The Religion Of Vaccines With Aaron Siri

In this episode, Aaron Siri discusses why he believes vaccines have become more than a medical issue—they’ve become a kind of modern religion. Drawing from themes in his book, Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines, Aaron explores how belief, institutional authority, and pharmaceutical influence have shaped vaccine policy and public perception.

He explains the powerful role a small group of vaccinologists has played in shaping vaccine science, education, and government recommendations, and discusses what he uncovered while reviewing FDA clinical trial documents and deposing some of the most influential figures in vaccinology.

The conversation also examines the lack of placebo-controlled trials for routine childhood vaccines, the liability protections granted to pharmaceutical companies under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the challenges surrounding informed consent, and the broader question of medical liberty in modern society.

Along the way, Aaron shares why he believes people should think more critically about environmental exposures of all kinds—not just vaccines—and why asking difficult questions remains essential when it comes to protecting long-term health.

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Kendall Nelson and the regular text is Aaron Siri.

What if one of the most trusted pillars of modern medicine was not grounded in the science we have been led to believe? What if the doctors we rely on, pediatricians, immunologists, infectious disease experts, are not actually trained to critically evaluate vaccines, but instead depend on a very small group of specialists shaping the entire narrative? Questioning that system does not just challenge policy, but changes something much deeper, something that looks a lot like belief.

This is episode 584, and our guest is Aaron Siri. Aaron is an attorney who has spent years litigating vaccine safety cases and examining the government’s own data, clinical trial records, and regulatory documents. He is the author of the book Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines, where he argues that much of what we accept as settled science may actually function more like unquestioned doctrine.

In this conversation, Aaron breaks down how a small group of vaccinologists influences policy, research, and medical education, why he believes vaccine safety testing falls short of what most people assume, and what he uncovered when he deposed some of the most influential figures in the field. We also explore the role of liability protections, the concept of informed consent, and why Aaron says the issue is not just about data.

It is about incentives, belief systems, and the structure of the entire system itself. This is a thought-provoking and at times controversial discussion, but one that invites us to take a closer look at the foundations of modern medicine and to ask deeper questions about trust, transparency, and health.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to remind you to subscribe to the Wise Traditions podcast on your favorite podcast platform. You can also download our free Wise Traditions podcast app on Android or iOS. Just type Wise Traditions podcast into the search bar. It’s a simple way to have every episode right at your fingertips with no middleman.

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Aaron, welcome to the show.

Great to be here.

I am so happy you are here. Aaron, I read your book, Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines. It is fantastic. I absolutely loved it. I thought you really laid out a comprehensive picture of what is going on with the current vaccine policy and this idea that vaccines function like a modern religion. I want to start by just reading two sentences from the first page of your book.

They go like this, “The reality is that most doctors, including pediatricians, immunologists, and infectious disease doctors, know almost nothing about vaccines. They rely on the word of vaccinologists, either directly or by following vaccine-related science, policy, and standards molded by vaccinologists.” My question to you is, what do those two sentences mean to you? Why can we not rely on the word of vaccinologists?

The “Cabal” Of Vaccinologists: Uncovering Clinical Bias

When it comes to vaccinologists, there is a very small group of them, and they see themselves as impartial as most people do, understandably. The only reason they ascended to the positions that they have is that pharmaceutical companies continue to fund their ascent. If they did not conduct clinical trials in the manner that pleased the pharma companies, they would stop funding them to do the clinical trials. They would stop picking them to be the principal investigators. It is a form of reverse natural selection, so to speak.

If vaccinologists did not conduct clinical trials in the manner that pleased the pharma companies, they would stop funding them to do the clinical trials.

The vaccinologists who already had this intuitive, innate view that vaccines are safe and you basically do not need to study them and to do as little safety as possible, get it on the market as soon as you see any efficacy, for example. The more in line with that view they had, the more likely Pharma was to use them as a principal investigator in the clinical trial, or to conduct studies, or go down the chain, or to fund their journal, or to fund them as a reviewer, or to fund them to write the article, or to fund them to do, you name it, or to lavish them with more praise at the medical conferences, or to pay for them to have the honorarium.

You go down the chain, but it really all starts at the pinnacle of these vaccinologists. A small cabal of folks, they do all the clinical trials for the most part, a lot of points to licensed vaccines. They then are the ones that sit on the FDA and the CDC advisory committees, oftentimes to decide whether or not they should be licensed and then recommended to everybody. They are the ones who act as the reviewers for the premier journals relating to vaccines. They are everywhere. There is just not a very big group of them.

They have all ascended in part because they have ascended primarily because pharma could fund them. You think if they actually approached vaccines in the manner that would assure that they really were safe in a clinical trial, they would keep funding them? No. They want products to get to market as quickly as possible with vaccines, because they are not liable for injuries, very different from drugs and other products. That statement is significant to me because when people think about vaccines, they are like, “I trust my doctor.”

