No Liability, No Studies, No Accountability: The Vaccine System Aaron Siri Exposed in Federal Court
An Essay on the 1986 Act, the CDC Court Order, and What Comes Next
Aaron Siri, attorney and managing partner of Siri & Glimstad LLP, appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience in early March 2026. What he described over the course of that conversation is worth examining carefully.
In 2019, the United States Department of Justice signed a court order on behalf of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The order, entered in the Southern District of New York, stipulated the complete list of studies the CDC relied upon to support its public claim that vaccines administered in the first six months of life do not cause autism.
There were twenty studies on the list.
Nineteen had nothing to do with the vaccines given in the first six months of life. They were either MMR studies — and MMR is not given until at least twelve months — or studies of vaccine ingredients not present in the products in question.
The twentieth was a 2012 Institute of Medicine review that had specifically examined whether the DTaP vaccine causes autism. The IOM found exactly one study on the subject. That study showed an association between DTaP and autism. The IOM discarded it because it lacked an unvaccinated control group — and concluded there was insufficient evidence to accept or reject a causal relationship.
The DOJ signed the order. A federal judge entered it. The CDC’s evidentiary basis for one of its most repeated public health claims was now a matter of court record.
Aaron Siri, the managing partner of Siri & Glimstad LLP and author of Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines, described this outcome in a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience.¹ He had spent years demanding the studies through Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of his client, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN). The CDC stonewalled. He sued in federal court. Days before the hearing, the DOJ produced its list of twenty studies. Siri read them. Then he called the DOJ attorney.
“Are you sure,” he told Rogan he asked, “that your client, the CDC, wants to settle this case on the basis that these are the studies they rely upon?”
They did. The stipulation was signed. It is publicly available.
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The Mechanism Behind the Gap
The absence of those studies is not a mystery once you understand the economic structure that governs vaccine development.
In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.² The law gave vaccine manufacturers something that exists for no other product category in America: immunity from civil liability for design defect claims. If a pharmaceutical company’s drug harms or kills someone, the injured party can sue and argue the product could have been made safer. That threat — the prospect of catastrophic jury verdicts — is what drives companies to invest in long-term safety data before and after products reach the market. Pfizer’s four top-selling drugs, as Siri noted on the podcast, each had between two and seven years of follow-up in placebo-controlled clinical trials before licensure.³ That is not philanthropy. It is economic self-interest.
Vaccines are exempt. A parent whose child is injured cannot bring a design defect claim against the manufacturer. The only avenue is a federal compensation program with a $250,000 statutory cap on pain and suffering and death, no article III judge, and no discovery as of right.⁴ The program has paid out approximately $5 billion in total since its inception — a figure that looks large until you consider it spans four decades of a mandatory national program administered to virtually every American child.
Remove the liability, and you remove the incentive to generate safety data. The result is not sinister concealment. It is ordinary corporate behaviour in the absence of accountability. Why fund a five-year placebo-controlled trial when the law does not require it and no plaintiff can ever use the results against you?
The vaccine schedule in 1986 included three injections before a child’s first birthday.⁵ By the time the current schedule was published in early 2025, that number had reached twenty-nine — recently reduced to nineteen following new policy review. The schedule expanded nine-fold over four decades without the safety accountability mechanism that governs every other pharmaceutical product. The CDC’s inability to produce a single study showing the vaccines given in the first six months of life do not cause autism is the predictable downstream result of that structure, not an anomaly within it.
What the CDC’s Own Data Shows About Measles
The 1986 Act was sold on a specific premise: that vaccines are so essential to human survival that the normal rules of product accountability cannot apply. Siri addressed this directly.
In the year before the measles vaccine was introduced, approximately 400 Americans died of measles annually — in a population of roughly 180 million.⁶ That is a death rate of about 1 in 450,000. The CDC’s own historical mortality records, publicly available on its website, confirm this figure. It is not a fringe claim.
More important than the number itself is the trend behind it. Between 1900 and the early 1960s — before the measles vaccine existed — measles mortality in the United States declined by over 98 percent.⁷ Improved sanitation, better nutrition, less crowded living conditions, and advances in acute medical care drove that decline. The vaccine arrived at the end of a decades-long mortality collapse, not at its beginning.
