A masterpiece: Lawyer Aaron Siri’s book “Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines”

“If you want the real truth about drugs, don’t ask doctors – ask lawyers.”

When drug policy researcher Alan Cassels from British Columbia reviewed my 2025 book, How Merck and Drug Regulators Hid Serious Harms of the HPV Vaccines, this was his conclusion.

Through litigation, lawyers can get access to confidential documents held by the authorities and drug companies. If we don’t have access to the comprehensive clinical study reports of the trials drug companies submit to drug regulators to get their vaccines and other drugs approved, we cannot know what their benefits and harms are. It has been abundantly demonstrated that we cannot trust what drug companies publish in medical journals, which is a variation over the theme, “Torture your data till they confess.” And if the data don’t confess under torture, they won’t see the light of day.

Complicit doctors on drug company payroll are also to blame, as they will usually refuse to share their data despite promising this in their publications. Even our authorities may refuse to cooperate for the public good, forgetting why society bestowed them with their important tasks and that their obligation should always be toward the citizens that pay their salaries through taxes.

Aaron Siri’s book is a rare testimony about what can be achieved via lawsuits. He brings many politically inconvenient facts to the table that the people who buried them thought would never resurface.

Being a lawyer, Aaron is very factual, which is uncommon for vaccine books. Most of them are misleading and emotional, with numerous errors, which do not prevent them from becoming bestsellers. The most horrible vaccine books I have seen sell by the millions. Apparently, many Americans don’t care about the truth. If they did, they would hardly have elected habitual law breaker Donald Trump for a second term after he had made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first presidency.

As Aaron argues, vaccines are a religion and sacrosanct, not to be questioned. People never say they believe in cars but many say they believe in vaccines, without having the data needed to provide an informed opinion. I found the same when I analysed 33 BMJ articles about health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s much-needed vaccine reforms. It was all about faith, not about science, and the journalists went after the man instead of the ball to such an extent that they committed character assassination.

Lies and obfuscations about vaccines

Aaron’s book is full of interesting information. Even though I have a keen interest in vaccines, I learned a lot. He documents how public health agencies misrepresent data, pretending there is certainty when there is none, and deliberately withholding information central to informed consent.

The authorities have urged everyone, but particularly healthcare workers, to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and influenza to protect others, but these vaccines cannot reduce the risk of transmission, as their effect is systemic, not local, on the respiratory mucosa. Drug companies also lied, and GlaxoSmithKline even tried to sell whooping cough vaccine to grandparents, claiming it protected their grandchildren. Aaron’s firm successfully sued the company for its false advertising.

That most childhood vaccines fail to prevent transmission makes it particularly repulsive to mandate those vaccines as a condition for school entry, but all US states mandate vaccines. Even the HPV vaccine has been mandated, although the disease is sexually transmitted, which hopefully does not occur in the classroom. Aaron argues that the more a product needs to be coerced, the more one should be concerned about that product.

An important reason why some people have become sceptical towards vaccines is that they know the authorities have lied to them. For example, they have claimed that the Covid vaccines are 100% effective, but many got Covid despite being been fully vaccinated.

Moreover, when observational studies show that vaccines increase deaths, they are by default deemed unreliable, but when the same kind of studies show that vaccines reduce deaths, they are considered reliable.

Most disturbingly perhaps, Aaron documents that the world’s top vaccinologists are responsible for a lot of mis- and disinformation about vaccines. Disinformation is very serious because it means intentional deception.

Aaron’s takedown during a deposition in court of Stanley Plotkin, the “high priest” of vaccines, is brilliant. Aaron exposed that the emperor had no clothes when claiming that childhood vaccines are safe and have been carefully tested.

