
Aaron Siri is one of the leading legal voices challenging vaccine mandates and advocating for informed consent, government transparency, and medical freedom. In this conversation, he explains why parents must think critically, ask harder questions, and understand the difference between consensus and actual evidence. The secret this week is… Consensus ISN’T The Same As Truth
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A
Most people don't wake up one day and say, you know what I want to do today? I want to take a socially ostracizing position that might get my kids out of school, meet the round of my job, potentially my kids excluded from play dates, call all kinds of pejoratives, have the news media talk about how we shouldn't be treated in emergency rooms. Yeah, that's what I want to do today. No, most people do not make this decision lightly. And I find they've often, they or somebody they know has had a very direct experience by these products. But I often find that alone is not enough. It's usually that coupled with they then did their own research, they did their own homework.
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If you're a parent of a child with autism, you are being called to rise with love, courage, and clarity. This journey isn't easy, and most parents aren't equipped, but you can be. This podcast is your invitation to rise higher because how you navigate matters. I'm Len, and this is Autism Parenting Secrets, where you become the parent your child needs now. Hello and welcome. Last week on this podcast, Del Bigtree shared a powerful message about courage and why parents no longer can afford to simply lay low. And this week's conversation continues that theme. This week, I'm joined by Aaron Seri, managing partner of Siri and Glimstad and author of the new book Vaccines. Amen. Aaron has become one of the leading legal voices challenging government agencies and pharmaceutical companies around vaccine safety, informed consent, and medical transparency. And I recently saw Aaron speak at the Autism Health Summit in San Diego. And what stood out most for me was his challenge for parents to think more deeply about the difference between consensus and. And actual evidence. So the secret this week is consensus isn't the same as truth. Welcome, Aaron.
A
Good to be here.
B
Fantastic. Well, I thought your presentation was dynamite. And I guess to ask you right at the outset to bottom line it, what do you think the biggest thing is that parents might assume is settled science that actually deserves much more scrutiny?
A
Well, you know, the area I work in, it comes to mandated medicine, vaccines. And I would say that when it comes to vaccines, that probably the area, the product that parents must research more than anything else, more than any car seat they're going to buy, any stroller, any car they eventually want to buy their child, what mattress they want to use, which sheets they want to use, what building the children use to build the house their baby's going to live in. And the reason for that is actually relatively simple. And it's because for every other product out there, except for childhood vaccines and those childhood vaccines used by adults like flu shots. The market will, with imperfections, correct for the harms that they would cause or for ones that might not be safe over time. The companies that put out a product that could cause harm first, they have an incentive not to do that because they don't want to lose money. And after they put it out, they can be held accountable. So they correct over time. Cars are safer because you can hold car companies accountable. That seatbelt could have been designed better. That airbag could have been designed better. The airbag should have been there, period. The frame of the car, the way it crushed, you name it, you go down the road of the gas tank line shouldn't have exploded When a little hit came from all of these things, you can hold the company accountable. Same with drugs. Drugs come off the market all the time because the company's gonna be held accountable. Many drugs never make it to market because when they're trialed they find they have problems. All of that to say that is just not the case with really only one product and that's vaccines. That's because of a law called the National Childhood Vaccine injury Act of 1986. And that law made it so that no matter how much safer the company could have made the product when they were developing it, could make the product after licensing it. No matter how much safer they can make it, you could never sue them to say, had you made the product safer, my child wouldn't be injured, my child wouldn't be killed, my child wouldn't have a chronic health issue. Vaccines are pretty the only product that has that permanent immunity. And with that immunity, what that means is that you just can't rely on the normal market forces to make sure that that stroller, the prior iterations of it that got recalled because there was some serious issue, is not going to continue. Right. You have a certain level of assurance that the product meets a certain level of safety because of that economic self interest the company has. But with vaccines, that doesn't exist. And so unfortunately, I know parents still to tell, I'm so busy, I can't research every product out there. Well, the truth is you don't have to research every product out there in the same way. But with vaccines you do. You have to do your own homework. Because the market is not gonna correct to make them safer, nor are they gonna be properly trialed beforehand because of the economic incentives the companies have.
B
Yep. And just that key point is something that is so important just to really focus on Because I know my own personal journey with my son. There's no question I researched car seats extensively, lots of research. But when it came to the vaccine question and my wife asked me to look into it and I did, I went to the cdc, they had a definitive statement, my research was done. And if I would have understood the fact that the market forces that I was assuming are in place, like with car seats and other products, the fact that there is that immunity and that level of rigor is not available is something that was not something I fully understood at the time. And I think that's why you raising it as that key missing element is really important for people to understand that much more due diligence would be needed for them to get into a position to make a more informed decision. Right now, that's just not the case.
