JAN JEKIELEK

“I told them what I was doing. And every single one of them said, Jeff, why are you throwing your career away over this?”

When COVID-19 hit, Jeff Childers, a bankruptcy attorney in Gainesville, Florida, found himself stunned by the sudden imposition of a mandatory mask mandate. He launched himself into constitutional law and got the first appellate decision in the country finding mandatory masking presumptively unconstitutional.

“If they could get away with encroaching on our constitutional rights to that extent, dictating what we wore, then they were going to go to the next level. That seemed obvious to me. And it was not something that was obvious to my peers,” Childers says.

In the last two years, he’s successfully fought against vaccine mandates, defended high-profile individuals in the Jan. 6 committee investigations, and sued a hospital for forcing a patient to stay hospitalized on a ventilator and remdesivir against the wishes of the patient’s family. After many lawyers reached out to Childers for advice, he launched an informal network around the country to share information and help other lawyers launch similar lawsuits in their states.

“Every major institution in this country has closed ranks to protect those wrongdoers … There will be accountability,” Childers says.