After an appeals court ruled in favor of Los Angeles school employees who opposed COVID-19 vaccination mandates, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., celebrated on social media.
“The ranks of the conspiracy theorists now include the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which just ruled Covid vax mandates unconstitutional because the vaccine does not stop transmission,” Kennedy wrote in a June 12 Facebook post. “I dunno, maybe it’s the brain worm, but I seem to remember the experts and authorities telling us otherwise.”
But Kennedy’s characterization distorts the court’s ruling. Kennedy has made misleading anti-vaccine claims a hallmark of his work and campaign. Kennedy’s campaign of conspiracy theories was PolitiFact’s 2023 Lie of the Year.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on June 7 ruled only that the lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles Unified School District could move forward. It overturned a lower court decision to dismiss the lawsuit, which was brought by the nonprofit Health Freedom Defense Fund, which advocates against vaccine mandates, and employees who opposed the district’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate.
“The court did not rule on the legitimacy or accuracy of the plaintiffs’ factual allegations about the vaccines, such as their claims that the vaccines do not prevent transmission,” said Stacey B. Lee, a law and ethics professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
Both Lee and Dorit Reiss, an expert on vaccine policy at University of California Law San Francisco, told PolitiFact that the court didn’t directly address the constitutionality of vaccine mandates.
“The question before the court was whether the district court was right to dismiss the case without letting it go to fact finding,” Reiss said.
That question had two main parts: Did the school district’s decision to revoke the mandate render the case moot? And did the lower court correctly apply a U.S. Supreme Court precedent related to vaccine requirements?
“We vacate the district court’s order dismissing this claim and remand for further proceedings under the correct legal standard,” Judge Ryan Nelson wrote in the court’s 2-1 decision.
We contacted Kennedy and received no response.
(Screenshot from Facebook.)
The school district’s vaccine mandate
In 2021, the Los Angeles Unified School District announced — and repeatedly amended — policies that required employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or risk losing their jobs.
Vaccine mandate-opposed employees and the Health Freedom Defense Fund argued in their lawsuit that the policy violated their right to refuse medical treatment. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution’s due process clause protects a person’s right to refuse medical care.
The lower court dismissed the case.
Appealing that decision, the plaintiffs asked the courts to declare the vaccination requirements unconstitutional and to prevent the district from requiring it in the future, according to the 9th Circuit opinion.
The school district dropped its vaccination policy in September 2023. Administrators said the district weighed factors including the slower and more predictable spread of the virus and the availability of COVID-19 treatments, LAist reported.
Oral arguments before the 9th Circuit took place Sept. 14, 2023, not long before the district’s school board voted to rescind the policy, according to the 9th Circuit opinion.
Nelson wrote that the school district had “reversed course several times” on its policy.
“LAUSD’s pattern of withdrawing and then reinstating its vaccination policies is enough to keep this case alive,” the 9th Circuit opinion said.
The appeals court said a Supreme Court precedent was incorrectly applied
In dismissing the lawsuit, the lower court had relied in part on the Supreme Court’s 1905 ruling in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which the defense had argued supported the vaccine mandate’s constitutionality. That Jacobson decision established that a smallpox vaccination requirement was constitutional, saying states can implement “reasonable regulations” to protect public health and safety.
The 9th Circuit ruling said the lower court’s application of the Jacobson precedent in the Los Angeles case was flawed.
The plaintiffs in the Los Angeles Unified School District case had argued that COVID-19 vaccines do not effectively prevent the spread of the virus and only mitigate symptoms for vaccine recipients. They argued COVID-19 vaccines are “a medical treatment, not a ‘traditional’ vaccine,” according to the 9th Circuit opinion.
The appeals court ruled that the Jacobson standard would not apply if the plaintiffs’ anti-vaccine arguments were factually true — something the court noted had not been fully examined or factually established at this stage of the court proceedings.
“On a motion to dismiss, the court is compelled to take the plaintiffs’ allegations as true,” said Margaret Foster Riley, a law and public health sciences professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Law. “It is not meant to evaluate those claims, but rather to determine whether the plaintiff has a legally viable case assuming everything that they allege is true.”
By allowing the case to continue, the plaintiffs now have the task of arguing the veracity of their COVID-19 vaccine claims. The defense, if it wants to use Jacobson as grounds for dismissal, has the task of submitting evidence to rebut the plaintiffs’ claims that vaccines don’t effectively prevent the virus’ spread.
Alternatively, the school district could appeal and either request a larger bench of 9th Circuit judges hear their arguments for dismissal or appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It’s crucial to note the court did not endorse the plaintiffs’ claims about the vaccines,” Lee said. The court found that “Jacobson alone would not definitively resolve the case at the outset,” if the plaintiffs’ allegations about the vaccines proved true.
The ruling said the appeals court’s findings on the application of Jacobson were preliminary. “We do not prejudge whether, on a more developed factual record, Plaintiffs’ allegations will prove true,” it read.
Our ruling
Kennedy claimed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals “just ruled Covid vax mandates unconstitutional.”
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to vacate a lower court’s dismissal of the vaccine mandate lawsuit; it did not rule on whether a vaccine mandate is constitutional.
We rate this claim False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