Plotkin was unable to understand why his earnings of hundreds of millions of dollars from royalties and his close alignment with the interests of the vaccine industry could influence his views on vaccines. He didn’t know that safety monitoring in certain trials only lasted 4-5 days after vaccination, which is way too short to capture autoimmune adverse events, but he nonetheless stated that certain vaccines don’t cause certain harms, or said the harms were rare, without having any evidence in support of his wishful thinking.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has defrauded the American public to an unbelievable degree. They launched a smartphone-based tool, V-safe, that the public could use for reporting adverse effects of the Covid vaccines. There were 10 listed symptoms that occurred within the first week after vaccination, those that normally occur with vaccines. The CDC omitted to include known or suspected harms of the Covid vaccines in the checklist, including myocarditis and stroke. They monitored health impact data for the Covid vaccines on V-safe for 12 months and published over 40 studies but in all of them, the data were only those reported in the first week after vaccination. When Aaron after two years of legal demands and federal litigation got the secret CDC data, they showed that 8% needed medical care after Covid vaccination, on average 2-3 times; in 75% of cases, this meant urgent care, emergency room, or hospitalisation. An additional 25% missed school or work or were unable to do normal activities. The CDC claimed that free-text data should not be released because they contained protected personal information, which is an invalid argument, as data can be pseudonymised.

When scientists using the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink found that vaccines cause various harms, the CDC moved the database to a health industry trade association to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests.

When the CDC found massive safety signals for the Covid vaccines compared with other vaccines (using proportional reporting ratios), they lied about it. Aaron’s firm asked for the data, but the CDC claimed they had not done the analysis they had planned to do. It was only after pressure from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) that the CDC admitted they had the data. Aaron’s firm sued the CDC to get the data, which showed that the CDC’s own threshold for triggering a safety signal was blown away for numerous serious adverse events, including cardiac events, multisystem inflammatory syndrome, and deaths.

It is very burdensome to report adverse events to the authorities and fewer than 1% are reported. When Harvard researchers developed a system for automatic reporting, which would also provide a denominator – the number of people vaccinated – the CDC killed the project although a CDC sister agency had funded it, and the CDC refused to communicate with the researchers.

After having complained in court about redactions in emails, Aaron’s group found out that the CDC had a cozy relationship with Big Pharma and made policies about vaccine safety with the companies while refusing to work with citizen groups concerned about safety.

During the Covid pandemic, when mortality increased despite continued vaccinations, and when it turned out that the more doses people received, the greater the risk of Covid infection, the authorities pulled the data from public view.

The FDA also defrauds the American public. When Aaron tried to get data on Covid vaccine harms from the FDA, the agency refused to provide them, claiming resource constraints. His federal lawsuit has so far lasted almost three years “with no end in sight as the FDA is fighting like hell to keep that data hidden.” The FDA is so corrupt that I call it Fatal Drug Approvals. If the FDA had protected the citizens instead of the drug industry, our prescription drugs would not be the leading cause of death, ahead of heart disease and cancer.

I also call it the Foot Dragging Agency. When scientists asked the FDA in 2021 to provide the data submitted by Pfizer for its Covid vaccine, the FDA wanted court approval to have more than 75 years to publicly disclose this information. Aaron sued the FDA and a judge ordered release of the documents. But even after being ordered to produce everything by a federal court, the FDA withheld records directly tied to its emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s vaccine, estimated to be approximately one million pages, corresponding to about 5,000 books. As Aaron noted, “Only those concerned about the truth seek to conceal evidence.”

The hepatitis B vaccine was approved by the FDA based on a study of only 147 children monitored for 5 days after vaccination, and with no control group. In contrast to Western Europe except Portugal, all newborns in the USA got the jab, even though this disease is transmitted by sex or drug users sharing needles. In December 2025, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the CDC decided to recommend the birth dose only if the mother had tested positive for the virus or if her infection status was unknown.

This change was very rational, but when I checked the news stories from 14 major media outlets, they were all very negative. The media used three main tactics to support their beliefs: First, they denigrated Kennedy, the members of ACIP he had selected, and some of the presenters at the meeting. Second, they gave undue prominence and praise to the three dissenting ACIP voices and outsiders, who were depicted as experts or scientists, as if to say that they must be right. They were widely quoted for their remarks, which were rarely rational or evidence-based and sometimes plain wrong, e.g. Plotkin’s best-known disciple, Paul Offit, lied monstrously on CNN. Third, they didn’t check if what the critics of the policy change claimed was correct.

The missing placebo and more lies

We know very little about the serious harms of vaccines because drug companies have avoided to compare their vaccines with placebo and have left out important harms in their published substandard and flawed trials.

When Aaron sent a legal demand to the US Department of Health and Human Services about why clinical trials for childhood vaccines did not include a placebo control group, the agency lied: “Many pediatric vaccines have been investigated in clinical trials that included a placebo.”

