Rolling Stone Exclusive Report on BG West Virginia Vaccine Litigation: "On the Front Line of the Vaccine Wars"
EXCLUSIVE: Rolling Stone has published an exclusive investigation by Katherine Eban into the national fight over childhood vaccines. Much of that fight is playing out in West Virginia, and the article highlights the work Bailey Glasser is doing on behalf of schoolchildren and everyone (including school professionals and families) who are affected by exposure to communicable diseases that vaccines can easily prevent.
Our firm represents the West Virginia Board of Education in litigation over the state's school vaccination law. That law has stood since 1937 and for nearly 90 years has required students to be vaccinated to attend public school, with exemptions only for medical reasons. West Virginia has not had a measles outbreak since 1994, while neighboring states have struggled to contain recent outbreaks.
In 2025, the new West Virginia governor issued an executive order directing the state health department to grant religious exemptions. The Board of Education voted 9-0 to follow the law as written. Within weeks, the Board was sued by a legal team that has challenged vaccine requirements in states across the country. The case went to trial in Raleigh County last September.
Partner Christopher D. Smith, founding partner Benjamin L. Bailey, and litigator Denali Hedrick lead the Board's defense. Rolling Stone follows Chris from that courtroom to the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, which has paused a lower court ruling against the Board. We are now awaiting a decision from the state's highest court.
A particularly compelling part the article describes in detail how the “expertise” of the anti-vaccine plaintiffs fell apart upon cross-examination:
When it came time to cross-examine Neu, Smith’s co-counsel, Benjamin Bailey, a former federal prosecutor and a founding partner of Bailey & Glasser, asked about his qualifications. Neu acknowledged he had failed to complete his surgical residency, was not board-certified in pediatrics, epidemiology, virology, or immunology, had no formal training in vaccines, and had never practiced in West Virginia. In 2004, he’d been hit with a $400,000 judgment after being accused of wrongfully prescribing medication that had caused a patient’s death. “I chose not to fight it,” he said, and settled it through a bankruptcy proceeding.
Then Bailey explained that the California Board of Medicine had rejected Neu’s expert testimony as not credible. He read aloud from the board’s 2021 judgment: “The court says, and I quote, ‘He does not believe any children should be vaccinated.’”
Siri’s co-ounsel jumped in: “Your honor, we’re beating a dead horse at this point.”
Two days earlier, Smith and other lawyers had filed an unsuccessful motion to strike Neu’s testimony: He’d been disciplined in Michigan in 2015 for improper medical treatment of a cancer patient, and numerous medical boards and other courts had found his expert testimony unreliable.
“The studies he was citing are not accurate,” says Smith. “Take time to examine it, it all falls apart.” He adds that Siri’s message is “driven by a bunch of pseudoscience. It very much reminds me of a Nineties-style ransom note where we take apart newspaper clippings.”
This Rolling Stone exclusive covers the case and our work in detail, from the sharp rise in exemption requests after the governor's order to the pressure the state has faced from federal health officials, including a warning that West Virginia could lose federal vaccine funding if it did not allow religious exemptions. It also traces the broader effort to roll back school vaccination requirements across the country and the people behind it.
Read the full article online at Rolling Stone at this link.
You can also read a version below.