Leslie Manookian, now the president and founder of Health Freedom Defense Fund, was at the top of her career on Wall Street when she decided to leave it all behind for something more meaningful.
“I would say a big breakthrough moment for me was when the CEO, the CFO, the head of investor relations, and the head of R&D of one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world came into our office to reassure us about their stock,” Manookian tells BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan.
“Their stock was plummeting in the stock market. It was down 25% or 30%. And they were going and visiting with their biggest investors to reassure them that their new blockbuster drug was OK,” she explains.
“The problem was that rumors were trickling out from their phase three trials, which is the last phase of clinical trials that a drug goes through before it can apply for licensure from the FDA, that this drug was killing people,” she says.
Manookian tells Shanahan that when the CEO brought up this issue in a meeting, he looked at her across the table and said, “A few people have died. It’s very, very rare.”
“And he said without missing a beat, ‘The bad news is the FDA is going to make us put a black box warning on our packaging. The good news is we still think we can do seven billion in peak sales,’” she recalls.
“What was the drug for?” Shanahan asks.
“Let’s just say it’s a household name,” she answers. “Everybody knows this company at this point in time, and it was about 25 years ago.”
That led Manookian to leave her career behind to focus on health freedom.
“The reason I started Health Freedom Defense Fund was because going way back, I’d been in the Health Freedom space for 25 years now, or 20 years at that point. And as soon as 2020 opened, I was absolutely certain as much as I could be that what was happening was some kind of an operation in order to mandate vaccines and lockdowns and all these other things,” she tells Shanahan.
“It was a perfect script given everything they’d put in place for over 20 years to facilitate an authoritarian response to a so-called public health emergency,” she continues, adding, “And so I founded Health Freedom Defense Fund, because I wanted to be able to fight back.”
Now, the successful nonprofit seeks to rectify health injustice through education, advocacy, and legal challenges to unjust mandates, laws, and policies that undermine our health freedoms and human rights.
“You don’t wear a mask on an airplane because of Health Freedom Defense Fund,” Manookian explains. “We’re the organization that challenged and defeated the federal travel mask mandate in 2022.”
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