Your doctor does not know anything, trust me, about vaccines. I have deposed numerous pediatricians, immunologists, and infectious disease doctors. As a group, I have deposed many of them, and they virtually never know anything about vaccines. The vaccinologists are the ones who know some stuff, but they are truly living in this religious little cacophony of dogma and what they repeat to each other. When you say, “I trust my doctor,” what you do not understand is that your doctor only really knows what has been fed to them by the vaccinologists, either through what they have published or indirectly by the guidance that gets promulgated as the standards because of what they have done.

You said this is just really a small group of people who are the vaccinologists who are making the policies and doing pharma’s bidding. One of those people is Dr. Stanley Plotkin, and he is largely considered the godfather of vaccines. He wrote the textbook on vaccines that is used in the medical schools. He has published nearly a thousand articles. He sat on the advisory committee for immunization practices for what, six decades? I know you got a chance to depose him. Can you just tell me a little bit about that deposition, and was there anything in there that you learned that shocked you at that time?

No, that is the most shocking part. The shocking part is that I was not shocked in terms of learning something new. What shocked me was that I did not learn anything new. This was about eight years ago. I knew a fraction about vaccines as compared to what I know now. I was not fully confident that when I asked him about, yes, this is what the FDA document shows, this product was relied upon to license this vaccine, that that is all there really was. Maybe there was more data. Maybe there was something else out there, for example. I was surprised that there was none of that.

If you watch all nine hours, in many ways, it confirms the worst of the fears of those who have issues with vaccines. In fact, it confirmed fears that I really thought could not possibly be true about vaccines. Not only during the deposition, but I should also add, after the deposition, we even sent them a subpoena to give him another opportunity to produce documents to support the safety of the ingredients, provide more documentation of the clinical trials, and provide more proof of post-licensure safety. He did not provide anything in response to this. In fact, he went and filed a separate petition to seek to quash it. That was the most surprising thing about that deposition. I can give you an example if you want.

Deposing Dr. Plotkin: Missing Clinical Trial Data

Sure, please give me an example.

One example would be the hepatitis B vaccine given to newborns. There are only two on the market, Recombivax HB and Engerix-B. That is it. Newborns are getting one of those. The first one, Recombivax HB, was licensed in 86. The other one in 89. Recombivax HB, according to the clinical trial documents, or I should say the package insert at that point, says that it was licensed based on a clinical trial, as you would expect, because you are giving it to a baby. It went on for many years with a placebo control group and a lot of kids, because you want to make sure it is safe before you give it to millions of children.

That is the minimum you would need to see if there would be a developmental issue, a neurological issue, an oncology issue, or a cardiovascular issue when you are giving it to a newborn. Obviously, I am being facetious. That is not what occurred. The clinical trial, according to the package insert, had five days of safety monitoring after injection in 147 kids and no control group. That seemed incredible.

When I asked Dr. Plotkin about it during the deposition, I expected him to protest wildly and tell me, “No. You do not understand. There is this mountain of other data that was part of the clinical trial that the FDA relied upon.” He did not do that. After the deposition, we even FOIA’d the FDA, and we got the Freedom of Information Act. We asked the federal government to give us documents in their position, which we are allowed to do because we pay their salaries and we swear a check-up on the people that work for us.

They forget that. We got the underlying clinical trial reports, and there it was. In less than a week, 100-something kids, it was clearly deficient and reconfirmed the worst fears confirmed during that deposition of Dr. Plotkin. There was one other thing about those documents when we got them from the FDA. We could see who the principal investigator was of the clinical trial to license that vaccine for children. You know who it was?

Who was it?

Dr. Stanley Plotkin. When I asked Dr. Plotkin in his deposition about that trial, he did not tell me that. “If anybody was going to know, it would have been that guy.” He did not have it then, and he did not even have it when we subpoenaed him. That is an example of, in my wildest dreams, if you asked me to come up with the craziest thing I could come up with about vaccines, like, “Go crazy, Aaron.”

Make us, I would probably come up with some alien story that might be more believable in my mind than the idea that they licensed this product for injection to millions of babies on a clinical trial with five days’ safety monitoring after injection with 147 kids in no control group. I just would never think it would be true, but there it was, and it remains.

That should be a full stop at the end of the story. Vaccines should not be on the market with these clinical trials, safety in parentheses here, testing. I do not want to drop the part about the small group of vaccinologists quite yet. We also have the disciples of Dr. Stanley Plotkin. One of those is Dr. Paul Offit, and he is largely known as the most famous vaccinologist in the world. He is the talking piece for the pro-vaccine, for pharma. I have to read one thing that he wrote as well.

This blows me away. This is something that you wrote that he usually says. He says, “We should be proud of vaccines as arguably the safest, best-tested things we put in our bodies.” How is it that these people can make these statements and then, as you and I both know, there really is no quality safety testing? We have B vaccines that are studied for a minimum of five days.

That is why I call the book Vaccines Amen: The Religion of Vaccines, because it is a belief. You said it is a modern religion. I would just call it a religion, modern or not. The difference between most religions and this religion is that in most religions, you know you are participating in a religion. To answer the unanswerables, where do you go after you die? Where does life come from? You know you are engaged in leaps of faith because you are addressing things that cannot be answered.

