Rogers v. Gardasil
- Laura Swain
- 1:25-cv-02344
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Rogers v. Gardasil, Judge Swain transferred the duplicate vaccine-injury case, closing it in New York.
Joshua Steven Rogers and Gardasil; the case was moved out of the Southern District of New York, and Rogers was denied fee-free status for an appeal.
What happened
Joshua Steven Rogers sued Gardasil without a lawyer, alleging side effects from an HPV vaccine. He had already filed an earlier lawsuit in the same court about the alleged side effects, and that case was transferred to a federal court in North Carolina handling related cases together.
The court found that this new complaint also appeared related to those cases and ordered the action transferred under a federal venue-transfer law. The opinion says in one place that the case would be transferred to the Western District of New York, but its concluding order directs transfer to the Western District of North Carolina. The court also directed that no summons issue and closed the case in the Southern District of New York.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain entered the transfer order on August 27, 2025. She also ruled that an appeal would not be taken in good faith and denied fee-free status for an appeal.
The detailed version
- Rogers v. Gardasil · No. 1:25-cv-02344
- Laura Swain
- Aug. 27, 2025
Background
Joshua Steven Rogers filed this action against Gardasil without a lawyer and sought permission to proceed without paying court fees. The court had granted that request on June 26, 2025. Rogers alleged that he suffered side effects after receiving the human papillomavirus vaccine.
The opinion states that this was Rogers’s second lawsuit against Gardasil in the Southern District of New York concerning alleged side effects from the vaccine. In the earlier related proceeding, the court transferred the case to the Western District of North Carolina, where coordinated litigation concerning alleged Gardasil side effects was pending. The Western District of North Carolina assigned that transferred case docket number 24-CV-0991, and the opinion states that Rogers was listed as a plaintiff in the coordinated litigation.
Transfer ruling
The court stated that the new complaint also appeared related to the coordinated litigation in the Western District of North Carolina. It therefore ordered transfer under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a), a statute allowing a federal court to transfer a case to another federal district for convenience and the interests of justice.
The opinion contains an inconsistency about the destination. Its explanatory paragraph says that the action is transferred to the United States District Court for the Western District of New York. But the conclusion directs the Clerk of Court to transfer the action to the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. The conclusion is the order’s final directive.
The court directed that no summons issue from the Southern District of New York and stated that the order closes the case there. It also certified under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(a)(3) that an appeal would not be taken in good faith and denied permission to proceed without paying fees for purposes of an appeal.
Disposition
The action was transferred, and the case was closed in the Southern District of New York. The opinion does not decide whether Gardasil was legally responsible for Rogers’s alleged vaccine-related injuries.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.