By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org. For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile. Aaron Siri makes it clear in Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines that the story we've been told about vaccine science rests far more on belief than proof. "No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines," Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America's overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule. I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I've spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was. Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won't save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn't get to say "trust me" the way many doctors do. "I need to prove claims with real data." And he does. He has lived this work for years — representing vaccine-injured families, fighting Freedom of Information battles, and suing government agencies. The book reads like a cross-examination — precise, uncompromising, and hard to dismiss. One of Siri's sharpest points is also the simplest. He asks, who bears the burden of proof? "The onus is not on you to show that a product someone wants to inject into you or your baby is unsafe," he writes. "The onus is on that person to prove to you it is safe. It is their burden." That principle should be uncontroversial, yet vaccine policy often flips it. Parents who ask questions are treated as obstacles, even threats. Siri's argument is basic: the burden rests with the party making the claim. He traces that inversion to 1986, when Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, insulating vaccine manufacturers from liability. I've reported on how this shifted incentives away from proving safety and towards expanding the schedule without fear of legal consequence. Once accountability was removed, the obligation to rigorously demonstrate safety eroded alongside it. Siri dismantles the myth of placebo-controlled vaccine trials in painstaking detail. A placebo, he writes, should be inert — saline, or something biologically inactive. And yet, as he argues, "when it comes to children, every vaccine on the schedule was tested against a placebo control group, right? Sadly, that virtually never occurs." Instead, many vaccines were tested against other vaccines, or against aluminium adjuvants — substances specifically designed to provoke an immune response. Siri calls this what it is: a corruption of science. Without a true placebo, you cannot reliably determine whether adverse events are caused by the vaccine itself. I've reported on this same sleight of hand in the Gardasil trials, where young women were told they received a saline placebo when, in fact, they were given aluminium adjuvant — an active comparator with known biological effects. There's another claim that comes up constantly in medicine — and in the interest of full disclosure, I've said versions of it myself. People don't value vaccines because they don't see the diseases anymore. Measles, diphtheria, whooping cough — gone. "The evidence is clear," I used to say, "and we can thank vaccines for that." Reading Siri's chapters on this, I felt a growing discomfort. He takes the belief apart slowly, drawing on historical mortality data I hadn't previously sat with in any depth. What struck me wasn't a single chart, but the consistency of the pattern. For measles, deaths had already fallen dramatically before a vaccine was introduced. The same was true for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. In each case, mortality had declined by more than 90% prior to vaccination. What changed during that period was sanitation, clean water, nutrition, housing, and advances in acute medical care. Deaths from infectious disease fel...