These people think they are engaged in science. They think they are engaged in science, but in fact, they are engaged in religion. They are beliefs, and no matter what, you cannot shake them off. Look at Dr. Offit saying the most, arguably the most well-tested product or whatever he said, we put into our bodies. First of all, somebody should let Dr. Offit know about filtered water, just by the way. It might be a better, safer thing to put in the body than a vaccine, but I do not want to quibble too much. Why would he say that? It is because he believes it. That is why Pharma kept funding him.

That is why he holds the Merck chair at his university, which is funded to the tune of seven figures a year, is my understanding. You think Merck would continue to pay for the chair that he would be sitting in at his university if he did not espouse the right views? No, it is because he has these beliefs that they are the most well-tested products, even though it is directly contrary to the evidence that he continued to ascend as a vaccinologist. As Dr. Offit says, “Dr. Plotkin trained the generation of vaccinologists to think the way that Plotkin thinks, and indeed that is the way Dr. Offit thinks.”

This is really interesting to me because I made the movie The Greater Good, which was about the vaccine controversy, and we have both Dr. Plotkin and Dr. Offit in our film, as we were able to interview both of them. I am going to go out on a limb here and probably not be very popular, but I am going to say they were both very kind.

Dr. Plotkin invited us into his home, and he gave us the interview. Dr. Offit had us go to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia two times to interview with him. I honestly think they believe what they say. I think that they believe that these products are both safe and effective. Yet, I, as a layperson, can look at the studies and tell them that the studies are not adequate. It is just a mind-blower that they actually believe, at least in my opinion, they believe what they were saying. Do you think that they truly believe these things?

Yes. I do not think that Dr. Offit or Dr. Plotkin are like, “We are evil.” Of course not. I think they genuinely believe they are doing God’s work, and that’s what makes them blind. Exactly that fact, the fact that they believe that they, no matter how much harm is caused, are saving more kids in the net balance of it. Because they are saving all of these kids, maybe there is some harm, but they are saviors. They are here to save humanity, basically, from infectious disease. I think that blinds them. I actually give Dr. Plotkin a lot of credit.

I have said this before. During the deposition, I gave him a lot of credit. He was trying to answer honestly, I think, but he did not necessarily say everything. I had to do a lot of follow-up questioning, and you know I had to address stuff that he said, but he was not like some other folks whom I have deposed, and you can watch those on the internet. Who will just say anything? They are untethered to the truth.

Whereas I do not view Dr. Plotkin that way, and I do not harbor any ill, and I do not think that they both believe in their hearts that they are doing God’s work literally to the extent they believe in God. Now, Plotkin said he is an atheist. Listen, let’s put it this way. If you leave your kids with them for as long as they do not vaccinate them without your knowledge, I would probably take very good care of your kids if they were watching some of these kids. I bet their great parents and grandparents have no reason to doubt any of that.

They would say that vaccines have saved millions of lives, and you and I believe that they believe that. Can you tell me why that statement is not true, that vaccines have not saved millions of lives?

Challenging The “Millions Saved” Narrative

It is the data. That would be the answer. In chapter seven of my book, I go through each of the routine vaccines in the United States, and there is a notion that millions in America would die without them if there were no vaccines. It just does not fit the data. First of all, we can start by looking at how many people died of that target infection in the year before a vaccine was introduced. I have a table that does that. It sets forth how many people died in the year before the vaccine was introduced. You can get a sense of what we are talking about.

How many people died of measles in the year before there was a vaccine? Was it hundreds of thousands? Was it thousands? How many died of rubella? How many died of mumps was a few dozen. How many died of tetanus was a few hundred. You go down the list, and you start seeing, first of all that as you get closer and closer in time to today from when really the first vaccine, the DTP in 1949, was licensed, the number of people dying in the year prior gets smaller and smaller and smaller, which shows you alone that the passage of time itself helps address this issue of mortality.

The underlying infections become less dangerous over time. What you get is maybe a few thousand deaths, period, across the vaccines on the table in my book. That is not where you should stop your analysis. You separately need to look at, “What was the mortality curve decline before the vaccine for 40 years or four, and what does it look like afterwards?” What they like to do is they do not only credit the decline after the vaccine and mortality to the vaccine, but also credit the decline before there was a vaccine.

The only thing they should really take credit for is that after you introduce the vaccine, if that curve accelerates. If it accelerates, then you should say, “Fine.” At least, we still have correlation, by the way. Just to use their language. You have to actually prove that it is causally related, but at least you have an argument. If you have got the same rate of mortality before and afterwards, then to say it is the vaccine, and what you see with a lot of these products is that the mortality curve does not accelerate. In fact, sometimes it goes up. Look at Hep B.

After the introduction of the Hep B vaccine, it was like 200-something deaths in 1980. First vaccine, 1981. Now you have got a few thousand deaths a year. How can you say the vaccine will reduce mortality? At least when you carefully look at the data. When mortality goes down, it is always the vaccine. When mortality goes up, somehow the vaccine still saves a bunch of lives.