A
And I would say starting at the CDC and the ethnic websites are good places to start. But as long as you don't just read the conclusory statement at the top, look at the studies they cite or the claim right now, that's what I'm saying, it takes a little work because you gotta actually read them. But if you go to the typical CDC webpage about vaccines and you'll see the declaratory statement and then go read the PubMed studies or the IOM reviews the that they cite to support the statement and you can see for yourself if it supports it, you will find it typically does not support that statement. In fact, sometimes it's the opposite. Leave it at that.
B
It's true. Well, Dr. William Parker was on this show about a month ago and he talked exactly about that concept that in science many times that conclusion isn't really supported by. If you read the whole study, there's an incongruence and it's not very, it's not uncommon in science these days.
A
It's what you said. It's what you said, Len. It's supported by consensus. The science becomes what the consensus view is. And that is the most dangerous type of quote unquote science. Because it's not driven by data, it's not driven by evidence, it's driven by dogma, repetition and belief. And when that becomes entrenched and the quote unquote science becomes beholden to it. They become very biased and blind. And that's really why I think the CDC webpages end up the way they do. They're looking for any little tether to support their already pre a priori decisions. I mean, just to bring this into something practical versus abstract, you Hear all the time, the vaccine's the most thoroughly studied product before they come to market because they're gonna be injected into millions of babies. Right? That's what you're told. That's what you're led to believe. That's what you will read over and over again. Well, the simple way to test that is go to the FDA website and there's a page called the FDA Licensed vaccine. It's literally one webpage, and it has every single licensed vaccine. And you can click in and you could see the clinical trial relied upon to license that product. Okay. There's a package insert that's for each one of them. And in section 6.1, as required by the federal regulations, they have to summarize what was the clinical trial relied upon to license that vaccine for purposes of safety. You can also then click further down and see the actual, for many instances, underlying clinical trial documents themselves. If you don't want to just see the summary, do both. And what you'll find is that if you actually look at the trials, you will quickly realize these are not the most thoroughly studied products on the market before they come to market. I don't even know how anybody could say that who actually looks at the actual licensure documents, because it's plainly clear to lay people. You don't need to be a scientist. You don't need to have a degree in epidemiology or statistics or virology or vaccinology or pediatrics. You don't need any kind of degree, okay. You don't need any education almost, to understand that these clinical trials cannot possibly validate the safety of these products because they often do not review safety for more than days or weeks. And you're giving the after injection, giving the product to babies. So on that basis alone, it's just common sense, you know, there's no way to know what effects it's going to have months, let alone years down the line when the baby's finally grown up. And they finally would diagnose neurological, immunological, developmental issues that don't arise until later, for example. And a very product intended to modify the immune system that has all kinds of neurological implications. So in any event. Yeah, that's the discord you're talking about.
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Yep. No, and it's real. And again, bringing this back to, from a parent's perspective, the key is having a desire to look and to understand more and then actually doing it. And again, I know where I got tripped up is I didn't want more work. I didn't want to do digging. I wanted to rely on the fact that other agencies, other institutions kind of had my back. But ultimately I look back on it as laziness on my part that I didn't do more diligence in something that was so critically important. And again, we all want to rely on institutions, but the reality is there's reasons why we should have our own healthy skepticism and to do our own research, regardless of what we hope might be true.
A
Now, I'm speaking more broadly. You said laziness, okay? But actually I think that it's a lot more than laziness for most folks. Not laziness per se. Very folks who are very diligent. Most parents are caring, they love their kids. Not necessarily laziness. I will say what I find a lot of the reason a lot of the times is this. There's a self schema that people developed about themselves, right? I am X kind of person, right? So for example, if I even told you to, you know, the earth is flat, a lot of people just, they won't even. Which by the way, you know, you can get in a high building and see the curvature by looking at the ocean. But in any event, putting that aside, okay, putting that aside, you're like, no, Even the notion of even entertaining that idea abuts with one self schema because that is the foil for I'm not a loon, I'm not crazy, right? And many times the foil for your own self schema that I'm a logical, science driven, data driven person is I'm not an anti vaxxer, I don't have issues with vaccines. Vaccines are safe and effective. And I'm going to repeat that mantra till I die, period. And they definitely 100% do not cause the 100 or so commonly claimed injuries that these products are claimed to cause by parents. They don't cause those, okay, stop listening to the parents. Because I'm a data driven, science person. That's your self schema. And so even entertaining that these products could have one or more issues, right? Even looking at it, oftentimes people find that to be discordant with their self schema and have a little bit of a visceral reaction to it. I bet there are people listening to this, our discussion up to this point, and they're already having a visceral reaction. How dare you? You're gonna kill people. How can you question these items given to Moses at Sinai? And that's the problem. People have emotional, they have beliefs about the products. They don't just treat them like products and I assure everybody out there they're just products made by for profit, publicly traded companies. The only real difference, unlike other products, is they have immunity, liability and are not supported and promoted oftentimes by the companies, but varied by your own federal health authority, which I'm sure creates no conflict for them.