The fact-checking industry also failed us badly, as they did during the entire Covid pandemic, e.g. when a health magazine claimed that the false information that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 100% effective had been fact checked:

Fact-checkers announced that the claim that routine childhood vaccines were not licensed based on a placebo-controlled trial is false but they had not bothered to look up the facts in primary sources such as the publicly available FDA documents.

Aaron describes a CNN article from June 2025 listing 258 studies and that Dr. Jake Scott from Stanford University claimed that 153 of these studies had tested vaccines against placebo. But, as Kennedy made clear in his response, not one of these studies included a placebo or was otherwise relied upon by the FDA to license a vaccine on the CDC’s childhood schedule. Nonetheless, in a public dispute with Aaron, Offit claimed that all vaccines are tested in such trials before licensure.

Offit even argued that it would be cruel to use a placebo control, but he cannot have it both ways. If there always was a placebo, it means that he, Plotkin, and their colleagues are cruel, as they did many of the trials. Moreover, as Aaron argues, in a placebo-controlled trial, children are left unvaccinated only for the duration of the trial. In contrast, injecting a vaccine into millions of children in an uncontrolled setting without first assessing its safety is grossly unethical conduct.

Childhood vaccines are used in healthy children to benefit very few. The requirements for vaccines should therefore be much greater than for other drugs, but there are virtually none. This may be the most appalling neglect we have in all of healthcare.

New vaccines are compared with old vaccines, which were not compared with placebo but with other old vaccines. When the adverse events are the same, the authorities conclude that both are safe. Merck concluded in the same bizarre way when they found similar harms with their aluminium containing adjuvant as with their HPV vaccine containing the same adjuvant. This is like saying that cigars are safe because they cause similar harms as cigarettes.

Virtually all serious adverse events in vaccine trials with no placebo control are dismissed by researchers on drug company payroll as being unrelated to the vaccine, which they cannot know, as they don’t know which harms a new vaccine might cause.

And even when there is a placebo control, the published randomised trials are seriously misleading. When my wife got the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine, she became terribly ill, with insomnia, fever, severe headache, muscle aches, nausea, dizziness, and loss of appetite. She needed to stay home from work for four days. On day three, she was slow-cerebrated in a way our family had never experienced before. The first 13 colleagues at her hospital department (she is professor of clinical microbiology) also became so ill from the vaccine that they needed sick leave. Being unable to work is by definition a severe adverse effect, which occurred in 100% of the hospital staff, but in AstraZeneca’s trial report in The Lancet, only 1% had a severe adverse reactions.

It cannot be disputed that vaccines can cause serious, sometimes deadly, harms, which was confirmed in reports from the US Institute of Medicine. In 2013, the US Department of Health and Human Services commissioned the Institute to review the safety of the CDC childhood schedule including the occurrence of asthma, autoimmune diseases, autism, and other neurodevelopmental disorders. When the Institute could not find a single study that had compared health outcomes in vaccinated children with those in children who had not received any vaccines, it offered an amusing conclusion: “There is no evidence that the [childhood vaccine] schedule is not safe.” I got the point. If the brakes in a new car model have never been tested, the reassuring conclusion would be: “There is no evidence that the brakes don’t work.”

As Aaron says, the onus is not on you to show that a product someone wants to inject into you or your baby is unsafe but on that person to prove to you it is safe.

Filmmaker Del Bigtree convinced Dr. Marcus Zervos from Henry Ford Health that he should do the much-needed study that compared vaccinated with unvaccinated children. The stated goal of the study was to rule out vaccines as the cause of long-term adverse health outcomes to reassure parents of the overall safety of vaccinations, and Aaron ensured that the study would be published no matter what the results showed.

Aaron received a study report in early 2020 but the higher-ups at Henry Ford didn’t want it to be published and Zervos said while he was filmed with a hidden camera that he didn’t want to lose his job. The study report came to light five years later during a Senate hearing on “The Corruption of Science.” I have explained that the study is above-average quality and that the authors were genuinely surprised by their results and did sensitivity analyses to test their robustness. They also provided a very interesting and convincing discussion about issues that might explain their findings, which they put in context. This was good science.