It is vaccinology logic and belief. What can I tell you? In any event, I am not saying that vaccines cannot be saved. For example, the measles vaccine can prevent transmission of measles, which means that if it breaks the transmission, it will prevent certain deaths from measles. Period. That it can do. That is where the vaccinologists want to stop. They want to say, “That is it.” Everybody is saved because of the measles vaccine.

They do not want to then take just a little step further and go, “Where were we when the measles vaccine was introduced? What is the total public health benefit?” As I go through my book, the health benefit, the overall mortality reduction benefit of the measles vaccine, is potentially negative. When you look at the holistic picture, regarding the effects of introducing that product.

Of course, you have got that, and then you have also got the fact that some of these diseases that you are talking about, these basic childhood diseases, they might be there for a reason. We might have those too. Some studies show that people who get, whether it is chickenpox or measles or mumps, these basic childhood diseases, have less heart disease or that they may not develop Parkinson’s disease as much as somebody who has gotten the vaccine. To me, it is like you even have to go a step further and say, “What are we doing when we interrupt this natural ability to contract diseases?”

Let us use measles as an example. First of all, between 1900 and 1963, when the first measles vaccine was introduced, measles mortality declined by over 98% in the United States. You could probably point to a lot of things. You could point to cleaner water and better living conditions. You can point to better sanitation. In fact, a lot of the things that were done by public health officials, they can get credit for, but instead, they never point to those things.

Wise Traditions - Kendall Nelson | Aaron Siri | Religion Of Vaccines — Religion Of Vaccines: You could point to cleaner water, better living conditions, and better sanitation. In fact, a lot of the things that were done by public health officials, they can get credit for, but instead, they never point to those things.

They pretend like that entire decline was from the measles vaccine, obviously, and nothing to do with it. I can say that categorically because there was no measles vaccine. It is not possible. That 98 percent decline had nothing to do with the measles vaccine. By the time you had a measles vaccine, and there is no reason that curve would not have continued, by the time you had a measles vaccine, there were about 400 deaths a year in the late 50s, early 60s, 400 deaths per year. Every death is a tragedy, but that is far from the numbers they like to make you believe are dying.

That amounts to about one in 450,000 Americans dying at a time when everybody got measles in the United States. Think about that. One in 450,000. Pockets of this country were still like a developing country, where infectious diseases of any kind can kill children. Let us just pause for a moment right there. Also, by the way, there were about 4.2 million births a year in the late 50s, early 60s. There are about 3.8 million births a year in America today.

You actually have smaller birth cohorts right now than back then. Let us just assume that there will be no further improvements in acute medical care, no further improvements in any of the same factors that reduced mortality between 1900 and 1963. Zero. We are going to hold America in stasis until the time when they were doing lobotomies. Lethally, still, and getting a Nobel Prize for it. We are going to hold it in stasis. Four hundred deaths. Now, let us look at the other side of the equation, the factor you just said.

There was a 100,000-person prospective study done in Japan where they tracked 100,000 Japanese for 22 years, and what they found is that the Japanese who had measles and mumps had a statistically significant reduction in deaths from cardiovascular disease after twenty years, such that fourteen percent of those who never had measles and mumps had died of cardiovascular disease versus seven percent of those who had measles and mumps. Even on a life-years lost basis, because obviously people dying of cardiovascular disease are older, you are already just on that one study upside down on your public health benefit.

This was a prospective study again, highly reliable, by the Japanese government, major universities, and there is no data that shows that it is incorrect or contradicts it. Separately, there is a whole line of studies, not as big, not mostly retrospective epi studies, that show that those who have had measles have far lower rates of various cancers. Kids and adults who have had measles have a 66% decline in Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a 233%, I believe it is, decline in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The kids who have not had measles have a 66% increased rate.

The kids who have not had measles have a 233% increased rate of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That kills about 20,000 individuals every year in the United States. Women who have had measles have half the rate of ovarian cancer, which kills a lot of women every year in the United States. Again, those studies, many of them, are smaller, they are retrospective, but they are all from major universities, and they are consistent in their findings, but they are inconvenient as to what the public health officials did, so they are ignored.

That is all to say that, as you said, it could be that humans developed an ecological relationship with these particular pathogens, often febrile childhood infections. That conferred a survival advantage. Maybe I am not saying it is, but that’s what these data appear to reflect, and maybe why they never went away, and maybe why they were increasing, decreasing in lethality over time. They had this other benefit, and why they just were with us, unlike other pathogens that have come and gone.

Not only have not only is it possible that vaccines have not saved millions of lives, but they also may have caused some harm in the sense that you are no longer getting these childhood diseases and having this protection. Arguably, they also just cause harm.

They definitely also cause harm at full stop. Period.

I want you to tell me about the Institute of Medicine study. I may be wrong, but I believe it was commissioned by Congress, where they were to look at 158 common harms that vaccines cause. Can you just tell me a little bit about that?

In 2009, the CDC and another agency within HHS, that is the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, that is what Robert F. Kennedy is currently the secretary of, and it is the department in which all our health agencies are located, CDC, NIH, FDA, and so forth, including one called HRSA, which administers the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. CDC and HRSA commissioned the Institute of Medicine, which is outside of the government, but is paid by the government all the time to do reports, meaning governments are clients, so they do not make the client happy.