There is a 1969 episode of The Brady Bunch in which the children get measles and treat it as a holiday from school. Rogan played the clip. The children joke that if you have to get sick, measles is the one to get. That is not Hollywood carelessness. That is a culturally accurate portrayal of how measles was understood by the American public in the era before the vaccine narrative was constructed. A disease that killed roughly 1 in 450,000 people, that typically struck children — in whom it was far less dangerous than in adults — and that conferred lifelong immunity after a single episode, was not the existential threat the current public health apparatus describes.⁸
Then there is the cardiovascular data. A twenty-two-year prospective cohort study in Japan, funded by the Japanese government and conducted across major universities, tracked approximately 100,000 people and found that those who had experienced natural measles and mumps in childhood had a statistically significant 20 percent reduction in deaths from cardiovascular disease compared to those who had not.⁹ Separate studies have found that women who had natural measles had approximately 50 percent less ovarian cancer, and that the absence of natural measles infection is associated with substantially elevated rates of Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.¹⁰ These studies are on PubMed. They are not retracted. They are simply not discussed.
The implication — which Siri was careful to mark as inference rather than established fact — is that childhood febrile infections may confer long-term immune system benefits that outlast the acute illness. If eliminating measles infection has increased cardiovascular deaths in the United States by even 1 percent, the life-years lost from that increase likely exceed the life-years saved by preventing four hundred measles deaths per year. That calculation has never been seriously attempted by any public health authority.
The Business Model
Siri summarised the vaccine program’s economic structure in a passage from the podcast that deserves to be quoted at length, because it makes visible what is otherwise obscured by institutional language.
Imagine a product you want to sell, he said. You are a little worried it might hurt people. But the government has given you complete immunity from liability — no matter how many people are harmed or killed. And because of that immunity, you don’t need to worry about the safety data. Better still, the government will mandate that people take your product. For those who can’t afford it, a federal program guarantees payment. And the government will spend billions promoting it, so you don’t need to build a marketing budget. No liability. Guaranteed market. Mandated uptake. Guaranteed payment. Free promotion.
“If it wasn’t vaccines,” Siri told Rogan, “you’d say it’s insane.”¹¹
He is describing a disclosed, legal arrangement. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act is a public law. The Vaccines for Children program, which purchases vaccines for underinsured children using federal funds, is a public program. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which votes vaccines onto the mandatory schedule, meets on a public calendar. The financial relationships between ACIP members and vaccine manufacturers are disclosed — selectively and incompletely — in conflict-of-interest forms that are technically available under FOIA.¹²
The system is not hidden. It is simply not described plainly.
What Siri’s legal work adds to this picture is the evidentiary layer. When he deposed Dr. Stanley Plotkin — widely regarded as one of the world’s leading vaccinologists — and asked whether there were studies showing DTaP does not cause autism, Plotkin said he assumed such studies would show no association. When shown the IOM review establishing there were none, he said: “Oh, okay.” Siri then asked whether, in the absence of those studies, Plotkin should wait before telling parents that vaccines don’t cause autism. Plotkin’s answer: No. Because he had to take into account the health of the child.¹³
That exchange is on video. It is publicly available. The world’s leading vaccinologist acknowledges there are no studies, and confirms he tells parents the matter is settled regardless. That is not science. It is the operation of a belief system using scientific language.
What Chronic Disease Trends Show
In the early 1980s, under 10 percent of American children had a chronic health condition.¹⁴ By the time of the most recent comprehensive surveys, that figure exceeded 40 percent — with some surveys finding over 50 percent of children carrying at least one chronic diagnosis. The conditions driving that increase are not infectious diseases. They are immune-system disorders: asthma, atopic dermatitis, food allergies, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, autoimmune conditions.
Approximately ten peer-reviewed studies have compared health outcomes in fully unvaccinated children against children who received one or more vaccines. The results are consistent across studies conducted in different countries and by different research teams: unvaccinated children have substantially lower rates of the chronic conditions that have exploded in the vaccinated population.¹⁵ The studies vary in their methodologies and each carries limitations. None is funded by the CDC or NIH. The studies that would settle the question — large, prospective, placebo-controlled vaccinated versus unvaccinated trials — have never been conducted.
The absence of those trials is not an oversight. Siri’s FOIA work established that HHS, when legally demanded to produce long-term placebo-controlled trial data for childhood vaccines, acknowledged in writing that no such records existed.¹⁶ The agency has been legally required since 1987 to submit biennial reports to Congress on vaccine safety improvements. A separate ICAN lawsuit established that those reports had never been produced.
A manufacturer with full liability exposure and an incoming class-action bar would have funded those studies decades ago. The economic incentive to know — to find the signal before a plaintiff’s attorney did — would have been overwhelming. That incentive was removed in 1986. The studies were not done. Children got sicker. The CDC website said the science was settled.
