The MAHA Profile: Mary Holland Will Never Back Down

Children’s Health Defense president, Mary Holland, on her 25-year fight for medical freedom - in the courts and in the court of public opinion

Mary Holland’s advocacy journey has evolved from human rights for dissidents in the former Soviet Union to health freedom for children in the United States.

Both, she believes, reflect a calling that began to take shape when she majored in Russian and Soviet Studies as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, Harvard University. During a semester in Moscow in 1980, she learned first-hand about human rights violations impacting dissidents who were censored, harassed, marginalized, and surveilled.

“That time prepared me for what I’ve seen in the fight for medical freedom,” Holland said during a recent interview with The MAHA Report. “Who has the power to make decisions, and what recourse do people have when they believe those decisions have harmed them?”

Holland, the co-author of two books on vaccines, Vaccine Epidemic and The HPV Vaccine on Trial, is president of Children’s Defense Fund (CHD), a non-profit founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2018 to better understand and address the rise in autism.

Holland said CHD became essential during Covid, challenging government mandates and pushing for all medical decisions to remain with individuals and families.

“If we do not have full autonomy to make our medical decisions, especially for our children, we are not free,” she said.

Holland explained that CHD’s work centers on four connected pillars: education, advocacy, litigation, and science. The organization focuses on environmental and other exposures affecting children’s health, along with issues including vaccines, electromagnetic radiation, pesticides, and fluoride.

CHD produces peer-reviewed science and pursues litigation to hold government and corporations accountable. During Covid the organization sued the CDC, FDA, HHS, NIH, Department of Defense, Merck, the state of New York, and the District of Columbia.

“This movement needs both grassroots and legal dimensions,” Holland said. “The corrupting influence of money has made it almost impossible to win over state and federal executives, legislators, regulators, media, and organized medical groups.”

She added, “The place where we have a fighting chance still is in the courts of public opinion and the rule of law. Precedents like Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act don’t make this easy, but it’s possible.”

After completing her undergraduate degree at Harvard, Holland earned master’s and Juris Doctor degrees at Columbia University. She later served as a professor at the New York University School of Law, where she was director of the Graduate Lawyering program for 15 years. She was also a lecturer on international human rights advocacy at Columbia Law School.

Holland’s parents were physicians – mainstream MDs who worked in hospitals and academic medicine and were members of major medical societies. Three of her siblings work in medicine or the pharmaceutical industry.

“I didn’t have a skeptical background towards mainstream medicine. It was quite the opposite. I contemplated going into medicine and saw it as a noble profession,” Holland said.

Her perspective changed when she had her first child at 38.

Like many advocates in the health freedom movement, she learned about vaccine injury from her son’s experience.

“I was aware that vaccine injury was possible – 1 in a million, or so I thought.”

As a first-time mother, she acknowledged that she didn’t know the signs of probable aluminum and mercury toxicity before her son received the MMR shot.

He was born in the late 1990s in the former Soviet Union when she and her husband ventured there.

“I delayed in getting him vaccines,” she recalled. “I wanted to be sure I got the shots in the United States, not Russia, so he didn’t get his MMR until he was over 2.”

The young boy’s health declined. He lost all language, couldn’t sleep, and frequently drooled. His hair became very coarse, and he showed clear signs of developmental issues, Holland explained.

“Like so many parents, we started this odyssey of going to see neurologists, psychologists and other medical professionals that included an occupational therapist, a physical therapist, and a speech therapist,” Holland said.

The occupational therapist gave her a book called Unraveling the Mystery of Autism by Karen Seroussi, and Holland learned about an association of scientists, doctors, and parents called Defeat Autism Now.

“When my child suffered a precipitous developmental regression, ending in an autism diagnosis, my appreciation of vaccine injury risk changed fundamentally,” she said. “I pieced together that there was no other plausible explanation for my child’s developmental regression.”

Added Holland,“Once I learned about the extreme liability protection that industry and healthcare providers enjoy, and the suppression of accurate science and information about vaccine risks and injury, I understood the need for immediate, radical systemic change. I have been devoted to that change ever since.”

Holland was invited to join the CHD board when the organization launched in 2018. The following year she became general counsel.

Led by Kennedy, CHD was outspoken about a plethora of issues, including the injuries that afflict children because of the childhood vaccine schedule.

The organization’s online presence grew rapidly until President Joe Biden was elected and censorship became widespread. Kennedy and CHD were removed from multiple social media platforms.“We brought cases against censorship,” recalls Holland. “We brought cases related to the PREP Act. We brought cases on religious exemptions, on medical exemptions, and on antitrust for the media censoring us for financial reasons, not just for ideological reasons,”

When then CHD president Lyn Redwood retired in 2021, she and the board asked Holland to fill the top leadership role.

Holland spent a few months in 2023 as a strategist, fundraiser, and organizer for Kennedy’s presidential campaign before returning as president of CHD that fall. She has remained president since.

“My work for health freedom has been my driving force for more than 25 years, addressing the crisis of children’s health, holding those responsible for chronic health epidemics accountable, and preserving fundamental human rights. CHD’s work in this area is unparalleled and urgent,” Holland said.

In addition to the books she has co-authored, Holland has also co-edited or contributed to works such as the English edition of Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth, and published articles on vaccine law and policy, including a review of compensated cases of vaccine-induced brain injury, “Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program,” published in the Pace Environmental Law Review.

Holland calls the childhood vaccine schedule a “cash cow” for the pharmaceutical industry, saying that loading infants with vaccines is “insane” and the bad health of so many Americans is proof of this.

More than 40 percent of America’s children have some kind of chronic health condition. The “explosion” in these conditions coincides with the “expansion of the vaccine schedule,” Holland noted.

Childhood vaccine injuries, she says, are “the saddest and most horrifying dimension of the pharmaceutical industry.”

“Big Pharma profits from vaccines and the chronic diseases that often result from them,” she said, emphasizing the importance of educating the public about injuries and their connection to vaccines.

The notion that the link between vaccines and autism has been debunked is “profoundly ridiculous,” Holland added. “Even with all the attention this topic has received over the last year, many people remain unaware of the story behind these claims. Making truthful information public will help people make informed decisions about whether to vaccinate their children or which vaccines to choose.”

“Over time,” she says, “I think most people will come to the view through truthful information that their children are better off not getting vaccines at least in the early years of their lives.”

CHD is also a resource and advocate for helping parents learn about vaccine exemptions for religious or philosophical reasons available in most states.

“We believe that people should have a choice whether they give their children vaccines or not, and the manner in which that is happening in 45 states today is through religious exemptions and medical exemptions,” Holland said.

“I am horrified that New York State is arbitrarily removing medical exemptions from medically fragile children,” she said. “It is literally putting their lives on the line. We have emergency litigation right now on behalf of a 17-year-old girl who received a medical exemption last year, and the same judge and the same doctors refused the medical exemption this year.”

Holland is encouraged about the progress made on children’s health in Washington D.C. through Kennedy, President Donald Trump, and Congress.

At CHD’s inaugural Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill, the organization praised Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for courageously amplifying the truth about what happened during Covid, despite tremendous pressure not to do so.

Significant change isn’t accomplished overnight, or even over the course of one presidential term, Holland acknowledges. She remains motivated by the children’s health crisis and the need for parents to have the freedom to make decisions they deem best for their children.

“Medical freedom is foundational to a free society,” Holland said. “This cause is the hill I’m going to die on.”