Need To Know Publications
January 20, 2026During a recent good natured conversation with an Australian
cardiologist called Paul I was gobsmacked when he said, and I quote
“What do you need to know what’s in the vaccines for…”
I tried explaining that I wanted to know what was being put into my
body but to use an Aussie expression he wasn’t having a bar of it.
I hope he gets to read this because Paul you are a closed minded disciple of the vaccine religion referred to in this article, where informed consent be damned.
Wakey Wakey Paul…
Regards
Phil
Mercola.com, Analysis by A Midwestern Doctor, December 12, 2025
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
As
more people awaken to the dangers of vaccines, they discover a
persistent problem vaccine safety advocates have faced for decades:
talking to vaccine zealots is like speaking to a brick wall. Regardless
of the evidence presented, you cannot reach them — sometimes it feels
like speaking to religious fanatics unwilling to consider the “blasphemy
you’re spewing forth”
This is deliberate, as vaccines
have been enshrined as the holy water which baptizes you into the faith
of Western medicine and became the “miracle” the superiority of modern
medicine is based upon
Because of this faith and the
relentless propaganda accompanying it, a series of absurd and
contradictory arguments have been established to assert vaccines are
“safe” which would never be accepted anywhere else
As a
result, all vaccine research is designed around the assumption vaccines
must be safe, and all regulatory decisions sharing this bias — thereby
making it nearly impossible to prove a vaccine is harmful, regardless of
how many people it kills or injures
This article will
review the absurd fallacies used to defend mass vaccination, the unsound
mindsets that produce them, and the incredible opportunity we have to
at last shift this dysfunctional dynamic
Once people awaken to vaccine issues, one question emerges: why does
the medical field maintain such rigid ideological attachment to
vaccination? This phenomenon reflects three converging factors:
•First, human society has always been defined by
competing groups vying for status and wealth, and it is a very recent
development that doctors have attracted the prestige and salary the
profession commands.
This was accomplished through:
- Market monopolization (via the American Medical Association)
and technological developments birthing an incredibly profitable
medical industry that generated the funding to market a newfound faith
in it to the entire world and required doctors (and faith in doctors) to
serve as the keystone for the industry.
- Medicine creating a mythology that it rescued us from the dark ages
of disease, and hence deserves its supremacy in the current social
hierarchy.
As “vaccines ending infectious diseases” is a central part of that
mythology, to maintain their existing prestige, those within the
conventional medical system are essentially forced to double-down on the
absolute supremacy of vaccines, regardless of the evidence against
them, or the fact, as Secretary Kennedy brilliantly shows, there is no
actual evidence vaccines were responsible for the decline in infectious
disease the medical industry falsely claimed credit for.
•Second, as the Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates,2
less competent individuals vastly overestimate their competence because
they lack the knowledge to recognize their incompetence.
In medicine, there is a massive amount of information that needs to
be learned, so in most cases doctors are forced to take short cuts
throughout their training where again and again they assume if A is true
then B is true without understanding exactly why A leads to B, how
tentative the link can be, and in which situations it does not apply.
Likewise, when the public (especially members of the media) appraises
medical information, rather than try to understand how A becomes B,
they typically take the pronouncement of an expert (e.g., a doctor) that
“A always leads to B” as all there is to say on the subject.
Since A often does not actually lead to B, and people do not like
admitting they are wrong (especially if, like doctors, an incredible
personal investment was required to attain the social status they hold),
when confronted with inconsistencies in their beliefs, the typical
response will be to double-down on their position rather than try to
critically understand the additional data.
Note: The cognitive dissonance created by
acknowledging vaccines they prescribed harmed their patients also makes
doctors psychologically invested in dismissing evidence vaccines cause
harm.3
•Third, a strong argument can be made that societies
cannot function without some type of unifying faith or spirituality
(particularly since in the absence of one, people will frequently seek
out one to adopt).
In our culture, a rather peculiar situation emerged where religion
was cast out by broad swaths of the society and replaced with science
(under the belief it would create a fairer and more rational society)
while the underlying need for a widespread faith was never addressed.
