Mary Holland: ‘Humanity Cannot Afford to Forget the Dire Toll COVID Took Upon Us All’

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland spoke Weds, June 10 at CHD’s first 'advocacy day' in Washington, D.C. Below are her prepared remarks.

By Mary Holland, J.D.

[Republished with permission from The Defender, a publication of CHD]

Thank you all for coming to CHD’s inaugural Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill! We are delighted you are here. We need your help to create positive change here in Congress and to support the brave lawmakers we will be hearing from today.

It is hard to put into words how grateful we are at Children’s Health Defense (CHD) for Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). For those who have been shouting from the rooftops for decades about the dangers of liability-free medicine, he is a hero. He has courageously amplified the truth about what happened during COVID, despite tremendous pressure not to do so.

Senator Johnson has turned a glaring light on the dark side of the COVID era — the deaths, the disease, the disability that occurred; the risky, liability-free products rushed to market; the suppression of truth in the interests of profit and government narratives.

Senator Johnson’s hearings on the vaccine-injured, the mechanisms for cancer from COVID shots, the suppression of science — these hearings have been shining examples of what real leadership looks like.

And shame on the corporate media for its abject failure to cover the biggest government scandal in our nation’s history.

We who are assembled here must understand that Congress made a grave mistake in 1986 when it granted virtually complete liability protection to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries for vaccine injury and death.

In essence, Congress conferred on them impunity to injure and kill. It wasn’t immunity — it was impunity.

Since the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, children, and now the adult population through COVID, have been subjected to the Massive Epidemic of Vaccine Injury, or MEVI.

About half of all people in the U.S. have chronic health conditions — this is not normal. And science strongly suggests that vaccines, COVID shots in particular over the past five years, have played a large role in this catastrophe.

There’s no real compensation for all the injuries, deaths and losses from vaccine injury and death. There’s no real informed consent. Instead, there’s silencing, intimidation, financial devastation and other punishment for the truthtellers.

The obvious moral hazard of the 1986 Act — granting impunity to wealthy, powerful actors — led us to the 2005 Public Readiness and Preparedness Act, or PREP Act, which in turn paved the way for the egregiously unconstitutional government actions during COVID.

Other industries are now lining up with their lobbyists to get the same extraordinary liability protection — no surprise! Telecom wants total federal preemption of state and local law. Big Ag wants liability protection through the Supreme Court. Employers want insulation from the courts through compulsory arbitration agreements.

Immunity for corporations is impunity — and it must stop — along with the ongoing assault on the freedoms upon which our country was founded.

That is why Children’s Health Defense is here today to advocate for two crucial pieces of legislation: Senator Rand Paul’s and Rep. Paul Gosar’s End the Vaccine Carveout bill to remove the liability shield gifted to vaccine makers in 1986, and Rep. Greg Steube’s GRACE Act to ensure religious vaccine exemptions are available and honored nationwide.

These are critical steps to maintain religious freedom and reverse the chronic disease epidemic that is harming our country in every way imaginable.

Children’s Health Defense has been putting out truthful information about toxic exposures to children’s health since 2018 — and it has been at the forefront of exposing the corruption and tyranny that define the COVID era.

For the latest on CHD Advocacy and Action Alerts, visit our website. We produce print, visual and social media. We produce peer-reviewed science. And we pursue litigation to hold government and corporations accountable. During COVID, we sued the FDA, CDC, NIH, HHS, NYS, DC, DOD, and Merck, to name a few.

We believe that the COVID shots were wrongly granted Emergency Use Authorization and Biologics License Application status. We believe there was rampant fraud in the processes used to hustle these poorly studied, poorly understood, liability-free shots to every man, woman and child in America regardless of medical status or deeply held beliefs.

Because of this, we join millions of Americans in demanding the withdrawal of COVID shots from the market.

The lack of federal action to end COVID shots bears no resemblance to the response Americans saw 50 years ago when it became evident there were problems with the heavily promoted swine flu vaccine.

In 1976, after approximately 32 deaths and 500 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome were reported following vaccination, the swine flu vaccine program was immediately suspended.

Today, in 2026, there have been over 1.6 million adverse events — including over 39,000 deaths — reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, following COVID vaccination.

It is mind-boggling that COVID shots are still being injected into people of all ages — including young, vulnerable children — given their astonishing track record of disability and death.

As Senator Johnson has said, we have not yet had a reckoning for what happened during COVID. And without it, we are undoubtedly at risk of it happening again.

As George Santayana famously wrote in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The future of humanity cannot afford to forget the dire toll that COVID took upon us all.

Now is the time for COVID justice. That’s why we’re urging all members of the House and Senate to support the COVID Justice Resolution and bring it to the floor for a vote. We must be assured as Americans that we will never face a repeat of such tyranny. Our nation’s founding fathers fought too hard to establish freedom to allow it to ever again be so powerfully threatened.

So this gathering, and your advocacy, give us hope — hope that the word is getting out. That things can and will change. And that we will live to see a better day when people will be healthier, when government and corporations will be forced to be more responsible, and when people have access to the truth when it comes to the life-and-death matter of their health — and that of future generations.

Mary Holland, J.D. is CEO of Children’s Health Defense. She has been writing and advocating for better vaccine law and policy for many years, including while she served on the faculty at NYU School of Law from 2002-19. She is co-author of two books on vaccines, “Vaccine Epidemic” and “The HPV Vaccine on Trial,” as well as several law review articles.