The strange religion of vaccine worship
It wasn’t until right after the little girl had received her third and final pertussis vaccine shot that all hell broke loose.
One of five children in a Christian homeschooling family this writer knows well, the child suffered an extreme and life-altering reaction to the common childhood vaccine. Today, many years later, her family’s life has largely revolved around taking care of this unfortunate daughter, confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, her life decimated by a “required” vaccine shot.
In 1986, prompted by ever-increasing numbers of vaccine disaster cases like the once just cited – and more to the point, in order to halt the trend of drug manufacturers abandoning the vaccine business altogether due to the huge judgments courts were awarding victims of their products – Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.
Pursuant to that act, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was launched in 1988 under the Department of Health and Human Services. It provided, courtesy of the U.S. government, an easier, faster and more humane avenue for victims’ families to receive needed support for such disasters – one of the chief culprits at that time being the pertussis component of the DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine that so grievously and permanently injured our family friend. However, the biggest – some would say the real – reason for the program was to let the pharmaceutical companies off the liability hook, thereby keeping them in business.
As a result, vaccine manufacturers today enjoy a rare business bonanza: 1) They manufacture drugs everyone is supposed to take, 2) they benefit from all the aggressive and free marketing efforts of government, the medical profession, educational establishment and news media, and 3) they are simultaneously protected from liability claims, even if their drug turns out to be dangerous.
For recent proof of the corruption this system has wrought, one need look no further than the COVID-19 pandemic.
The so-called Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, established in 1990 as an outgrowth of National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, has long been touted as a sort of “early warning system,” allowing doctors and scientists to identify “adverse events” resulting from a particular vaccine. The idea, of course, is that if a certain threshold of such problems is reached, the drug responsible will be pulled from the market.
Indeed, there is precedent – before the current era – of vaccines being withdrawn when medical authorities saw a correlation with adverse events. In 1976, for example, as the CDC recounts on its own website, after millions had been injected with the swine flu vaccine, “a small increased risk of a serious neurological disorder called Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS)” was noticed. As a result, “federal health officials decided that the possibility of an association of GBS with the vaccine, however small, necessitated stopping immunization until the issue could be explored.” In other words, they recalled the swine flu vax because of a statistically small but real problem with the drug.
That was then. Today the story is very different.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the VAERS database racked up an astonishingly large number of adverse events related to the COVID vaccines. For journalists, reporting on negative outcomes of the various vaccines, especially among the young, became virtually a daily occurrence, from “sudden death” reports of athletes to the never-ending string of disturbing reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young men.
Yet throughout the pandemic, rather than serving as an “early warning system,” VAERS served as a barometer of just how disinterested and corrupt the federal health bureaucracy – from the CDC (which administers VAERS) to the Food and Drug Administration to the National Institutes of Health – have all become. None seemed to care about the alarming number and variety of serious medical crises following COVID-19 vaccination.
Currently, the VAERS database – summarized on the much more transparent “Open VAERS” website – documents the following list of COVID-19 vaccine “adverse events.” (Bear in mind, as “Open VAERS” states up-front, that VAERS “is a voluntary reporting system that has been estimated to account for only 1% of vaccine injuries.”)
VAERS COVID Vaccine Adverse Event Reports
1,656,138 Reports Through November 29, 2024
38,190 Deaths
219,170 Hospitalizations
155,989 Urgent Care
246,208 Doctor Office Visits
10,924 Anaphylaxis
17,864 Bell’s Palsy
5,159 Miscarriages
22,082 Heart Attacks
28,769 Myocarditis/Pericarditis
72,492 Permanently Disabled
9,326 Thrombocytopenia/Low Platelet
40,662 Life Threatening
47,241 Severe Allergic Reaction
16,278 Shingles
This is clearly “Exhibit A” in the case against current government policy of giving pharmaceutical manufacturers a perverse incentive to avoid properly and exhaustively testing their vaccines, since they have been explicitly assured they won’t be held legally or financially responsible for negative outcomes their products cause.
At the same time, these products have become extremely lucrative for the manufacturers, since every member of the population is being continuously exhorted to receive some of these shots. Especially disturbing is the fact that parents of all newborns are pressured to inject their children with a great many more shots than infants of a generation ago – with multiple vaccines sometimes administered at the same time, creating the additional risk of unpredictable drug interaction.
Yet if they balk or ask too many questions, they’re bad parents, ignorant conspiracy nuts and “anti-vaxxers.”
Is it any wonder, then, as COVID proved so incontrovertibly, that big pharma is running amok – at least when it comes to vaccines?