Because of this, science gradually morphed into the society’s
religion, resulting in it claiming to be an objective arbiter of truth,
but in reality, frequently being highly dogmatic and irrational as it
sought to establish its own monopoly over the truth (which has led to
many labeling the current societal institution of science as “scientism“).
As such, when science is discussed, religious terminology is often
used by its proponents (e.g., “I believe in science,” “I believe in
vaccines,” “anyone who denies climate change is reprehensible and must
be silenced”).
Over the years, many have observed that medicine, by claiming
dominion over life and death, has become science’s new religious
foundation. Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn stated:
“Modern Medicine can’t survive without our faith, because Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science. It’s a religion.”
In Mendelsohn’s 1979 book Confessions of a Medical Heretic, he argued that medicine was a dogmatic institution prioritizing authority and ritualistic practices over patient well-being.4
He then made numerous highly impactful television appearances, including a 1983 debate on vaccine dangers.
Note: 55 other previously aired news segments aired on vaccine dangers that would never air now can be viewed here.
Mendelsohn highlighted how doctors compulsively rushed to prescribe
new drugs before side effects were known, many routine practices caused
more harm than benefit, that medicine’s compulsion to “do something” was
faith-based rather than rational, and that doctors challenging the
faith were treated as heretics and cast out — all of which we
collectively witnessed decades later throughout COVID-19.
Mendelsohn also highlighted specific techniques medicine appropriated
from religion: doctors replaced priests; white coats replaced priest
robes; hospitals functioned as temples; medical insurance resembled
religious indulgences; drugs were treated like communion wafers; and
vaccines became the holy water baptizing you into the faith. I would
argue the final point is the most important as:
•Medical students and healthcare workers are
required to be fully vaccinated — filtering out those not aligned with
dogma and forcing submitters to push vaccines on patients. Likewise, as
COVID-19 showed, many segments of the public will now excommunicate
those who aren’t vaccinated.
•Vaccines significantly increase chronic illness likelihood (typically a 3-10X increase), causing recipients to become lifelong medicine adherents.
•The trauma of vaccination repatterns the nervous
system to be less connected with one’s surroundings, thereby making the
individual much easier to pull into a controlling materialist paradigm.
For a long time, the religious nature of vaccination has been a
relatively unknown and taboo topic to discuss, but fortunately, in
recent days that has shifted. Here for example, Tucker Carlson and
Cheryl Hines gave millions of viewers one of the most poignant
explanations I’ve seen for why vaccination is ultimately a religious
ritual: x.com/MidwesternDoc
Note: This is the mural deifying vaccination Tucker was referring to.5
Recently Aaron Siri published Vaccines, Amen,
an excellent book which makes the best comparison between medicine and
religion since Mendelsohn’s 1979 work by showing how repeatedly:
•The words of a small number of
(pharmaceutical-funded) trusted authorities are taken as dogmatic truth
everyone copies — despite lacking evidence or logical support. Siri
deposed the godfather (high priest) of America’s current vaccine
program, showing critical gaps in his duplicitous reasoning that defined
vaccination practice.
•Illogical and blatantly inconsistent positions are
taken arguing vaccines are safe and effective with identical evidence
types accepted if supporting that belief but rejected if refuting it.
Siri highlights countless instances of glaring contradictions with the
phrase “Vaccines, Amen,” something that also captures vaccine zealotry’s
censorship of questioners and forced vaccination rather than logical
persuasion.
•Vaccine safety research is layered with endless
assumptions that vaccines must be completely safe, concealing actual
harms, yet this research — which never actually proved safety (due to
those assumptions) — is presented as ironclad proof vaccines are both
safe and effective.
Note: I recently corresponded with a CDC
employee who shared that he “read a 2021-2022 project proposal which
discussed how they were seeing the first girls that got the HPV vaccines
were showing higher rates of cervical cancer as they got into older
ages. Instead of making the obvious observation that this disproves the
central [but never proven]
justification for HPV vaccines, they just said, we know the vaccine
works so something else must be happening to cause the rise in the
condition it was meant to prevent.”
Due to the high toxicity of vaccines,
real studies inevitably show significant injury. The medical
community’s strategy hence has been to block studies comparing
vaccinated to unvaccinated from ever being produced.
