[Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines by Aaron Siri, Injecting Freedom LLC, September 4, 2025, 308 pp.]
In large-scale medical tragedies like the handling of tobacco-caused death and disease or thalidomide-caused birth defects, most of the damage is caused not because the science is elusive but because the social dynamics are recalcitrant. In Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines, trial lawyer Aaron Siri blazes an optimal path to liberty, good science, and a reckoning, by establishing multiple facts about the vaccines to date and people’s supporting actions.
Siri places the social dynamics front and center by introducing key groups of people and some of their key actions and beliefs. In part I, “The Clergy,” Siri begins with the high priest—foremost vaccinologist Stanley Plotkin. Plotkin helped develop at least four vaccines, was listed as an author of over 900 peer-reviewed articles, and was listed as an editor for each of eight editions of vaccinology’s standard medical textbook, Plotkin’s Vaccines. Deposed by Siri, Plotkin showed that he didn’t know that the two Hep B vaccines that were then FDA-licensed for newborns were approved based on, at most, five days of safety trials—inadequate time to detect any neurological disorders, for example, that arose later. Plotkin also claimed that the Hep B vaccine doesn’t cause encephalitis, but he had no proof. He claimed that other commonly suspected harms including autism weren’t caused by vaccines, but he had no proof. Even so, he said, for the health of a child he absolutely would have to tell the child’s parent that DTaP/Tdap vaccines do not cause autism.
Siri next introduces “the disciples,” Plotkin’s trainees. Like Plotkin, disciples like Paul Offit and Tina Tan are selected by vaccine producers as paid researchers and paid speakers, and are selected by FDA and CDC to advise on vaccines. The CDC, in turn, is selected by state-government people to advise on vaccines.
Siri then introduces “the priests”—the federal, state, and local government-agency managers, the foremost being Anthony Fauci. During covid, government managers turned to Plotkin’s trainees for advice on whether natural immunity—which is the gold standard that vaccine developers strive to meet—might not be as good as vaccine-derived immunity from the warp-speed-developed covid vaccines. When legally required to answer why no childhood vaccine clinical trials were run against a placebo (like saline solution), the responsible managers didn’t refer to the trial data they keep on record, but here too turned to Plotkin’s trainees, who falsely claimed that the vaccines had been trialed against placebos.
In part II—“The Church”—Siri first describes the dynamics and the content of the pivotal National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. Vaccines were starting to be used more widely, bringing mounting injuries, leading to mounting product-liability lawsuits. Instead of allowing producers to face lawsuits and withdraw products, Democratic representatives, Republican senators, and a Republican president enacted a statute that, from then on, government elites treated as having taken away people’s constitutional right to pursue civil justice from vaccine producers for product liability for every routine childhood vaccine sold at that time or developed later. Government elites forced people seeking civil justice for vaccine harms to sue the national government.
Siri next introduces the government agency minions. HHS’s FDA people approve vaccine safety. HHS’s CDC people promote vaccine use. HHS’s CDC reviews mortality data and only approves reports for publication that support CDC’s policy that vaccines are safe and effective. HHS defends the national government in suits over vaccine harms.
Siri concludes with the church’s real power—the pharma people. Pharma funding is allocated in such a way as to very effectively select for the disciples, priests, and allies who maximize profits. Pharma-selected people conduct clinical trials, edit academic journals, advise government regulators, and guide medical educators.
In part III, “The Faith,” and part IV, “The Golden Calf,” Siri examines this extended vaccine system’s outcomes. Rare but compelling evidence has established that vaccines may likely have taken more lives than they’ve saved; vaccines have likely have caused more harm than they’ve reduced; and only measles vaccines prevent transmission, while pertussis and potentially other vaccines increase transmission.
Vaccines aren’t thoroughly studied pre-licensure or post-licensure. And the recently-revealed Henry Ford Health System one-and-only large-scale study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people showed that the vaccinated people experienced substantially-elevated proportions of deaths and harms (which, when reanalyzed recently, indicated that relative to unvaccinated people, people who received on average 18 vaccines—far-less vaccine exposure than the CDC’s childhood schedule, as of the reanalysis, of 81 vaccine doses—experienced symptoms characteristic of autism-spectrum neuropathies at a rate that was higher by a factor of 5.49).
As managing partner of Siri & Glimstad, LLP and lead counsel for the Informed Consent Action Network, Siri sought and obtained discovery of government records on vaccines and deposed highly-influential vaccinologists. Siri brings to Vaccines, Amen unique knowledge from legal discovery, plus an exceptionally broad survey of pharma-disincentivized findings, that most scientists don’t have and in any case typically wouldn’t bring to bear on their usual far-narrower research. Siri is uniquely able to state definitively what has never been studied and reported.
Siri also readily explains, in terms that jurors would readily follow and weigh, the ways that vaccinologists credit vaccines for good results the vaccines didn’t produce—either at all, or to the degree vaccinologists have claimed. Also, he adeptly explains the ways that potentially damaging results are by design not collected, or are collected but then systematically misinterpreted. And he has timely access to recent, striking findings.
Siri doesn’t stress alternatives for prevention and treatment. Vaccines originated in a different time, back when dread diseases caused substantial death and disability, and people who were exposed and survived gained substantial protection. Since no alternatives to such prevention were known, attempts got underway to exploit such immune-system training to protect lives and health. Meanwhile, though, massive improvements in nutrition, exposure reduction, and the earliest treatments greatly reduced the spread of infectious diseases and the resulting harms.
Each time a vaccine was developed, the vaccine turned out to already be far-less necessary to prevent a disease or the resulting harms. As a result, the risk-benefit calculus changed. If a vaccine caused harm, and vaccines were administered to more people than would be exposed to or at least harmed by the target disease, any vaccine-caused disease turned out to have been transformed by events into a substantial menace. Siri does include some examples of this. Meanwhile, non-vaccine preventions and treatments were proliferated into a formidable arsenal that encompasses such measures as vitamins, supplements, minerals, exercise, improved interior ventilation, antiviral solutions and drugs, antioxidants, steroids, and antibiotics.
In the main, Siri focuses on opening the door to requiring genuinely informed consent. Given more adequate information, vaccine producers, distributors, and potential customers can begin to work out the valuable tradeoffs that best improve health, individual by individual. Be aware, though, that the vaccine products that have been developed to date look remarkably unpromising. Natural immunity is clearly more agilely adaptive, and time-proven, than one-size-fits-all vaccine forced immunity.
Vaccine victims and families, prospective customers, and even producers, regulators, and providers could ask for no more-precise targeting of harms and a chance to turn to healing.
Although Siri’s framing of vaccine support as a religion may lead distract some people into not noticing or appreciating this, Siri keenly observes the vaccine system’s social dynamics, and acknowledges them in a kindly, accommodating manner—for instance remarking, in effect, that a vaccinologist might well have easily concluded that he receives support from industry solely because of his skill and achievements, and that since his work helps people, it’s incidental and quite understandable that his work also increases profits. More thoroughly, Siri’s considerable and diverse collection of outcomes, his skillful interpretations, and his passing remarks about scientific points, such as that viruses evolve to become less lethal, surely will demonstrate his competence and build up his credibility with people in the system who choose to look into what he might have to offer them.
I encourage readers of this review to not authorize or take another vaccine without first reading through this timely, one-of-kind resource and trove of information. For individuals’ health, for exposing crony-warped science in process, and for potentially single-handedly overturning an enduring, destructive paradigm and clearing the way for greatly helpful increased uptake of safer, more effective preventions and treatments, Aaron Siri’s Vaccines, Amen is a must read.