The CDC and HRSA said, “IOM, listen, these are the 158 most commonly claimed injuries from vaccines, serious injuries. We need you to do a review of all the existing science. Let us know, does the science that is out there support that it is not causally related, that it is causally related, or maybe you do not know because the science has not been done.” The IOM went and paid a bunch of money from our federal government. Obviously, their job was to find not related so that they could also use that to defend themselves in vaccine court.

In 2012, three years later, they finally published a report and tried as they might. They were only able to find evidence to rule out five of those conditions as not being causally related. Five out of the 158. Another sixteen of them, they found that the evidence did support a causal relationship with the vaccine causing the serious harm. For the remaining 130-something or other, eight or whatever it was, the IOM said, “Sorry, you have not done your job.” I did not put it that way. They said the data and the studies have not been done for us to reach a causality conclusion on whether the vaccine causes harm. Anybody can tell you that we thoroughly study these products after licensure.

Remember, we just did pre-licensure. Pre-licensure is a joke for almost all of the childhood vaccine studies, and I will just say it quickly. It is my favorite fact-check in the world. I say this all the time, and it is categorically a fact, and I prove it in chapter ten of my book, that there is not a single routine injected childhood vaccine on the schedule that has been licensed based on a placebo-controlled trial period. Sentence two. Nor when another vaccine was used as the control, which can be appropriate if the vaccine has been shown to be safe, was that vaccine licensed based on a placebo-controlled trial? So on and so forth down the chain.

The reason I know it is true is that I did not call Paul Offit like the New York Times does, or WAPO, or Politico. I have the FDA documents that show exactly what the control was. That is a categorically true statement. It will never be untrue unless the FDA deletes all their files, comes to my law firm, deletes all our files, and erases every single clinical licensure document in the world so you cannot know what they were relied upon to license. It will be true forever. Even if they did use a placebo control, they reviewed safety for only days or weeks, typically, maybe up to six months, and they were often underpowered.

The IOM Report: Investigating Vaccine Harms

The clinical trials relied upon to license routine injected childhood vaccines are, to put it nicely, laughable in terms of assessing safety. They are useless. This IOM report now shows you the state of the science after licensure. Out of the 158 most commonly claimed conditions according to CDC and HRSA, and to be clear, these are not like conditions that happen. These are often conditions that arise very quickly. They are the ones that they could not just ignore.

They happen right away, they are in your face, they’re close in temporal relation, there is a good reason why it would cause it, and there is biological plausibility. They needed the IOM to wipe them away, and the IOM had to come back and say, “You have not done the science for almost any of them, over 130 of them.” That is really, to me, the significance of this report, and because it reflects on the lack of post-licensure safety science after the anemic studies were allowed to license them.

Going back to just the initial clinical trials you talked about, there is never a true placebo being studied when it comes to the childhood vaccine schedule. I did not Dr. Offit make a comment? I thought I read it in your book somewhere that he said that, yes, the placebo group gets a salt-water injection. Tell me about that.

The Placebo Myth: Scrutinizing Control Groups

This is a fun exchange I had with Dr. Offit. I put out, I believe, a post that said what I just said. There has never been a placebo control trial relied upon to license a routine injected childhood vaccine or something like that. He wrote back, and he said something like, “That’s not true because the Salk trial for Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine licensed in 1955 had a salt-water placebo.” He said a saltwater injection, which he says is a placebo. Which, by the way, if it were saline, salt water, saline right solution, that would be a placebo, that would qualify as a placebo. Period.

A placebo means an inert substance, like a saline injection, is considered inert. I showed him that that is not true. He wrote an entire Substack where he repeated this claim, and he called it the casual cruelty of something or other of using placebo controls, which, by the way, is ironic because he says that yes, there were placebos, but then he calls it cruel to use them. Which one is it, buddy? Let us just put that fun aside, okay? He has this long Substack article in which he is, I guess, trying to show how there were placebo controls, but he only has one example in the entire article.

It is the Salk vaccine trial, by the way. The irony is that the Salk trial also did not have a saline saltwater injection. For a vaccinologist, by the way, who makes their whole claim to fame as being knowledgeable about vaccines and vaccine trials and their safety, and who claims he himself was a Napoleon Award, you would think he would know that that was not true. How do I know it is not true if I responded to him on Substack, which he never responded to, by the way, is that I have the official final version of the Salk Report.

I offered to send him a copy. He did not respond to me. In the actual official report for the Salk trial, it says exactly what the control group was injected with. It was not just salt water. It was not salt water. It included antibiotics, not inert. It included formalin. Formalin, which you use to preserve dead people. Not inert. It included something called 199 solution, which has in it meat culture mediums and so forth. It included red dye. It included a whole bunch of ingredients in it.

It was not salt water. In my response to him, I show him that you are wrong about the Salk trial. Literally, I put every single vaccine in my Substack article, and I said, “Here was what the control was, not inert, here’s the FDA link. Here’s the vaccine, here’s the control, not inert. FDA, like I did that all the way down.” When another vaccine was used, I put in what was licensed upon. He never responded.