As such, placebo-controlled vaccine trials are vehemently rejected as
“unethical” because they deny (placebo) children a “life-saving”
vaccine — despite it being far more unethical to inject every child with
vaccines of unknown safety. Yet when “ethical” studies show vaccine
injuries are real, they’re rejected as “non-controlled” and met with
demands for “controlled trials” (that are banned for “ethical” reasons).
This absurdity continues as:
•When “non-controlled” datasets indicate safety, rather than be questioned, they are widely publicized.
•Large datasets that could “ethically” compare
vaccinated to unvaccinated exist, but the public is never given access
despite extensive efforts to obtain them.
•When individuals independently conduct such studies demonstrating harm, studies get retracted and investigators are often targeted by medical boards.
•Most recently, a physician agreed to conduct a
vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study to prove vaccines were safe and then
publish the results regardless of what they showed. Once its data
irrefutably showed vaccines were immensely dangerous,6 he refused to publish the study and apologetically admitted to a hidden camera he did that to protect himself.7
•Many other incriminating datasets are routinely
buried. For example, a CDC whistleblower testified that the CDC buried
data they collected showing vaccines cause autism,8 and when a
court order finally forced the CDC to release the data used to track
COVID-19 vaccine safety, it showed significant harm and that past publications of this data had hid that harm.
In short, an illogical status quo has been enshrined where “the
absence of evidence” for vaccine harm is erroneously accepted as “the
evidence of absence.” Building upon this, evidence-based medicine (the
guiding principle for modern medical practice) was founded upon the
premise that clinical decisions should be made with the “best available
evidence.”
Unfortunately, industry redefined this to mean “large (expensive)
double blind trials” (RCTs) published in top (industry funded) medical
journals and positions endorsed by (corruptible) “experts,” rather than
the best evidence currently existing on a subject.
Note: The FDA also rigidly demands costly RCTs for drug approvals,
making it impossible for off-patent (non-monetizable) therapies to ever
be approved. RCT fundamentalism (the refusal to consider anything
besides randomized controlled trials) is particularly misguided as
smaller observational trials typically yield the same results as large
RCTs (proven by a definitive 2014 Cochrane Review9), especially if effects are significant.
As such, while the best currently available evidence (retrospective comparisons of vaccinated and unvaccinated children) shows significant harm from vaccines,
it is dismissed for not being from RCTs (despite vaccine placebos being
“unethical”) rather than taken as a sign “better” research needs to be
conducted to disprove the harm the best available evidence currently
shows.
Likewise, when Siri tried to obtain data proving vaccine safety
(e.g., in depositions, lawsuits or Federal petitions), no one could
identify a single study supporting the claim that infant vaccines don’t
cause autism, despite all being certain “mountains of evidence” exist
showing vaccines are safe.
In turn, the Institute of Medicine (IOM)’s 1994 and 2012 reports10,11
(considered by many the definitive proof of vaccine safety) actually
stated insufficient evidence existed to definitively support or disprove
a link between vaccines and serious injury, and that this research
should be urgently done.
Furthermore, Gavin DeBecker’s excellent book Forbidden Facts,
focuses on how the IOM routinely whitewashes proven harms of toxins the
government has a financial stake in (e.g., Agent Orange) and, as
DeBecker discusses below (see the source document to watch the video – Ed), provides leaked records that show IOM members were told at the start that their final report could not provide evidence suggesting vaccine harm.
Since
RCT’s cost so much to conduct, the pharmaceutical industry has found a
series of reliable methods to game them that are continually utilized.12 This data manipulation is particularly brazen with vaccine trials. For example:
In
clinical trials, vaccines are monitored for very short periods (e.g.,
the studies for hepatitis B vaccines given to every newborn only
monitored side effects for 4 to 5 days13), making long-term detection of the myriad of chronic illnesses vaccines cause impossible.
The
“placebos” used in vaccine trials typically cause a significant degree
of injury, hence concealing the harm of the vaccine as the injuries
observed in trials are “equivalent to placebo.” For example, consider this data from the HPV vaccine trial14
(which used a harmful aluminum adjuvant as “placebo” to mask 2.3% of
trial participants developing a life-altering autoimmune condition):
Likewise, in the initial Gardasil trials, out of 21,458 subjects, 10 vaccine recipients and 7 “placebo” recipients died15 including 7 from car accidents16 (which POTS — a common Gardasil side effect — can trigger by causing drivers to pass out).