B
Right, well, let's just go back to this example. And again I didn't mean to convey that it was only laziness that was the result of me not going deeper than going. But there was another element to it and you hit it on the head. Right. I didn't want to know. This was something I didn't want to know to be true because I could even in my own head subconsciously play out. I don't want to be that person, at least from my standpoint. I didn't want to stand out. I was hoping that this wasn't true. And so there's a lot that goes on in terms of what could keep a parent from again doing more digging. And sometimes it's inconvenient, sometimes it's uncomfortable. And so there's also that aspect that this is such a charged topic that I think in many cases there's probably many people like me who would just didn't want to know because once you know you, there's a lot of uncomfortable results of knowing something and doing something that cuts against the grain. Yeah.
A
So my firm is like over a hundred folks. About half of them do vaccine related work and we do have a vaccine injury practice, about 20 folks now they don't, we don't sue the companies, we can't, but we, there's a little federal program paid out over $5 billion in injury with a cap of 250 on pain and suffering, 250 on death. Can't do the sciver. Right. It's got a lot of problems but we try to get folks some a compensation in this program where we fight against a little law firm called the doj. In any event, it's funny, people say to me all the time, well the people who call your firm about vaccine injuries, they're just anti vaxxers. And I often say to them, I say, I can assure you the anti vaxxers are not calling my firm. And they're like, why not? Because they didn't get the vaccine. The folks who are calling, this is the irony, right? It's those who end up with a, they do what they're told, they, they go get the products, they or their child get injured and then they are labeled and discounted and no, we don't listen to these people because they are acts. They are the quote unquote anti science. Right. They're quacks. No, they're just parents trying to do the right thing, in fact. And the folks who actually research these products early and choose not to get them, they're obviously not calling our firm. And to your last point, yeah, Most people don't wake up one day and say, you know what I want to do today? I want to take a socially ostracizing position that might get my kids out of school, meet their out of my job, potentially my kids excluded from playdates, call all kinds of pejoratives, have the news media talk about how we shouldn't be treated in emergency rooms. Yeah, that's what I want to do today. No, most people do not make this decision lightly. And I find that often they or somebody they know has had a very direct experience by these products. But I often find that alone is not enough. It's usually that coupled with they then did their own research, they did their own homework, they looked at what were the trials relied upon to license these products. What does the post licensure safety literature look like? And not because they're just doing it as an experiment, it's because there is a specific issue that arises so they want to dig down. If you want to figure out whether or not a vaccine causes a certain injury, the first thing you want to look at is a clinical trial because that's a prospective study that's supposed to be placebo controlled where you're comparing those who didn't get it to those who did and you're looking at the outcomes. It's only through those types of trials, these prospective trials, clinical trials, that you can actually determine causation typically. So that's where you want to start. Those are useless once you've actually looked at them to determine safety. And it also buzz with like wait a second, I thought these most. Because with drugs it's multi year placebo controlled trials. With vaccines it's like days or weeks they do. And not a single injected routine childhood vaccine was ever licensed based on a placebo controlled trial, nor was any vaccine used as a control license based on a placebo controlled trial which they could have used another vaccine if that vaccine was properly licensed, to be clear. But if you go down the chain, that's not true for any of them. And I get fact checked on that all the time. That's because they just talk or the consensus, talking heads versus look at the FDA documents that I've been litigating around for 10 years, which are all laid out in chapter 10 of my book. You can see every single FDA source yourself, or you can go to icandecide.org's website. There's a great chart there. No placebo chart that has everything. It's all cice sourced to FDA sources, all hyperlinked, all clickable. In any event, I think that that exercise is what then tips parents often into going, whoa, there's a problem here, because not only do I see certain issues with the products, but you quote, unquote, public health authorities have not been honest with me.
B
Yep. And everything. You touched on so many different topics just now. I just want to reiterate overall, because we won't be able to go hit each one of them. And what's in your book. Right. It's not that this is your opinion on what you think. I mean, everything in your book is. This is what's actually the case. Right. In terms of what research or lack of research, what conclusions were done, what that was based on. So it's a very informative read, really well put together. And again, I think there's a lot of things that you just said that most people would say, can that really be true? And reality is, it is. So I guess moving to kind of, what's the action for parents. Right. Whether it's not necessarily vaccinated or not, it's about what does a parent maybe what does a parent need to make an informed choice in this case, informed consent, you know, whether it's this issue or anything else, it's all about decision making by the parent. And at least from my standpoint, I just want access to information so I can make the right choice for my family. And I know back when my son was born in 2006, I don't feel like I had access to the right information with my wife Cass, to make an informed choice. And. And I feel like, especially since RFK Jr. Has been in, a lot of positive things are happening, but I think parents still don't have what they need to make an informed choice.
