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by
A Midwestern Doctor
December 12, 2025
from
Mercola Website
PDF Version

The
Untouchable 'Truth'
that Silenced a Generation...
For decades, one medical ritual has enjoyed
immunity from
scrutiny, fortified by dogma, fear,
and
institutional loyalty.
Now, leaked
data, whistleblowers, and unraveling narratives
are exposing a
belief system hiding in plain sight...
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.

Note:
The evidence for the most sacred vaccines
(Smallpox and Polio) is quite weak.1
For example,
the smallpox vaccine was never proven to work,
caused rather than prevented outbreaks, and
smallpox only ended after an English city eschewed the vaccine
in favor of improved public sanitation and smallpox quarantines.
• 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").
The Religion of Medicine
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
-
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:
Note:
This is the mural deifying vaccination Tucker
was referring to.5

Vaccines Amen
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."
The Absence of Evidence
Is Not the Evidence of Absence
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, provides
leaked records that show IOM members were told at the start that
their final report could not provide evidence suggesting vaccine
harm.

Burying Evidence
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:
Video also
HERE...
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:

Regulatory Capture
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).
Conclusion
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.
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 Note from Dr. Mercola
About the Author
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
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