So,
despite the Gardasil death rate (8.5 per 10,000) and “placebo” death
rate (7.2 per 10,000) being almost twice the background death rate in
girls and young women (4.37 per 10,000), much like the unprecedented
spike in autoimmune disorders, the FDA wasn’t concerned since it matched
the “placebo.”
More remarkably, as Siri has shown,
most vaccines use another vaccine (often one for a completely different
disease) as the “placebo,” again making it possible to mask all the
injuries observed from the vaccine. Likewise, in many cases, when you
look up each consecutive vaccine trial, you will find that the very
first vaccine in the pyramid scheme was simply never tested against a
placebo but assumed to be “safe” (despite the injuries which occurred in
those trials).
In many instances trials will become unblinded. For example, in the COVID-19 trials, trial investigators testified (and published data indicated17)
that the trial was not blinded, resulting in vaccine recipients with
COVID like symptoms not being PCR tested for COVID-19 (thereby reducing
their COVID cases and inflating vaccine efficacy), much in the same
manner adverse events were not logged from vaccine recipients.
Note: This likely explains why the vaccine performed so much worse in reality than the trials suggested.
In
trials, it is almost impossible to report adverse reactions occurring
that are not “expected reactions” being monitored for (typically minor
side effects like fever or fatigue) — something we also saw through the COVID vaccine trials and within the CDC’s system that was created to monitor the vaccines for safety.
Pharmaceutical companies being permitted by the FDA to reclassify injuries that occur to make them seem less bad (e.g., COVID trial participants testified
that a severe cancer was reclassified as enlarged lymph nodes and a
permanent disability was reclassified as “functional abdominal pain”)
and principal investigators (PIs) having the authority to determine if
the reaction was related to the vaccine — which they inevitably will
conclude was not.
Sadly, as mentioned before, these issues are not unique to vaccines. For example, recently Secretary Kennedy shared a post highlighting the decades of suppressed evidence SSRIs can cause violent behavior:
One comment on the thread18
caught my eye, as it illustrates how reluctant PIs are to tie an injury
to a pharmaceutical, even if they can clearly see it occurring:
Vaccines are the only consumer product which:
Are mandated upon you for your own good.
You are forbidden to see the safety data on and instead must trust “experts” to evaluate.
You cannot sue the manufacturer if a defectively designed one severely harms you.
If
you take a step back, that is completely absurd, and has only been
possible due to the religious faith around vaccination and drug
regulators abjectly failing their basic duties to protect the public.
This failure results from:
The religious zeal for vaccines
having permeated the healthcare bureaucracy and preventing any real
scrutiny of vaccines before or after they enter the market.
The
Federal government (which pays out vaccine injury claims) being
strongly incentivized to eliminate any science suggesting they are
unsafe or ineffective. For example, if a single HHS study found one in
five autism cases were linked to vaccines, it could result in
approximately $1.3 trillion in liability19 — for context, the entire 2017 federal budget was $3.3 trillion.
A
revolving door incentivizes healthcare bureaucrats to maintain the lie
each vaccine is “safe and effective.” For example, the FDA and CDC
fought for years to bury a deluge of severe injury reports for the HPV
vaccine, after which that CDC director became a Merck executive and received over 30 million from Merck.
Likewise, Peter Marks, an FDA director who continually fought to conceal COVID vaccine injuries and rush the vaccine along without adequate testing so it could be mandated recently left the agency and became a Eli Lilly executive.
Similarly, in Vaccines Amen, Aaron Siri shows:20
FOIA’d
emails demonstrate the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office head routinely
communicated with the pharmaceutical industry to set national vaccine
policy while stonewalling citizen groups advocating vaccine safety.
CDC
reports are heavily scrutinized internally to ensure they only release
data supporting the notion that vaccines are safe, effective, and
necessary.
CDC members and advisory panels view
vaccination industry authorities with such reverence that their claims
rarely face basic scrutiny, regardless of how absurd they may be.