A
Since you brought up my book, I'll start there and then I'll broaden out in terms of informed choices. So if anybody does read my book as a way to get an introduction to the topic, you will find that every single claim, every sentence almost has a footnote to it that has a claim in it, and that footnote has a hyperlink. And when a permalink is available because they don't let you permalink everything. There's a permalink there, so it'll never go away. And most of those sources are government sources, journals and so forth. The very type of thing the quote unquote mainstream tells you to rely upon. Right? And so to your point, I get harpooned with this all the long. You're not a doctor, you don't have an MD, you don't have a PhD, you don't have an MPH. It's true. I don't have any of those things. I'm just a lawyer. 100%. I completely agree. But the difference is that that means I really can't say something. I can't just say, trust me, I'm a doctor. When I go to court about vaccines. We've done hundreds of lawsuits around vaccines, suing federal health agencies, state health agencies are going down the list. I've deposed numerous vaccinologists, immunologists, infectious disease pediatricians. When I go into those depositions, when I go into federal courtrooms, state courtrooms, I can't just say stuff about vaccines. I actually have to prove them. And that's a big part of why I ended up looking at all of this stuff and digging down and doing freedom of information requests, including a lot of it, on behalf of the informed 10 Action Network ICANN, a nonprofit that supports a lot of the vaccine policy work that my firm does. But we FOIA the FDA because this, even what's on their website seems incredible. How can it be you licensed, you know, a Hep B vaccine for newborns based on a clinical trial that had 147 kids, five days of safety monitoring after injection. No control group. That's literally the clinical trial with a lot of onto license. One of the two had B vaccines, the other one had four days of safety monitoring after injections. Okay, that's NZRXP, the first one, Truculax HP. That seems crazy. So we FOIAed the FDA, we got the underlying clinical trial documents, we've jumped through every hoop possible to see what else there is. Not only to prove that they didn't properly do safety, but when folks call us and say, hey, my baby got this injection and went into a grand mal seizure within four minutes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, had this cascade, we have to go to vaccine court against the federal government. We need this data. We want good clinical trial data, we don't have it. And so that experience over 10 years is where, you know, when I started this, I probably held the same orthodox views that most people do. I don't Know everybody with that, without them. If you ask me, I don't know. And then over 10 years, what I have found is unfortunately, there is what the public health authorities tell you and then there is what the data, the actual evidence reflects. Will millions of people actually die in America without vaccines as they claim? Or is it really just hundreds or dozens? Which one of those truths is real and really is the benefit maybe even upside down? What does the actual data reveal? They'll say to you, oh, the data's settled, right? We know what it is, really. Have you ever looked? Well, I looked and you can read all about in chapter seven, right, and go through it and you can check every source and you can see for yourself. In any event, with that said, you said the words informed consent. How do you get informed consent? Right on the informed bit. The reality is that that's up to each parent. If you're a parent that wants to walk into pediatric office and just say, look doc, stop, I don't want to know anything, jab them up. Well, that's informed to the degree that that parent wanted and that's informed, right? And then they consented. If you're a parent that wants, before you buy the car to see the crash test report, then that's a different level, right? You want to understand the safety profile and you know, that requires getting a bigger picture. You can read my book. You can also just go to icandecide.org there's a section called get informed. It's all free resources, it's Excellent. There's a two pager, there's a 10 pager, there's a 50 pager. Depends on how informed you want to become and when. Then you go to the pediatric office, you can ask some basic questions. In fact, I implore folks to take a look at some of the primary sources and bring them with you. Ask your pediatrician questions about them, like what was relied upon to license this? Was this issue actually studied? Now you'll have in your hand the actual proof of what the answer is and then see what the pediatrician tells you. I've deposed many pediatricians. I could tell you they're well meaning people. I have no reason to doubt that. But they don't know anything about these products for the most part. In fact, most depositions I have of pediatricians are. They're pretty, it's good they remain private because they're pretty embarrassing. Again, it's not cause they're bad people, that's just not their job. They don't study vaccines, they don't look any under the hood a lot of times. Even though they've literally written scripts. Cause they don't inject them. Typically a nurse does, right? They've written scripts to inject them. Tens of thousands of them over their career. I've had ones who literally can't tell you what the contraindications are by the CDC for these products, even though they've administered it to thousands of kids. They don't know. And it's not like the contraindication list is long, by the way. Only a few items on them, right? I even had like for example, the Hep B vaccine. One of the contradictions is if you're allergic to yeast, why? Because yeast is in the vial. I had a pediatrician tell me in a deposition that that is a conspiracy theory that there's yeast in Hep B vaccine. And then I pulled out the contraindication. You could see in just like this guy was a pediatrician for almost 40 years. 40 years, administered thousands of these things, had no idea. So in any event, what do parents need to do to get informed? They need to, like I said, the very beginning of this, you got to do your homework with these products because the market's not going to correct. And then on the consent part, and to me that's actually the more important part than the informed part because you know, being informed is to the degree to which you have the ability and your capacity and the time and the inclination and you get what you want. But then the decision is, do you want to or do you not? And you could say, no, I don't consent. But at that point, and that's where I focus my work, it's on the consent part. Because if I say to the pediatrician, you know what, you can give them these three, but I don't want this fourth one, I don't want this particular product, the pediatrician goes, no problem, you don't want to consent, no problem. But now your kids can't go to school and can't get a job and blah, blah, blah, blah. Well then that's not really consent. When you have then been put on punitive measures for refusing consent, that destroys consent. That doesn't mean that's not free will consent. And so, you know, that's where that impact in civil and individual rights is where I do most of my work when it comes to vaccine policy related work, which is, look, if you want to get a vaccine, it's America. That's freedom. Get as many as you want. I support your right to do it. But if you don't want them, you should be free to decline them without any penalty or persecution.