This is what I love about you. If you actually read the studies. You get the information from the FDA, and you actually do the digging. I feel like so many people are in that vaccines, it is a men’s camp that believe so wholeheartedly in the benefits of vaccines, but they do not ever read the studies. They do not ever do any of the digging. It is just incredible to me.

I do not blame most people in the public for that, though. I will tell you, because think about it, Kendall, if every time you went to buy a product, you had to go and research it, how would you ever get through the day? How would you, how would you finish your shopping list at Costco? You would never make it out of the store. You would be there forever. When it comes to vaccines, you do have to do what you just said, and that’s because vaccines are unlike every other product.

Whereas every other product, because you can hold a manufacturer liable for imperfections, the market corrects itself over time to make it safer. Cars are safer because the company can be held liable. Drugs are safer because the company can be held liable. It has nothing to do with the government. If you think the government’s reason that products are safer, I have a bridge to sell you. The government has nothing to do with making products safe. It has to do with the economic self-interest of the company. That is why airbags are safer, that is why roll cages, you go down the list.

There is only one product on the market, ready for only one product, where the company, you can never say, “I had you make that product safer, my kid would not be injured, wouldn’t have a chronic disease, wouldn’t be dead.” That’s vaccines. That’s it. That’s the only product that has that permanent immunity. Unlike every other product with imperfections, the market will correct it to make it safer.

When you go in to buy that new car, there are a thousand lawsuits that precede every ass with that car, even the paint. Our firm is currently in lawsuits about paint peeling. They will correct, but it is never going to happen with child vaccines. Unlike most products, they’re trying to do it with pesticides now, but unlike any other product, you do have to do your homework on it. You do need to dig under the hood about it, but people do not realize why they have to do that for vaccines.

This makes me think of what you wrote in your book several times. The pharmaceutical companies do not have an incentive to make vaccines safe because of the 1986 Act. Can you explain that to us?

The 1986 Act: Liability And Perverse Economic Incentives

I cannot stress enough how important the economic self-interest of a corporation is to ensure the safety of products. Think about it like this. You own stock, Kendall. You have a retirement account. Where do you want your stock to go? Which direction?

Up.

You want it to go up. You want your stock to rise. How do stocks rise? When companies make money, when they have profit, the more profit they make, the more it goes up. Everybody has a retirement account, every mutual fund, every investor, Wall Street, every single executive, the board of directors, every single person in that company, all the way up and down the management chain that has any say. They often have stock options. They all want the stock to go up. When you think about a typical drug, companies and pharma are still liable for the injuries caused by the drugs.

When they’re sitting there and they’re designing that clinical trial, I am going to show you how important these economic self-interests are. They’re thinking, “What is the fastest way to profitability?” They’ll design that clinical trial, and they’ll implement it, and they’ll proceed on the quickest way to market to increase profitability. When they’re liable for the harms the drug will cause, it does not mean they’re not going to put a drug out that causes some harm. They want to make sure, though, that it is safe enough that they’re going to make far more money than the damage it’s going to cause. That conforms to their conduct.

How do they do that? By doing a clinical trial with five days of safety monitoring, 147 kids? No. They’re not going to do that with a drug, by the way, they’re moral or because they’re ethical or because they want to do the right thing or because the FDA requires it. Nothing to do with the government. The government’s useless when it comes to product safety, in my opinion.

The government’s useless when it comes to product safety. What it comes down to is the economic self-interest of the company to make sure they do not lose money.

What it comes down to is that the company wants to know the safety to a degree before it goes to market, which is why it often will do long-term placebo-controlled trials of drugs before they go to the market, because they have an economic self-interest to make sure they do not lose money on safety issues. With vaccines, they do not have that interest, because of a law called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which I’ll call the 1986 Act, that gave the vaccine companies the immunity I addressed earlier.

It made it so that those companies will never, ever, no matter how much science advances, no matter how easily they could make their product safer, ever be able to be held liable, that had they made the product safer, your kid would not be dead or injured. The only product like that that has that permanent immunity, and every single vaccine on the current schedule was licensed, save one, by a pharma company knowing they would not be liable for their injuries.

That is an incredibly moral hazard and perverse incentive. The reason that the law came into effect, I think, wraps this up and really brings it home, because leading up to 1986, there were only three routine vaccines. That’s it, MMR, DTP, and OPV. That’s all there was. That’s it. A child following the CDC schedule in 1986 got three injections on or before their first birthday. Three, that’s it.

A child following the CDC schedule today gets 29 injections on or before their first birthday, counting three injections the mom gets while she’s pregnant in that 29, including in utero. Every one of those products was tried and licensed by a company, knowing they would not be liable for the injuries they caused on the basis that they could have made the product safer. It is what I call the original sin. I go through it in chapter four of my book.

I just want to ask you a couple more questions, if that’s okay with you. It is very interesting to me that, of course, we’re in total agreement that the safety studies have not been done. Yet we hear people on our side say, “We really fight for informed consent.” I would almost argue that there’s no such thing as informed consent, because what is a parent, for example, going to do, even if they’re willing to do the research that we talked about and do the digging? If the studies have not been done, how are they ever going to be able to adequately see whether or not the product is safe and then give their informed consent? That seems absurd.