Since
lackluster standards exist for ensuring vaccine safety (no placebo
trials due to “ethical” issues), the proposed solution is post-marketing
surveillance. Unfortunately, since this is at CDC and FDA’s discretion
and since they “know” vaccines are safe, signals of harm are virtually
always dismissed — best demonstrated by what we saw throughout COVID-19.
When
irrefutable vaccine injury examples arise, the typical priority is
covering up bad publicity rather than addressing issues (e.g., UNICEF
worked with CDC to cover up backlash from data showing their vaccine
program killed children, rather than changing the program itself).
Because vaccines have such a high rate of injury
(and conversely such a small benefit), the only way the existing
paradigm can be sustained is by having the majority believe vaccines are
“safe and effective” and prohibiting debate, as the moment debate
emerges, nonsensical contradictions justifying the paradigm become
immediately apparent.
COVID-19 at last shifted this,
as beyond the vaccines being mandated despite failing abysmally to
prevent the infection, they severely injured millions of recipients,21 with robust polls since 2022 (detailed here),
consistently finding a third of recipients had side effects, a tenth
had severe side effects and half the population believes the vaccines
likely caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.
For example, the most recent survey22
found 26% of vaccine recipients experienced “minor” side effects, 10%
experienced “severe” side effects and 46% of Americans believe it is
likely the COVID vaccine is killing a significant number of people —
with 25% believing this is very likely.
Furthermore,
since the vaccine brand was used to sell the experimental COVID-19 gene
therapies, this tarnished the entire brand, creating a window for many
others to begin speaking about similar severe injuries they experienced
from other vaccines (e.g., Tucker Carlson recently told millions his son got Guillain-Barré syndrome
from an [unnecessary] flu shot). The faith that protects vaccines is
hence fracturing and leading to lawmakers at last calling out the
absurdities used to sell everyone vaccines.
Video Link
Furthermore, last week, thanks to you speaking out, the completely unjustifiable newborn hepatitis B vaccination
was removed from the immunization schedule — something many of us who’d
fought it for over thirty years never imagined was possible. There has
never been an opportunity like this in our lifetimes and it’s critical
to get this message out and support people doing excellent work to shift
this issue.
Author’s Note: This is an abridged version of a longer article
which goes into greater detail on the points mentioned here and their
profound implications. That article, along with additional links and
references can be read here. Additionally, a companion article
which reviews over a dozen suppressed studies that show vaccinated
children were far more likely to develop chronic illness and how far
more experienced subtle neurological injuries which profoundly changed
society can be read here.
A
Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician from the Midwest
and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate AMD’s exceptional
insight on a wide range of topics and am grateful to share it. I also
respect AMD’s desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front
lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check
out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.
- Sources and References
1 Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History, Suzanne Humphries, CreateSpace, 2013
2 Wikipedia, Dunning-Kruger effect, 2023
3 Wikipedia, Cognitive dissonance, 2024
4 Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Robert S. Mendelsohn, Contemporary Books, 1979
5 History of Vaccines, Diego Rivera’s Vaccine Mural in Detroit in the 1930s, July 12, 2021
6, 7 An Inconvenient Study, 2025
8 Statement of William Thompson, Children’s Health Defense, August 27, 2014
9 Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 2014, 2014(4), MR000034
10 Adverse Events Associated with Childhood Vaccines: Evidence Bearing on Causality, NCBI Bookshelf, 1994
11 Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality, NCBI Bookshelf, 2012
12 Doctoring Data: How to Sort Out Medical Advice and the Doctors Who Give It, Malcolm Kendrick, Chetnaa Publishing
13 The Forgotten Side of Medicine, A Midwestern Doctor, Substack, 2025
14 Gardasil Package Insert, FDA, April 2015
15, 16 FDA, 2006
17 BMJ, Peter Doshi: Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% effective” vaccines — we need more details and the raw data, January 4, 2021
18 X.com, November 5, 2025
19 Amazon, Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines
20 Vaccines Are Not an Amen-Religion: A Guide to Understanding Vaccine Science, Aaron Siri, Skyhorse Publishing, 2024
21, 22 Rasmussen Reports, Millions Experienced COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects, November 10-12, 2024
Source: https://principia-scientific.com/why-has-being-vaccinated-become-a-religion/
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