B
Super clear. And again, that consent piece is so important. But even before getting there, as a parent, you had talked about the big difference between science and belief. And again, I just want to underscore what you were saying about pediatricians. Parents may walk in with a false belief that the pediatrician does understand much more than perhaps they do. So that's where, as a parent, we have to kind of drop our own beliefs about what we think might be happening and again, just really do our own homework. And when you're asking those questions, can you comment a little bit more about this, the concept of belief? Because I think that's what you really talked at length about in your presentation, in your book, that these beliefs are being shared by these institutions and present. And it's presented as if it's scientific, but it really is just the narrative that people have kind of agreed to. So can you just talk about the distinction between those terms a little bit more?
A
Sure. And given the name of your podcast, I'll use autism as the example because I think it's an apt example for this exact point. So I'm sure everybody out there has heard probably God knows how many times in her life that the, that vaccines do not cause autism. And that is expressed as a scientific statement, as a statement of evidence, as a conclusion by authoritative scientific source, you know, institutions and sources. Right. Okay. And when you walk into a typical pediatric office and you bring up autism, that's what you'll hear. Vaccines do not cause autism. It has been thoroughly and utterly and completely debunked. Right. Well, the reality is that the statement vaccines do not cause autism is not a scientific claim, it is a belief. It's a mantra. It's almost like a religious incantation. And the reason I say that is not to be pejorative or hyperbolic or whatever in any way. It's because in the decades long quest that our firm has, has undertaken on behalf of ICANN and other, and the Informants and Action Network in particular, to actually identify the studies to support that claim, all we could find are studies which effectively support it to some degree. And those have something called healthy user bias in them. For MMR vaccine, which is not given until at least the first year of life, typically first birthday or afterwards, and for one particular ingredient that's not in any vaccine for almost two decades, for the most part. And so when you survey parents of children who have autistic children and you ask them what do you believe caused your child's autism. Those studies reflect that. 40 to 70% depending on the survey of those parents say that vaccines they believe is a contributor to the causing their child's autism. Then when you ask them, well, which vaccines do they, they point to the vaccines given in the first six months of life. That's DTAP, Hib, IPv, Hep B and PCV each injected three times each. So those 15 shots given in the first six months of life is what they point to. And they also point to the MMR vaccine given on or after the first birthday. Okay, so when the CDC claims that vaccines do not cause autism, you would assume they have the studies that reflect that none of those vaccines cause autism. So unfortunately, the reality is that the Institute of Medicine has conducted a review, for example, with regards to pertussis vaccine and autism, could not find any study supporting that pertussis vaccine does not cause autism. The Agency for Health Research and Quality AHRQ did this review in 2014 and they also reviewed an Hep B vaccine in autism. They couldn't find any. That does not call the support that those EPI vaccine or DTaP, each given three times each in first except midlife, do not cause autism. In fact, there was only one study found for each of those products and they actually found an association between those products and autism. For example, the Hep B study out of the University of Stony Brook by Gallagher and Goodman. You could look this up in pubmed if you want to found that the children that got the Hep B vaccine in first month of life versus those that didn't had three times the rate of autism. That is the only published study I'm aware of with regards to Hep B vaccine and autism. It's the only one. Now it's a retrospective epidemiological study. So of course there's confounders. They all do. That's what retrospective EPI studies have. And you can criticize them. But when your weight of your evidence is one study shows cause autism and you have zero that shows that associate association zero. Well that's your state of your science. And you may not like that reality hcdc, but that's your reality. Well, so that was those AHRQ and iom. Then on behalf of icann, we actually foia, that's the Freedom of Information act. That's the federal law that allows us to get documents from federal health agencies because they work for us even though they forget that they take our tax money. We asked them for the studies that they rely upon to Support that DTAP doesn't cause those five vaccines given three times each in the first six months of life. They didn't give us any studies. So then in 2020, we sued them in federal court. And days before the initial conference, we finally got a list of 20 studies. Well, great. When their back was against the wall in a federal lawsuit, finally the CDC produced the list. Well, we got the list and we looked at the studies because they're words and we have eyes and we can read. And I called up the Department of Justice attorney representing the cdc and I said to him, I said, look, got you a list of 20 studies. I said, is this your final list? Yes. I said, are you sure you want to settle this case on the basis of the list? Because 19 of these have nothing to do with the vaccines given the first six months of life, they have to do with either MMR or an ingredient that's not in these vaccines. I