The Religion Thesis
Siri’s book is titled Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines for a reason he articulated clearly to Rogan. The vaccine program operates with the social and epistemological structure of a religion: a foundational doctrine that cannot be questioned, a class of priests authorised to interpret the doctrine, rituals of compliance enforced through institutional pressure, and the treatment of doubt as moral transgression rather than scientific inquiry.
The tell is the response to evidence. When Siri presents the court stipulation — the CDC’s own document, entered by a federal judge — the standard response is not to examine it. It is to dismiss Siri as an anti-vaxxer and move on. When he presents the Gallagher and Goodman study from the University of Stony Brook — the only peer-reviewed study examining HepB vaccine and autism, which found a threefold increase in autism rates in vaccinated versus unvaccinated infants — the response is not to replicate it or fund larger studies. It is to find procedural objections to this one study while citing the absence of others as proof of safety.¹⁷
“Vaccines don’t cause autism has been thoroughly debunked,” Siri told Rogan, “is a belief. It is not science. It is not fact. It is not based on data.”
The CDC’s own updated website, as of early 2025, now acknowledges there are no studies showing that the vaccines administered in the first six months of life do not cause autism. That is a quiet admission with enormous implications, made without press release or apology, to no major coverage in mainstream outlets.¹⁸
The document exists. The signature is on it. The date is what it is.
Whatever you call the gap between what the CDC said publicly for decades and what the DOJ signed in a federal court — delay, negligence, institutional failure, or something harder to name — the court record does not change. It is publicly available. It says what it says.
References
¹ Joe Rogan Experience #2462, Aaron Siri, March 4, 2026. Available at youtube.com/PowerfulJRE.
² National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, 42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 34 (2016). See also Mary Holland, Kim Mack Rosenberg, and Eileen Iorio, The HPV Vaccine on Trial (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018), pp. 247–249.
³ JRE #2462 (Siri). See also J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), pp. 43–46, for discussion of comparative clinical trial lengths between drugs and vaccines.
⁴ National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), Health Resources & Services Administration, hrsa.gov. Statutory cap: 42 U.S.C. § 300aa-15(a)(2). See Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, pp. 54–57.
⁵ Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Brian Hooker, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak (Skyhorse Publishing, 2023), p. 2. See also comparison of 1986 and 2023 CDC schedules, figure 1.1.
⁶ CDC historical mortality data on measles; cited in Paul Thomas, Vax Facts (2024). See also JRE #2462 (Siri).
⁷ Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History (self-published, 2013), chapter 14, graphs 14.1 and 14.2. U.S. and England measles mortality data, 1901–1965.
⁸ Thomas, Vax Facts; Humphries, Dissolving Illusions, chapter 14.
⁹ Kubota Y, Iso H, et al. “Association of measles and mumps with cardiovascular disease: the Japan Collaborative Cohort (JACC) study.” Atherosclerosis 2015 Jun 18; 241(2): 682–86. Cited in Neil Z. Miller, Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies (New Atlantean Press, 2016), study 169.
¹⁰ Miller, Miller’s Review, studies 169–171. See also JRE #2462 (Siri).
¹¹ JRE #2462 (Siri).
¹² See ACIP conflict-of-interest disclosure process; discussed in Holland et al., The HPV Vaccine on Trial, pp. 198–205.
¹³ Deposition of Dr. Stanley Plotkin, conducted by Aaron Siri on behalf of ICAN, 2018. Video available publicly online.
¹⁴ Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth (anonymous, Israel, 2022 English edition), chapter on chronic disease rise, citing U.S. periodic health surveys 1960–2010.
¹⁵ Kennedy and Hooker, Vax-Unvax, chapters 2–3. Mawson et al. 2017; Hooker and Miller 2020, 2021; Enriquez et al. 2005; Netherlands NVKP survey. See also Thomas, Vax Facts, Mawson study table.
¹⁶ Kennedy and Hooker, Vax-Unvax, pp. x–xi. HHS written acknowledgment, June 27, 2018; Federal Court order, July 6, 2018.
¹⁷ Gallagher CM, Goodman MS. “Hepatitis B vaccination of male neonates and autism diagnosis, NHIS 1997–2002.” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A 2010; 73(24):1665–77. Cited in JRE #2462 (Siri).
¹⁸ JRE #2462 (Siri); CDC autism and vaccines page update, 2025.