By Diaz Reus Of Counsel, Brant C. Hadaway, B.C.S.
Like most people at the beginning of 2020, I was minding my own business, doing my job, and planning for the future. Life was good.
I had rarely thought about what public health bureaucracies have, or should have, the power to do. I naively believed that agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were supposed to investigate causes of disease and report their findings, leaving it to state and local governments to decide what actions to take. I assumed that CDC was a benign example of “good government.”
Then came reports of a virus that was supposedly ravaging a Chinese city that I had never heard of. Would it come here? What would we do if it did? Hadn’t China dealt with this kind of thing in the past?
I remembered the SARS and Avian flu scares. The vulnerable were urged to take precautions, and the rest of us got on with things. I couldn’t have imagined that a bunch of bureaucrats would completely upend our lives.
But they did.
As a nation, and across the developed world, we began living under a COVID tyranny that robbed so many of us of our livelihoods, educations, and time with family. Things that made life worth living as social animals were simply taken away by a wave of the pen. A reckoning and accounting for the lives destroyed will take many years.
At the behest of my friend George Wentz of the Davillier Law Group, I took my career in a new direction to fight this tyranny on behalf of the Health Freedom Defense Fund. My proudest achievement was bringing the case that ended the CDC’s travel mask mandate. Watching the viral videos of people celebrating as they were told they could remove their masks was the greatest emotional highlight of my career.