said, so none of these are relevant to this lawsuit. The last one was that an IOM report from 2012 that did look at pertussis vaccine and autism, and as I mentioned earlier, could not find any study that showed it doesn't cause autism and found one study that showed there was an association between TDAP vaccine and autism. But the IOM threw it out because it didn't have an unvaccinated control group. In any event, the cdc, excuse me, the DOJ attorney said no, came back to me and said, yep, that's what CDC wants to resolve on because that's all they had. Well, they can't make up studies they don't have. That's what happens when you're actually in a federal lawsuit, right? You get the truth. We ended up signing a stipulation. The DOJ signed it on behalf of the cdc. I signed it on behalf of icann. Federal judge in the Southern District of New York entered as the order of the court, and there you have it. It's on the ICANN website if you want to see. What the CDC said were the studies were allowed to claim that the vaccine's given the first six months of life do not cause autism. It's on the ICANN website in a federal court stipulated order. And what's clear from that list is they don't have any studies to support that those vaccines do not cause autism. I also then had further opportunities to depose other experts in this area. Same outcome every single time. And in fact, as some folks who are out there may already know, the CDC website has now finally been updated to tell the Truth. It basically says actually, sorry we lied to you. The claim that vaccines do not cause autism is not an evidence based claim. We made it without the studies or the data to support it. It actually finally now says that. But the AAP still says it. The ama, the American Academy of Pediatrics still says it. The American Medical association still says it. Every pediatric office still says it. I'm certain for the most part, unless they actually study the products and actually understand, the pediatricians that actually understand these products get a very different experience. They often actually stop giving vaccines. That's a separate story. And so that is what you're, you know, it's using. So I'm just using autism as a example. I'm not even getting into the science that reflects vaccines connection to autism and how it could cause autism and so forth. I'm not even touching that. I'm just touching on their claim that vaccines do not cause autism and that that really is a belief. It is not a science data driven claim. It's in fact the opposite. And it's believed through repetition and dogma. Exactly where we started. And I think answers your question, chapter 11 of my book. I go through that entire history year by year with regards to the claim of vaccines and autism, what the evidence actually shows.
B
Great. And I appreciate you giving that overview. And again, there's a lot of intricacies here, but, but it's a monumental thing that the CDC did change what's on the website. I mean, I think it's just incredible that that's actually, you know, you don't see usually kind of people admitting that something that they had before wasn't grounded in science. So it's phenomenal that it's there. If going back in my case, I would have seen that when I was looking to do research for my son, okay. That would have given me the ability to investigate further and to again to dig deeper. But it's crazy that now that's on the CDC site, which is definitely a positive. But as you said, all these other organizations are ignoring it and they're still holding not to their science, but to this belief that's being presented as if it's scientific fact.
A
Well, vaccinology is based on belief. It is their quote, unquote science. The only thing is that the reason I call it a religion is because in most religions, you know, you're in a religion, right? You know, you're engaged in a leap of faith to answer the unanswerables, right? Where do we go when we die and all that, you know, you're engaged in a leap of faith. These folks think they're engaged in quote, unquote science, but in fact, they're engaged in a religion. They repeat these statements over and over again and they're certain somebody's got the proof, somebody can prove it. Somewhere there's an angel. Somewhere there's a, you know, who can assert it. You know? You know, I'll tell you one funny story on that point, okay? So in this quest to get the studies that show vaccines don't cause autism, well, I had occasion when, during this was during Trump 1, that Trump formed a vaccine safety Commission and along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Invited me to go with him. And with just a few of us to go down to nih. And on one side of the table was now Secretary Kennedy, then, you know, Mr. Kennedy and a few of us. On the other side of the table was Francis Collins, the head of nih, Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease. Right. Folks, I think know who he is today, and a bunch of other heads of institutes, okay? And during that meeting, the head of the National Institute of Mental Health, Joshua Gordon, okay, who's also at the time was the head of the Interagency Coordinating Committee for Autism at the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, two hour heated exchange, blah, blah, blah, about vaccines and trials. And it was a fascinating meeting where Fauci got pretty worked up at one point, but that's a story for another time. In any event, Joshua Gordon says, he goes, he says, but at least you have to admit vaccines don't cause autism, right? He just says that. And I said something to him, like I said, But I said, Dr. Gordon, I said, you can't say that without studies that actually reflect that the vaccines don't cause autism. And he said, oh, that's been thoroughly studied. Here it is. The man who's the head of the National Institute of Mental Health, who's the head of the