I guess it matters how you look at informed consent. A lot of people focus on the informed part. To me, that’s not the important part of informed consent. It is the consent part. That’s what it is to me. You can get a parent who goes in and says, “Doc, I do not want to know anything. I believe in vaccines. I believe there was the Bible and there were vaccines, and that’s all there is,” and jab them up. They were informed to the degree they wanted, and they consented, and that’s informed consent for that parent. You got the parent who does maybe some of the stuff we just went through.

They look at the package insert. They say, “I do not think that trial is sufficient for me to consent.” They look at the post-licensure safety. Let us look at Hep B. They look at the Hep B packages. They go, “I do not think that’s good enough.” Post-licensure, the IOM report, “You have not actually studied almost any of the serious harms our own government says Hep B vaccine can cause.” They look at the immunity. They go, “The company won’t even stand behind their product? Really? That’s troubling.” They go, “I’m informed enough, doc. I do not consent.”

The doc says, “No problem.” The government says, “No problem.” The schools say, “No problem.” Now you cannot send your kid to school. You cannot get a job. You cannot participate in civil society. That is why the consent part of informed consent to me is what matters. Informed consent to me means you inform me to whatever degree I want to be informed. There will never be perfect knowledge about anything, Kendall. Never. There will never be enough time in the day for anybody to become an expert in everything.

I am informed to the degree I want, and then I choose to consent or not, and when I say no, that should be the end of the story. To then take away my rights because I do not consent, that is, to put it nicely, bullying, thuggery. It is the worst form of governance that you can imagine. It is destructive to civil and individual rights. That right to say no, what I call medical liberty, is truly an incredible fundamental right that I think a lot of people do not appreciate, because people do not think about the fact that your body and your kid’s body are the commodity on which pharma makes its money.

The more they can control what you ingest, what you inject, and what you put on your body, the more money they make. The far quicker route to profitability and to getting you to take their product is not persuading you through marketing. It is mandating you with lobbying dollars. That is far cheaper. This is how much they have to spend on lobbying to mandate. This is what they have to spend on marketing to persuade you. They are always going to go the lobbying route.

You have seen this encroaching larger and larger circle to take away people’s right to be able to say no to an increasing number of medical products. You are correct. No one will ever be fully, truly informed about the actual safety profile of these products to compare it against the efficacy profile because they have not done all the studies. I do not think that is necessary. However, I will put an asterisk on it, and I will say this. When you look at the studies that compare kids who have gotten no vaccines, the studies that have kids who have gotten one or more vaccines, what you see is that the vaccinated kids have multiple times the rate of chronic health issues. Which ones?

The very same ones that have exploded in the last 40 years. We have gone from under ten percent of kids in the early 80s with a chronic health issue in America to over 40% of kids with a chronic health issue, according to data. What are those chronic health issues? Almost all of them have some kind of etiology in immune system dysregulation. What is causing the immune system of kids in America to dysregulate en masse? Our health authorities will tell you they do not know. It is a mystery.

They could start by looking at the over a dozen studies that compare vaccinated, zero vaccines, to unvaccinated, zero vaccines, excuse me, to one or more vaccines, unexposed to exposed. They are retrospective epi studies. They all have confounders. You could criticize every one of them standing alone for different reasons, but they are consistent. There are over a dozen of them at this point.

Practical Steps: Navigating Vaccine Research

The fact that they do not want to do the more robust ones does not change the fact that the weight of that evidence at the moment reflects that vaccines are probably a significant material contributor to the explosion of chronic health issues. I do not disagree with you on the informed part. You cannot know, but if you are going to do it based on the existing weight of the science, vaccines are pretty big trouble, not only individually, but collectively.

I am glad you put it that way because I am not sure I was quite thinking of it in the sense of the consent part. Of course, I am 100% for consent, but I was really thinking about the informational part. I have studied this topic for so many years like you, and it is hard for us to figure out what is true and what is not true. It just seems like a parent is at a disadvantage. As you said, “They can look at the package inserts, and they can read a lot of stuff that is going on with the vaccines because the companies legally have to put on certain aspects. They have to say, “We’ve had these harms happen in our clinical trials, or we studied this for X amount of time,” correct?

Look, to make it a place I would start is I would go no further than the FDA website, the CDC website, and the Institute of Medicine. Honestly, you do not need to go far afield from that. On the FDA website, for each vaccine, there is one page called US-licensed vaccines. Start with the package insert. You can look at the underlying clinical trial documents, too, if you want. Let us just start with the package insert. Go to section 6.1. Section 6.1 is the summary, as required by the FDA regulation, that summarizes the clinical trial relied upon to license that vaccine. Read it with your own eyes.

Go to section 6.2. Section 6.2 lists the adverse events that the manufacturer has, as required by federal law, has a basis to believe are causally related to the vaccine, not correlation, and has a basis to believe are causally related. That is what the FDA regulations require them to put in section 6.2. You can then go see what the manufacturer says, which conditions they believe they have a basis that is causally related. When you are done with that fun exercise, then flip over to the Institute of Medicine report and look up that vaccine, and just go down there. They have a summary table.