The vaccinated children had 2.5 times the rate of “any chronic disease,” compared to unvaccinated children. The risk was four times higher for asthma, three times higher for atopic conditions like eczema and hay fever, and five to six times higher for autoimmune and neurodevelopmental disorders. This is expected for vaccine harms because childhood infections appear to provide significant protection from atopy.

The Agency for Health Research and Quality also failed us badly. They produced a colossal review (740 pages), which was supposedly about vaccine safety but the real goal was to increase vaccine uptake. The authors stated that new vaccines must undergo rigorous processes before receiving approval and that they meet “stringent criteria for safety,” which is so wrong that it looks like a propaganda pamphlet from Pfizer. Aaron explains that virtually all the included studies were conducted by drug companies or by people funded by them, and the agency’s claim that they had an unvaccinated control group was wrong, as people also got vaccines in the control group.

Other misinformation issues

I am one of those who have written that vaccines have saved millions of lives, which is correct. The smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions. But many vaccinologists claim that vaccines save millions even today, in the Western world, which is not correct. Aaron documents that in the year before the introduction of each of 12 childhood vaccines, only about 5,000 people in total died from these diseases in the USA. This means that, currently, the life-saving effect of these vaccines must be very small.

It is important to realise this. When a drug used for the whole population benefits very few people, its harms become very important for decision making, both on a governmental level and for individual people. Vaccine advocates like Plotkin and Offit don’t say much about vaccine harms, even though they can sometimes be deadly or cause serious, permanent neurological handicaps. They prefer to repeat the industry mantra that vaccines are safe and effective even though this is impossible. A drug that has a beneficial effect cannot also be safe. There will always be some people who are harmed, so what matters is the balance between benefits and harms.

I give an example in my vaccine book where I use concrete numbers to demonstrate that travellers to endemic areas, where they can get Japanese encephalitis from mosquitoes and die from it, should not get vaccinated if they are just on a short-term vacation. The CDC tells you to “Talk to your doctor,” but in an area with so much uncertainly, and with such a rare disease far from home, it is unlikely your doctor will be qualified to advise you. It is more a matter of the authorities avoiding any responsibility by passing the buck. If the vaccine kills you, which it might, they can point to the fact that they did warn people.

Two of the most outstanding vaccine researchers in the world, the Danish couple Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn, have become so famous for their groundbreaking research on the nonspecific effects of vaccines that it is on the list of milestones in Nature. They have shown in randomised trials and observational studies that live, attenuated vaccines reduce overall mortality more than can be predicted from their specific effect, while non-live vaccines increase overall mortality; that the order of vaccination is important; that it is best to finish with a live vaccine; and that the harmful effects of non-live vaccines predominantly affect girls.

These researchers found that the DTP vaccine, the most used vaccine in the world, doubled mortality in tropical Africa. After the WHO had produced an inconclusive report about this in 2014, Aaron asked me to review the evidence. I found that Aaby’s findings were much more convincing than the WHO report, and that the way WHO’s experts handled the data was inconsistent and scientifically inappropriate. Two high-ranked Cochrane people were involved in producing the WHO report, and – amazingly - they violated Cochrane’s own guidelines for systematic reviews.

It was truly bizarre. When Aaron asked UNICEF if they had evidence that the DTP vaccine decreased mortality, they referred to the WHO report, and when he addressed the issue again, most recently in 2021, after my 2019 report, UNICEF didn’t do anything, but emails exchanged with the CDC revealed that both agencies were concerned about avoiding personal exposure and not about whether a vaccine might kill children. The metric of success in the vaccine field is not survival or childhood health but vaccine uptake and, tragicomically, the usage of the DTP vaccine is the marker the WHO uses for vaccine uptake generally.

Conclusions

Aaron warns that “history will not look kindly upon the misguided officials and individuals who seek to expel children from school, fire people from jobs, and otherwise punish people for refusing a medical product.” He also notes that when they cannot persuade on the merits, tyrants engage in coercion, censorship, mandates, and punishment, which dehumanise people.

Sadly, I will need to agree that this is where America, and to a much lesser extent, Europe, is today in relation to vaccines.

Several of the issues mentioned above have been published in: Gøtzsche PC. How CDC and FDA Defrauded the American Public about Serious Vaccine Harms. Brownstone Journal 2025;Nov 21.