Interagency Committee on Autism, who is responsible essentially for coordinating all autism research across our entire federal government, is saying to me, this bit has been studied. And he asks me, right there at the table at the NIH for my email address. I give it to him and he sends me this review, this Meta review of 10 autism vaccine studies. Now, the title of it, of the study, and clearly to me, he had not read past the title. Cause it reflects unvaccinated, right? As what they were comparing. Vaccinated, unvaccinated. Problem is, when you look at the actual 10 studies that's not true. Almost all of them are comparing kids that got like 26 shots with 25 shots. Meaning they got all the vaccines without MMR or all the vaccines with MMR. Of course, if the kids already got injured by a DTAP vaccine the first six months of life, are they likely to get the mmr? No, that's something called healthy user bias. It's the healthiest kids that go on to get the MMR vaccine. A coin term by the cdc, not me. Okay, so all of the few studies in there. So I sent them an email. I said, Dr. Gordon, I appreciated meeting with you. Thank you very much sending me the study. Unfortunately, it does not have in it what you said it had. It does not have anything in here that actually show that dtap doesn't cause autism given three at two, four and six months of age. That Hib doesn't cause autism given at 2, 4, 6 months of age. Hep B doesn't cause autism given at 2, 4, 6 months of age. Hib. PCV doesn't show it. And so you know what he did? He finally wrote me back and he said, I think the information you're seeking is best obtained from the cdc. Okay? So I added onto the chain the folks who were assigned from the CDC to his autism committee to the interagency committee. And I said, hey, Dr. Gordon says you guys have the studies to show that these vaccines don't cause autism. So I'm adding you guys to the chain, okay? Get no response from them. Then I finally get a response from the CDC office of the Secretariat in which they just send me one sentence, cut everybody else off the chain, and they say the studies you're looking for are in this link, which is the link to the CDC Vaccines and Autism page, which, I mean, of course, I looked at that a million times. Obviously I'd read that. I mean, I looked at every single thing cited in that page. This is what I go back to what I said earlier. So I wrote back And I said, Dr. Gordon, I got this link below. I forwarded him the thing, and I kept them all on the chain. I said, listen, Fu guys, I'm asking for a simple thing here. You say vaccines don't cause autism. You're literally the head of the National Institute of Mental Health. You're the head of the Interagency Committee on Autism. You now have the CDC folks on this chain who are responsible for this. You have not provided me with any studies. Give me the actual studies. Not a CDC webpage that doesn't have any Studies in it give me an actual studies that support this. That's how you're supposed to do science, right? He never gives it to me. He never sends me anything. I never get anything from him. And I even sent him a quote from a Congressman, Dave Weldon, who I believe it was Dave Weldon, who had this quote. And it's in my email chain. It's in my book. You can see the quote. It's in my book because I said my quote. And in it, this Congressman is saying, hey, look, I went to the CDC for an answer to this vaccine question. They sent me to the fda, the FDA sent me to the nih, the NIH sent me to the cdc. The CDC said. And he's like, I went in circles forever. And the Congress had never got an answer to his question either. And this is what goes back to your last point, which is it's just a belief. They believe somebody out there has got the proof, the evidence, but it's not there. And after 10 years of litigating this, I can't find it. Would love to have it. And that's what I've basically what I wrote my book to do. The whole book is about what they tell you versus what 10 years of battling to try and get the evidence actually shows where we are. That's not to say that vaccines have no value. To be very clear for anybody listening, measles vaccine, for example, can stop transmission of measles, okay? It can stop transmission of measles, which means it could prevent somebody from getting a case of measles, which means it can prevent somebody from getting the harm that measles can cause. Okay? But that's where folks want to stop, and then they want to go put their fingers in their ears and never listen to another word. But that's not where the story or the data or the evidence ends, unfortunately. And whether or not as a society, the benefits outweigh, the risk requires being objective, and it requires being empirical and sitting back and looking at all the evidence, not just that one data point.
B
I just told you absolutely no. There's so much that you touched on. Again, we can go in so many different tangents, but I appreciate you sharing all of this, and I know for many of our listeners, they're going to be quite familiar with this and others, it may be the first time hearing it. And your book is phenomenal in the sense that it's what RFK Jr talks about all the time, right? Where the key thing for a parent is critical thinking. Right? It's really taking the time. So digesting what's in your book in terms of the information, the factual information is an incredibly powerful step if you want to get into a place of being better informed, to be able to make better decisions. And again, I think just you personally, you've had such tenacity in this and doing and really like seeking the truth and helping parents to have more information to be able to make these decisions. So I just want to express personal gratitude for what you've done as part of this overall movement. A lot of things are moving in the right direction and I know there's so much more to do.
