(Bloomberg) — Most Americans have never heard of Leslie Manookian, but the former banker is the reason why they no longer have to wear a mask on a plane.
Manookian, 58, who worked for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in the 1990s and later Alliance Capital Management, was behind the lawsuit that last week led a federal judge in Tampa, Florida, to strike down the mask mandate for public transportation. The judge said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lacked the authority to impose it.
“It is so inspiring to see millions of Americans celebrating, cheering, dancing and singing on airplanes, posting messages about how happy they are to be unmasked, to be liberated,” Manookian said in an interview from her home in the ski resort town of Sandpoint, Idaho. “I think the lawsuit has given people a sense of hope in a very dark time.”
The Biden administration is appealing the decision, but it’s already a big win for Manookian, who left the world of finance in New York and London after having a child in 2003 and moved back to her native Idaho. There she became a self-described wellness “junkie” immersed in homeopathic medicine — as well as a fierce anti-vaccine activist.
Vaccine Mandate Challenge
The tiny non-profit Manookian founded in 2020, Health Freedom Defense Fund, filed the mask-mandate suit last year, eight months before Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced he would be leading a similar challenge. The group has another suit pending in the same Tampa federal court challenging the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal employees.
“She’s very passionate about the issue of health freedom,” Brant Hadaway, one of her Miami-based attorneys, said in an interview. “I greatly admire her determination.”
Manookian wouldn’t comment on who is funding her organization and the litigation it’s pursuing other than to say her “donors are thousands of like-minded private individuals.”
Foes of mask and vaccine mandates have been criticized for spreading misinformation on the topic. Evidence overwhelmingly shows that the shots are safe and effective. In the U.S., millions of people have taken the shots under what the CDC calls “the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history.” Data from Los Angeles county in January showed that hospitalization rates of unvaccinated Covid patients were 23 times higher than for those who’d been vaccinated and boosted.
Manookian joined Goldman in 1992 after earning her MBA at the University of Chicago. After a stint in New York, she moved to London for a position in research sales focused on European technology and telecommunications companies. She says she helped put on the first European technology conference hosted by an investment bank in the region.
Anti-Vax Documentary
It was also during her time in London that Manookian was first learned of the “anti-vax” movement which believes that vaccines cause autism and other harms in children. She said she began experiencing a series of unexplained health issues. When doctors couldn’t diagnose them, she turned to homeopaths and eventually came to believe her problems were caused by a series of inoculations she received before joining friends for a trip to Southeast Asia after finishing business school.
She went on to write and produce a high-profile 2011 documentary raising questions about vaccine safety entitled “The Greater Good.”
Claims that vaccines cause autism have been widely debunked, and the mainstream scientific community points out that diseases like smallpox, measles, pertussis, diphtheria and Covid are far more dangerous to children and adults than the vaccinations against them.
Her lawsuits mostly argue against masks and vaccine mandates as government overreach and encroachment on individual rights. In her April 18 decision on the transport mask mandate, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle said it was invalid because the CDC is authorized to impose “sanitation” measures but “wearing a mask cleans nothing.”
Manookian’s suit against the vaccine mandate for federal workers claims it violates their “fundamental rights” as well as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s regulations governing the privacy of employee records.
The government moved on March 9 to dismiss the suit, arguing “there is no fundamental right to avoid employment consequences based on a refusal to be vaccinated” and noting that “courts have consistently upheld vaccination requirements as rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in promoting health and safety.”
Though Mizelle didn’t address them in her ruling, Manookian claimed in her suit that wearing masks poses a variety of health risks, including leading to “unacceptably high” concentrations of carbon dioxide in children’s blood.
The CDC has said that, under most circumstances, mask-wearing had no adverse health effects for children or adults. The American Academy of Pediatrics says mask-wearing is safe for children over two-years-old and says reports of carbon dioxide poisoning are “not true.”
When Manookian isn’t busy working on her non-profit, she spends time with her husband, a former neighbor whom she met walking their dogs, and says she teaches people about nutrition, meditation and spiritual growth.
“I’m committed to becoming a better, more conscious, healthy person,” she said.
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