The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ‘FOLLOW THE SILENCED’ FILM MAKES WAVES AHEAD OF MAY RELEASE

Episode Date: April 19, 2025

Filmmakers Mikki Willis and Matt Guthrie open up about the making of Follow the Silenced—a bold new documentary that gives voice to those vaccine-injured and silenced during the COVID era. Featuring exclusive recorded calls with FDA’s Dr. Peter Marks and CDC officials, the film reveals the hidden cost of government censorship. After fleeing California amid backlash, the filmmakers returned for a triumphant Hollywood premiere—where the film took home “Best of Fest” and “Best Director” at the Santa Monica Film Festival.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

There's already a documentary that is making waves. And I want you to imagine that you're a filmmaker. You're in California. You're living there and suddenly it gets so oppressive that the people around you start hating the work that you're doing, the movies that you're putting out. You're revealing dangers of authoritarianism coming into inside of our borders or talking about the vaccine issue or talking about the COVID issue. And you run out of California and say, let me go to Texas and start making it.

my movies there. But then as COVID clears and you make a spectacular documentary that may be one of the most revealing of all times, you say, you know what? Let's launch it in Los Angeles. Let's go back to the belly of the beast and see where we're at now. And then imagine winning awards there. That is what happened just two weeks ago for Follow the Silence. This is the trailer. Maddie? The first question was why isn't the United States looking in our own backyard for our data? Madeline, hey, honey, it's daddy. But they were.

They just weren't telling us what it said. Maddie? Maddie? Maddie? Most of you have never heard of me. I did my part. I got it. And most likely have never heard of most of us here.

I would like to introduce, I'm proud to introduce, Miss Briand Dresson. I don't know where to go. Her cause of death, or actual cause of death is not on this. Thanks for returning my call. And I did not want to be a lot to give my mother and I'm still for me. Why it is the responsibility of sick people

to do this is beyond me. The worst part was I could not walk. Couldn't move my arms early. No response for my legs. I couldn't think about moving my legs. I couldn't move. I can't feel my legs. I can't feel anything.

You know, I don't want to die. I want to still live. For my kids. The truth is not out there. And it's thanks to these guys. These are safe and effective products. For these MRI vaccines, there is incredible BS out there about thousands of people dying, et cetera. That just ain't true.

There is no bad time to get your second shot. This stack of patients are patients that are stuck. There were 50 to 100 reports going missing. There's IDs being disappeared. We started having in-person Zoom calls with the FDA. We've got thousands of people that are having issues, neurological side effects to the COVID vaccine. None of us are denying that there are these reports of neuropathy

and this potential vaccine injury here. How many studies do you run where you take the placebo group and give me the vaccine to them? We don't have any secrets here. I told my family that I was going to end my life. It broke my son to hear that his mom, wanted to die because she had gotten a COVID vaccine. The government killed my baby.

I'm not going to stop it. I am not speaking out because of my injury. I'm speaking out because of what happened after my injury. Facebook says it's working hard to fight misinformation. Lies about vaccine. The base of this story, the very center of this story is love. We can't give up. Let's get you someone for your life back, okay?

And we can't give in. I won't sleep until this war is done. I know that I'm on the other side of the country, I promise you you're not alone. Without validation, without love, without acceptance, feeling cannot happen. So that's what this story is about. It's about love.

I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to give up on these people. Well, just two weeks ago, followed the silence, won the Santa Monica Film Festival. What an amazing accomplishment there to go in the belly of the beast and win with this very, important and incredible film. It's my honor and pleasure right now to be joined by the executive producer, Mickey Willis. Thanks, Dale. Good to see you. And the director, Matt Guthrie.

First of all, congratulations. Thank you. I mean, I, you know, you and I have been through it with media, Vax, of course, got kicked out of Tribeca Film Festival, dragged through it on that, toured the country, and then the Plandemic series, probably the most censored, you know, set of films in history and then to see it come full circle, are you worried about a sense of censorship around this film, or do you feel like we're living in a different time right now? I'd say we're living in a different time right now. There's a lot of things that we were very concerned about last year,

and we've already noticed that to some extent, you know, the restraints on the throttle have been released, and there are already things, except for the fact that I found out recently that Plandemic is the most censored work. word in the world. And so that's kind of why we ended the series also because our last couple of films, people couldn't find them because you can't even, there's no hashtag pandemic.

And so I don't know how to undo that once the technocrats set that in place. But there's definitely been a, it's a new era. Just the fact that as you mentioned, the Belly the Beast that we're invited to be right there in the heart of Hollywood at the Director's Guild of America and to, you know, to sweep the festival really shows that there's people even within that organism that are ready and wanting the truth. What was that like, man? You're in Hollywood. Were there like real Hollywood liberal types coming up and praising the film? Yes, I mean, that's what was really unexpected, you know? Like we built every piece of this movie to speak to the people that would be predisposed to turn it off, right?

Which is a lot of this audience. And I told him when we got up and had a panel and I said, you know, guys, I just want to If you're a liberal person, and I hate, you know, like you, I hate the definitions between them. But if you feel that way, this is a story that should appeal to you. This checks every box for all of the things that you care about. These people should be people you care about. But after the film, myself and Mickey and a variety of other people, Tyler, people came up to us and just said, hey, look, man, I didn't come here to watch your film. I just wanted to check out a movie at the festival. And I'm walking away a different person.

Wow. I'm walking away open-minded. And just to see the look on people's face, I mean, it worked. exactly as we intended it to. And beyond that, there were several moments that was brought to our attention that family members had arrived with injured or with the doctors who might have been in the movie, and after the screening, they apologized to them. They said, you know, after all this time, I now see that you had a few things right here

in Brasari. And so that's, you know, I've been saying this is the movie that ends the debate. Yeah. You know, and it's really hard not to watch this movie and walk away with an understanding of what happened to these people. because you know the origins of this film was that because of the Planned Demic series there were a lot of people that were calling me saying hey are you tracking all of these injured people because they were first in line for the

trials and now they're in wheelchairs and they need help breathing and they're having seizures and buzzing sounds in their heads and and I was in the middle of producing I think at the time Plendemic two or three and so I said these calls were mounting and I and I thought we got we have to do something about this. And so then that's when I reached out and found Matt and said, can you come in? Because I'm already directing two projects.

But this can't wait. We need to give these people a voice because I really felt for them. Because you and I know what it's like to be attacked from one side, right? So the pro-vaxxers attack us. These people were attacked by all sides. At the heart of this, I think the power of documentary is it's not a fiction. You're not making up. It's not a podcast where we're sitting here and this is my opinion.

What you have is real footage. And the heart of this story really is this guy, Peter Marks, who is the Center for Biologics Evaluation. And he is doing these phone, like Zoom calls with some of the people, Briand Dresson and others, you know, asking what's going on with you, checking in with them. When you first saw that footage and started looking at, I think there's like seven.

Seven calls in total. Seven calls, six of them are on video. Yep, one is just audio. Yeah. What's it like? What was it running through your head? It's one thing to hear someone tell a story, but then to see these interactions with someone that is overseeing the trials is supposed to be throwing up a red flag if there's a problem

because you're about to say, let's give this to the entire world. And when you imagine that this is the predated before anyone in the world is going to get it, to get it. You're watching these calls of people making these complaints to this guy. What were your thoughts? Well, the first thing that I got was, you know, I had to get Bree's trust, obviously, first before she felt like she could entrust me with these recordings. The first thing that I got were transcripts. And I read through those transcripts. I was actually on the plane out to fly and film with Bree, and I was reading all of these. And I'm on the plane

just like highlighting everything, right? Because that was the thing that was, you take away from this immediately is how much of this stuff is so important. But the thing that you need is context. You need to understand why this stuff is so important because it can sound like a lot of jargon unless you understand, you know, the overview around it. But it was incredibly eerie because it's very, very obvious that you have a group of injured people, mostly physicians, right? They wanted to be taken seriously. So they want to go get people that have. So it wasn't just people in the trials that were in these calls. There was also physicians. They were saying, I'm a doctor. I I haven't been treating this.

I got the vaccine and I'm telling you I've been injured. Yeah. And not only are they injured, but they're also seeing this in their own patients. So they're seeing injuries happening in their hospital system. They're also injured themselves. They're seeing the same mechanisms in that illness within their own body as well as their patients. Just think of the math on that.

We hear like one in a million, right? Oh, it's one a million injury. It's like, no, not if I'm injured and the people I'm treating are injured. And it's all around me in the hospital, the nurse with me and many of a lot. us are sick and injured all inside of the same. There's only a couple hundred of us in this building. The evidence is so crystal clear that they had a problem. Yeah. What did you, you know, in the editing process as you're trying to choose what of this stays, what goes, was it hard to cut the film down? Oh, incredibly. So somebody, I'm not going to

say who, would not let me release a three-hour movie. But I would, I tried. But no, it's, you know, There was, that was one of the things that was the, the hardest thing for me to cut out of the film was the safety signals around MIS and how clear that is, which you guys will get into a little later in a segment. But that was, that is such. My S is. Is multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children and in children. And that's, you know, again, that's just something that COVID causes this illness. And even in the studies from the CDC, in children, by the way, right, before they're going to approve this for children, they know that there is a causal relationship between the kids getting the, vaccine in this. And this is an illness that is, like this is, you go to the ICU. It's not take some ibuprofen and you'll be fine. This is a very lethal illness. Like Ernest Ramirez, for example. A little baby. Yeah. Ernesto's heart was four times at size when he died. That's what, 16, 17 years old? Yeah. 15. 15. He was in the age group, the five-year age group. Yeah, if this thing can kill, you know, a child that big, what chance is an infant or a baby? We have one of the edits that of, so the Zoom calls were talking about some people will notice.

Let me just take a look at this piece. It's excellent. Thanks. Everyone wants to just introduce themselves. It might be helpful. And then we can introduce Suzanne from the FDA. After we got these meetings set up with the FDA, thankfully through my home senator here, Senator Lee.

So I'm Peter Mark, director of Center for Biologics. Peter Mark's head of biologics is the, guy that is supposed to evaluate the safety and the efficacy of these vaccines. As you can tell, we've got thousands of people that are having issues with the neurological side effects to the COVID vaccines. We're currently involved with research at the NIH, but the research at the NIH has been kind of mired and slowed. I confirmed with Janet Woodcock, the head of the FDA, as well as with the researchers that we were working with at the NIH. that they knew, that I knew that they were talking to each other.

And after that, NIH went radio silent. I wanted to make sure that they got a perspective from medical professionals. One of these physicians is a critical care physician. She's trying to hang on to her medical license. I'm going to protect her identity. Thank you, Bree, for inviting me. And Dr. Marks, it's really wonderful to meet you. As you know, the physician community holds FDA guidance

in incredibly high esteem. After the FDA communications about myocarditis came out, both the ER and cardiology teams were tuned to look for it. Our patient care dramatically improved, all due to the FDA advisory. They disclosed myocarditis to the medical community, and the medical community was given the green light to actually identify myocarditis and look for it

and help their patients and also report myocarditis. So the FDA is not naming additional adverse reactions to the vaccine, because the passive surveillance systems aren't displaying it. But the passive surveillance systems aren't displaying it, because physicians are blinded to the adverse reactions in their patients and thus aren't reporting them. And it's resulted in a negative feedback loop. And I believe that this loop is the reason why we are having a hard time getting recognition from the FDA regarding our neurologic reactions. So we are really hoping to have a conversation with you that has more specific details with how the FDA has looked into things such as small fiber neuropathy, disautonomia, and general neuropathy. It's not like we can just cluster neurologic symptoms in general.

So the majority of folks with this is a disautonomia? What would you say are kind of the top three? It doesn't have to be just one, but what are the top couple of things that you think we should be looking for? It is obvious from that question they have not looked specifically for any of these things. There's 88 distinct search terms on VERS when you curate to index. a neuropathy, so I'm hoping we can look at all of them. Yes, please feel free to send that to us. Yep, that would be helpful.

Ask a preschool teacher and a critical care physician for 88 terms of neuropathy. We'll hand it over. We'll get that to you. You know, in the meantime, I hope that things get better for you both, and we'll continue to look into things. Thanks. Well, that's got to be really as shivering as your son. as you're sick as hell and the giant FDA head there is saying, well, I hope things get better for you. And magically, you know, no plan. We're going to send doctors. We're going to send scientists. We're going to get a team together and figure out what's going on with you. Like none of that. Just good luck with that.

I mean, who imagines when you go on a trial for a product that had done poorly in animal testing for 20 years, couldn't get this thing online onto the market? you rush it, you spend billions of dollars to warp speed it onto the market. And then you say, you know, we need you for the trials. We're going to take care of you. And these people, like Brianne, is calling. And all she gets is good luck with that. I mean, it's so incredibly shocking. It's one of the most enduring parts of the narrative of this movie for me personally.

Because when you see that these people were completely shut out, you know, they trusted the science. which is why we call it follow the silenced. And then when they came out to say, oops, something happened to me. And two hours after my shot, I collapsed, I had a seizure, something's not right. They had their accounts shut down, their social media accounts.

They were completely silenced. They couldn't use their voices. And so they band together. That's one of the most beautiful aspects of this film. These injured people band together because no one else would help them. And you see Bree lying down on a couch there. She's not chilling out.

Yeah. She's too sick to sit upright. Yet she's managing this group of people that are fighting, even when they don't have the strength to get out of bed. They're still on calls every day. They're flying to D.C. There were several trips to D.C. Where they were promised that they would have a face-to-face meeting. It turns out they had to flip open their laptops and meet these people in the same format they'd meet them at their home.

They just avoided them. And then you see through the movie, you see a lot of back and forth where it's, you know, hiding things through, emails in the back, and then they get on video calls and say, we have nothing to hide here as they're hiding stuff, you know, and it's just, it just really shows, I know there's always been that question of, is this incompetence or corruption that always comes up? And as you've always said, it's both. And but to really learn that the heads of these departments, it's beyond corruption. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it is corruption and it is beyond incompetence because in many cases, they knew what they were doing. And they were just, you know, and they were

giving them lip service and in the meantime trying to shut these people up so that it didn't ruin the the rollout plan. Matt when you were going through this I mean so you have seven of these calls they all how long are they roughly 30 around about an hour an hour like seven hours of footage just right there six and seven how much you know ends up making it into the film oh a tiny tiny fraction yeah tiny fraction like that so so we I was talking to Brian just last week we saw that Peter Marks was stepping down and she's said, I want, I want the world to see all of these calls. The whole thing. The movie's amazing, but there's so much detail here that couldn't fit in. So, so we've taken the footage and you've worked

with us. You helped us pick out like some of the best selects. I'm sure things that you wished had made it into the movie, but also the timeline on this. Our legal team put together a really comprehensive timeline that goes with the footage that makes all of this makes sense. Of course, Aaron Siri was involved with Brian through this whole thing, so he's been a huge part of it. So it's legal, it's media, it's entertainment, it's truths being released to the public. I want to thank you for making this all happen today. It's our honor and thank you so much for helping us get the word out. Appreciate it. Absolutely. When is the film premiering? Texas premiere is May 15th and then it goes live right there on the spot. You guys will be one of the ones of the high wire you can find it on the highwire.com. You can find it at follow the silence.com. You can follow it at plandemic.com.

All right. It'll be out everywhere in the world, just like all of our series, we're going to let this one go for free because it's, it gets stuck. When they get stuck behind a paywall, it doesn't reach the people. Yeah, amazing. This one is being given to the people so that we can really get the truth out and give these people a voice. They deserve it at the very least. Well, I'm really proud of you guys. Congratulations once again.

And thank you for being a part of this epic moment. And part of like real media, real press, this is what it's about. You never find this on CNN. So keep up the good work. Thank you for it. Absolutely. Thank you.