A
Well, thank you for what you do. Obviously nobody would get informed at all if there weren't folks who stepped out and went cut against the public grain to do what you're doing in terms of broadcasting this information. So thank you.
B
Thank you. And again, everyone in the show notes will include the information about Aaron's book as well as ICANN which is just a dynamite organization. And again, just so grateful there's people like you out there trying to help get to the truth. And again, thank you for taking the time today. Your child needs you running on all cylinders now and the fastest way to rise is with personalized one on one support. Get started today. Go to elevatehowyounavigate.com.
Hosts: Len Arcuri, Cass Arcuri
Guest: Aaron Siri (Managing Partner at Siri & Glimstad, author of "Vaccines. Amen.")
Air Date: June 25, 2026
In this episode, Len Arcuri speaks with Aaron Siri, a leading legal advocate for informed consent and transparency in vaccine policy and author of "Vaccines. Amen." They tackle the critical distinction between scientific consensus and objective truth, especially for parents of children with autism. The conversation urges listeners to interrogate institutional beliefs, demand substantive evidence for medical claims, and to become true informed decision-makers regarding their children's health.
Topic: Why vaccines are different from other consumer products.
Insight: Unlike products like car seats or drugs, vaccine manufacturers are shielded from liability by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. This immunity removes market incentives for manufacturers to ensure safety post-approval.
Quote:
"Vaccines are pretty much the only product that has that permanent immunity... with that immunity, you just can't rely on the normal market forces to make sure [they] are safer." — Aaron Siri [03:45]
Practical Lesson: Parents need to personally research vaccine safety because traditional consumer protections (like litigation or recalls) do not apply.
Topic: How consensus can supplant evidence.
Insight: The scientific "consensus" often becomes accepted dogma, untethered from published data and sometimes in direct conflict with the underlying research cited by authorities like the CDC.
Quote:
"The science becomes what the consensus view is. And that is the most dangerous type of 'science'... it's driven by dogma, repetition and belief." — Aaron Siri [07:28]
Actionable Tip: Don't only read institutional statements—scrutinize cited studies to see if they support top-level conclusions.
Topic: Why many parents don’t question consensus.
Insight: It’s not laziness, but self-identity and emotional aversion to being labeled as outsiders that prevent deeper inquiry.
Quote:
"Even entertaining that these products could have one or more issues... people find that to be discordant with their self schema and have a little bit of a visceral reaction to it." — Aaron Siri [11:49]
Host Reflection:
"I didn't want to stand out... I was hoping this wasn't true. There's a lot that goes on... sometimes it's inconvenient, sometimes it's uncomfortable." — Len Arcuri [13:20]
Topic: The people who contact Aaron's law firm are generally not anti-vaccine; they are those who complied and experienced harm.
Quote:
"The irony... it's those who end up with a, they do what they're told... and then they are labeled and discounted... they're just parents trying to do the right thing." — Aaron Siri [15:20]
Key Fact: No routine injected childhood vaccine was licensed based on a classical placebo-controlled trial.
Topic: The gap between informed consent and actual parental choice.
Insight: True informed consent is not possible if opting out results in penalties (e.g., denial of school access).
Quote:
"If you don't want [vaccination], you should be free to decline them without any penalty or persecution." — Aaron Siri [26:49]
Resource Mention:
"Every single claim [in my book]... has a footnote... most of those sources are government sources, journals and so forth." [19:35]
"Go to icandecide.org – there’s a section called Get Informed... free resources." [23:17]
Topic: Institutional claims that vaccines "do not cause autism" are more belief than evidence.
Key Story: Despite a decade-long quest, Aaron could not obtain studies demonstrating routine vaccines given before age one do not cause autism—the claim is based on consensus, not science.
Memorable Moment:
"The claim that vaccines do not cause autism is not an evidence-based claim. We made it without the studies or the data to support it. It actually finally now says that [on the CDC website]." — Aaron Siri [35:50]
Institutional Loop:
"The Congress had never got an answer to his question either. And this... it's just a belief. They believe somebody out there has got the proof, the evidence, but it's not there." — Aaron Siri [41:43]
Memorable NIH/CDC Anecdote:
Describes a meeting with Anthony Fauci and Dr. Joshua Gordon, wherein Gordon directed Aaron to CDC web pages instead of supplying studies. When pressed, “He never gives it to me. He never sends me anything. I never get anything from him.” — Aaron Siri [40:00]
Quote:
"The key thing for a parent is critical thinking. It's really taking the time... digesting... the factual information is an incredibly powerful step..." — Len Arcuri [44:04]
Final Thanks:
"Thank you for what you do. Obviously nobody would get informed at all if there weren't folks... to do what you're doing in terms of broadcasting this information." — Aaron Siri [44:55]
Tone: The conversation is candid, methodical, and challenging of medical orthodoxy while urging empowered, evidence-driven parenting.
Summary by Theme: