when, measles arrives. The law makes it illegal to send home kids who aren’t vaccinated, as long as they are “healthy.” That has important implications when it comes to measles, which can spread for days before the contagious person even realizes they’re sick.
As a person who lives here, I can’t help but think about this. My family is vaccinated, but what if a student at my child’s school can’t be immunized for some reason; what will their parents do if measles begins to spread? What about my friends with kids too young to be immunized, who still need to go to day care? Does the new law keep them from choosing what they believe is best for their child?
I posed that question to an ally of Manookian’s, Mary Holland, the CEO of Children’s Health Defense, a national organization that’s become one of the fiercest foes of childhood vaccines.
Holland said Idaho parents who want their kids to be in a learning environment with “herd immunity” levels of measles vaccination can start a private “association” — not a school, because schools can’t require vaccines — just as parents who don’t like vaccines have done in order to dodge requirements in states like California and New York.
Her answer underscored how this law isn’t just about policy. It is about flipping the script on what we’ve considered the norm for generations now: that if you’re going to be part of a community, you must help protect the other people in your community. The thinking behind the Idaho Medical Freedom Act not only rejects that norm, it makes it illegal.