Out of the 158 conditions, which ones have been properly studied? You are like, “Hep B vaccine, no. That is not looking good.” You might want to ask yourself one final point. This, to me, is really important. Think about vaccines as a product. This is really important because they are, they are a product. Get yourself in the mindset to think of it as a product. It is a consumer product. Imagine yourself going to buy any other consumer product.

We use the car as an analogy. Imagine, and I will go back to what I said earlier, you go in to buy a car, and you say, “What’s the warranty on this thing? I’m going to buy it for my daughter.” They say, “Warranty? What do you mean? No warranty.” “How do I know it’s safe?” The guy says to you, “It’s safe.” I said, “Why don’t you put a warranty, stand behind your product?” “It’s safe.” They get angry at you, the car salesman says, “Wait a second. Unless you prove to me that this car is not safe, you’ve got to buy it. If you do not buy it, I’m kicking your daughter out of school.”

You would be like, “What the hell is going on here? This is crazy. This is insanity.” That is the reality of vaccines. You’ve got to replace it with a different product to see how ridiculous it is. How absurd it is. The solution to that is simple. If you go to the ICAN website, ICanDecide.org, which is the nonprofit that funds a lot of the vaccine policy work that my law firm does, and does great work, just like Weston A. Price Foundation does some great work.

There is a letter there that you can send to the pharmaceutical companies that says, “I’m going to inject this product into my child after you send this back, signed, please, because you say this product is safe. It’s been decades since you’re saying it’s safe, so obviously, you know it’s safe. We do not have to worry. Kindly sign here to waive your immunity to liability if my child gets injured for the injury you say will never happen.” Please send that back to me, and then wait for that to get back to you in the mail, and then you’ll, you get your warranty basically.

Final Advice: Protecting Your Health In A Modern World

I’m sure there’s been a lot of returns on that. Aaron, it has been so great talking to you. I want to wrap up today by asking you one question that I ask all of my interviewees, and that is, if the audience could do just one thing to improve their health, what would you suggest? It could be anything.

I am going to go do something safe. I am going to say, get informed before you engage in an intervention. I am biased in that regard because I focus on these products in particular for what I do, but I mean that. I would get informed before you go do something new. I say that by the way, for everything, because all environmental insults can cause dysregulation. Vaccines can do it, so can drugs, so can forever chemicals, so can microplastics.

Get informed before you engage in an intervention because all environmental insults can cause dysregulation.

Go down the list. So can pesticides. Every exposure that you have, and do not let them call it, I love these terms, like organic. No, organic just means like the way humans lived forever. It’s conventional. No, it is not. It is new. It is your made-up stuff that you just created in a synthetic lab a few decades ago. Polyester means it is just plastic, and you want to wear plastic on your body all day. Maybe you think that is fine, and maybe it is fine for most people. Especially before you get pregnant, because your toxic load is going to get transferred to your baby, potentially your unborn infants, and so forth, especially during those very critical times of development in utero and their first year of life.

Anything and everything, including what you have exposed yourself to before that, I would really think hard about everything in your environment. I would start with this one fundamental question. Were human beings exposed to this for the length of human history? If they were not, and it was only introduced in the last few hundred years, take a moment to think about it. That would be what I would say.

That is very good advice, absolutely. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. I hope to have you back on the show sometime soon, and I hope you have a wonderful day.

Thank you. It is fun. I appreciate it.

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Our guest was Aaron Siri. You can learn more about his work and his book, Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines, by visiting his website at AaronSiriOfficial.com and following his ongoing efforts to bring greater transparency to vaccine policy and safety. This conversation was a powerful reminder that when it comes to our health, and especially the health of our children, we cannot outsource our thinking.

We explored how incentives shape science, why so many critical questions remain unanswered, and how a system built without accountability can quietly erode both trust and truth. Erin also challenged us to look beyond assumptions, to examine the actual data, and to recognize that informed consent is not just about information. It is about the freedom to say yes or no without coercion.

At the end of the day, this conversation invites us to become more aware of the world around us, to question what we have been told, to seek out primary sources, and to take responsibility for the choices we make. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend, leave us a review, and consider supporting the Weston A. Price Foundation. You can learn more at WestonAPrice.org. For a full transcript of today’s episode, visit WestonAPrice.org and click on the podcast page. Thank you so much for listening. Be well, be nourished, and be free.

About Aaron Siri

Aaron Siri is the author of Vaccines, Amen, the host of Informed w/ Aaron Siri, and the Managing Partner of Siri & Glimstad LLP, a national firm of over 100 professionals focused on civil rights, class actions, and complex litigation.

He has led high-profile cases challenging medical mandates and restored exemptions. Examples include preventing discharge of over 10,000 U.S. military personnel, compelling FDA to release Pfizer’s COVID-19 documents, securing a religious exemption to mandated vaccines for over 400,000 students in Mississippi and over 300,000 students in the University of California system, and deposing leading vaccinologists.

He is a graduate of UC Berkeley School of Law, clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, and is frequently interviewed by national media.