In light of all this, and the widespread near-hysterical and unselective cheerleading for all vaccines regardless of their safety, effectiveness and track record, a very unusual but important question emerges and begs for an answer.
‘A language of religion’
What accounts for today’s widespread, uncritical and almost cultlike religious devotion to vaccines – all vaccines?
Of course, everyone knows the world has been blessed historically with highly beneficial “miracle drugs” – including smallpox, polio and other vaccines, as well as myriad drugs, from penicillin and insulin to morphine and even aspirin. There’s no question these and other medicines have greatly benefited mankind.
But that obviously doesn’t mean every vaccine and every drug is in the same league. Some are questionable and problematic, while others simply should be banned, based on their terrible track record.
Moreover, why are some vaccines administered when they clearly are not indicated? For example, as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, himself a medical doctor, asked during the confirmation hearing for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., why is it that the Hepatitis B vaccine is routinely administered to newborn babies to “protect” them from contracting a disease that is transmitted almost exclusively through sex or sharing of contaminated needles from illicit drug users?
Part of the answer is obvious – the financial incentive pharmaceutical companies have for making sure every child born receives their shot. But there’s more. An almost religious guilt-trip is laid on parents who choose either not to vaccinate their children, or to be selective as to which shots their kids will receive and when.
In his Dec. 27, 2024 podcast, Tucker Carlson asked this “vaccine religion” question of his guest, attorney Aaron Siri, who has handled numerous high-profile cases involving vaccine injury and other mandated medicines.
Tucker Carlson: “What accounts for the religious attachment of certain people, particularly affluent, well-educated people, to vaccines as a category? There are a million medicines out there … and there are all kinds of treatments for all kinds of diseases, but people take a cooler, less emotional view of them. Chemotherapy saves lives, but there are downsides to chemotherapy. Most people are like, ‘We’re weighing it out. Is it worth taking chemo or not?’ But vaccines quickly become religious, almost immediately. Even the word has an emotional power that no other treatment or medicine does. And this has been true for a long time. Why is that?”
Aaron Siri: “There’s an irony in the following way. Those who often don’t want to receive vaccines, I find, are the ones … who have taken the time to really look at the clinical trials, the post-licensure safety, to understand these products more objectively. The CDC will tell you that the people who have the highest rates of completely unvaccinated kids are ones with PhDs and are highly educated, often in the sciences. So what are they learning? What are they understanding that caused them not to receive these products?
“But … to answer your question, have I seen religion almost when it comes to these products? Yes, I have. But it comes from often the side of the folks who want to make you get them, force people to do it. You must believe what I believe about these products. That’s right. You must submit. Do not ask questions. You must just believe.
“I’ve never heard people say, I believe in statins. [But] I believe in vaccines – that’s the language they use. It’s a language of religion. … It is for a lot of people, and I found this with a lot of the vaccinologists who I’ve deposed and interacted with. … A lot of them are atheists. Maybe they were brought up in a certain religion, but they have now become atheists. And I think when somebody doesn’t have a religion in their life – any religion – they don’t believe in God … [they] end up with an empty space that needs to be filled with something.
“They have to believe in something. How do you not believe in something in this life? You have to have meaning. It’s got to be a really dark place to believe everything came from nothing. And if you do, I’m speculating that vaccines start holding a place of religion, that they look to it as, ‘See, this saved us. This is what saved humanity.'”
Meanwhile, treatment of heretics and unbelievers in the religion of vaccine worship is often extremely harsh.
During the COVID pandemic, nearly half of all Democrat voters told pollsters for Rasmussen Reports and the Heartland Institute that they backed measures that would require “the unvaccinated” to live, at least temporarily, in detention facilities. The national telephone and online poll surveying 1,016 likely voters found that 45% of Democratic voters favored such measures for unvaccinated Americans.
A shocking 59% of Democrat respondents – 3 out of 5 – favored a government policy requiring citizens to “remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies” if they refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine – which later turned out to be one of the most problem-ridden vaccines in history.
It gets worse. As the Rasmussen/Heartland report revealed: “Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.” Equally outrageous, the survey found that “29% of Democratic voters would support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s much more than twice the level of support in the rest of the electorate – seven percent (7%) of Republicans and 11% of unaffiliated voters – for such a policy.”
The preceding is adapted from the February 2025 issue of WND’s monthly Whistleblower Special Report, titled “MAKING AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN! How Big Government, Big Pharma and Big Food are making Americans overweight, addicted and chronically ill,” and available in both a print and digital edition.