The Highwire with Del Bigtree - HHS REINSTATES VACCINE TASK FORCE

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

Aaron Siri reveals how ICAN has fought HHS since 2017, relentlessly exposing and litigating the agency’s decades-long neglect of its legal duty under the 1986 Act to ensure vaccine safety. After disbanding its safety task force in 1998—following just one report—and failing to submit even a single required biannual report to Congress, HHS is finally being forced back to the table. Now, with RFK Jr. at the helm of HHS, the task force is being revived—and ICAN is ready with decades of overdue recommendations.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Huge development for ICANN actually this week. Some of those fights take longer than others. We've been three years of this fight in West Virginia, but one of the longest fights ever, in fact, the second lawsuit we ever filed was to reinstate the vaccine, like why is the vaccine task force? We start with a FOIA request. The vaccine task force that was supposed to make vaccines safer.

It was written to the 1986 Vaccine Indies Compensation Act, that terrible law, but in it they did have some provisions, to make vaccine safer, but instead, as we proved through our lawsuits, they disbanded that vaccine, you know, safety group task force. And so now Robert Kennedy Jr. has just reinstated a vaccine safety task force. This is huge news. One of the big developments, he's really been putting his pedal to the medal in his last two weeks. HHS finally restores task force on safer childhood vaccines on the back of removing the childhood COVID vaccine, which we've talked about earlier, and pulling, you know, funding for, I think, $500 million worth of investment into looking at, you know, new MRNA technologies.

So great stuff happening there. But this one, this is a big one for us. This was one of our early fights. And I want to talk to our attorney, Aaron Siri, who is at the forefront of that initial fight right now. Aaron, this is a huge development. Talk about a long time coming. We're talking about 2017 we were involved in this lawsuit against, you know, and we're talking about. the government.

Yeah, the, you know, as you just pointed out, the, the 1986 Act has a section called the mandate for safe for childhood vaccines, okay? That one section of law in many ways underpins all of vaccine safety in this country. We've talked about this before on the show. But remind people that aren't aware of that. Like what does that mean?

Like what does it underpin? What's at the center of that section? Sure. Well, when you look around, everybody who's watching the show, Look around your room. Look at every consumer product around you, okay? Whether it's a computer you're looking out right now or the TV, whether it's the car in your driveway,

whether it's every material in the walls of your house, literally every consumer product around you. If the people, the company that make those products design it in a defective way, they could have made it safer, they could have done it with ingredients that weren't gonna be as harmful, you can sue them for doing that

to make it a better product. It's called a design defect claim. It's the primary way you hold product manufacturers accountable. But leading up to 1986, when there were only three routines of vaccines in America, that's it, right? A child by the age of one back then got three injections, according to CDC scheduled today. We're at 29.

Anyways, those three vaccines were causing so much harm. The manufacturers were all going out of business, you know, which reported there were six manufacturers of measles vaccine down to one. There were, I think, six around pertussis down to one. three for the oral polio down to one. So there's one left for each. Now, when companies face that crossroads, what do you normally do?

Your car's blown up, what do you do? Your plane's falling out of the sky. Your building materials are causing all kinds of harm for people, causing cancer. You make a better, safer product. That is what happens. The self-interest that companies have in making money, the economic self-interest drives them

to make a safer product. Nobody needs to push them. No agency needs to force them. They automatically want to do it because they don't want to lose money. And if they're really resistant, then they get a lawsuit. And then they do it. Fine. Congress, however, in its wisdom, decided, hey, you know what?

Instead of making you bank a better, safer vaccine product, we're just going to do something unprecedented. We're going to give you immunity. We're going to make it so that every child that you hurt, every child that you kill with your product, don't worry. They can't sue you for it. We're going to let you continue to sell your harmful product into the marketplace. And we'll just make it to the people who are harmed. They can't see you. That is what the 1986 Act did.

And it didn't just do it for those three vaccines back then. It did it for any other vaccine that was created thereafter. And hence the explosion of what we see. Now, when Congress did that, okay? And I'm not giving a lot of credit to Congress, okay? No slight on any particular member of Congress. But in its collective wisdom, it decided that, well, you know, we've kind of mucked up the works here. The companies, they don't care about safety anymore.

In fact, they have the opposite incentive, right? Their incentive financially is to do as little safety before licensure that we know from clinical trials. Yeah. And afterward. So we're going to transfer all those safety responsibilities to do to the federal government, to the federal health authorities, the Department of Health and Human Services. And how did they do that? How did they transfer those responsibilities?

They did it in a provision of law for the lawyers out there, 42 U.S.C. 3008-27, okay, called the mandate for safer childhood vaccines. It's three simple parts to it. Okay. And, you know, when Congress passes laws like that, a lot of times they'll put in, let's say, one page. So sometimes they'll put in a page and they'll say, okay, do this. And then there'll be like a thousand pages of regulations implementing it.

and hundreds of thousands of pages of reports and so forth going forth. You know, like when the government said make, when there's a law that says to make drugs, you know, pure and safe, you know, there's a billion regulations about that. When it came to vaccines and the mandate for safer childhood vaccines, right? And if you look at that, there's actually pretty much no regulations. Separately, most importantly, it's got three little parts.

Part one, it's saying make the vaccines as safe as possible, government, okay, because we screwed this whole system up. Companies aren't going to do it. So we're going to ask you, Secretary of H.S., make it a safe in every possible way. When you read it, it's literally every possible, you know, it's in the distribution, it's in the manufacturer, it's in the, you name it, it's every single aspect of it. Part two is something called a task force. It creates a task force for safer childhood vaccines, which is comprised of the head of NIH,

CDC and FDA, and the role of this task force. role of this task force is to make recommendations to the Secretary of HHS on how to make the vaccine safer in every possible way. And then Section 3 of the mandate for safer child of vaccines is that there's supposed to be a report submitted to Congress by the Secretary of HHS every two years detailing how have vaccines been made safer in the prior two years. And so at the very beginning, you know, I remember, you know, we sat down, pulled up this provision. I said, look, the place to start vaccine safety is. What are they done?

Let's look at the biannual reports to begin with. Let's see. Let's read them. So our first lawsuit was Section 3 there where we said, you know, how many meetings have they had with Congress the way they're supposed to and bringing forward all these new recommendations? And how did that that FOIA turn into a lawsuit? And what did we discover? They've never once, as far as we can, certainly 100% never, ever submitted a report to Congress, ever by annually.

And the best, the craziest part is, remember, we did that lawsuit. It's now been six years, I believe. And then we did a follow up after they had to conceding court in the embarrassing admission. Yeah, we've never done it. Still today, they still didn't have done it because we did a follow up for a request few years later. And they had to admit again. Yeah, we've still never done. They're at this point openly and blatantly not falling this law.

Now, separately, we also had to end up suing them for the recommendations of task force. We said, fine. Maybe they just never submitted a report to Congress, but what were the recommendations on how to make vaccines safer? Because these are the two easy. We can submit them now. If the task force has been doing the work, let's just submit it all right now. Well, let's see what those are. They're government documents subject to FOIA.

We finally got an answer, and the answer was the task. was disbanded. Well, there was one report, one instance of recommendations made in, I believe it was 1998, and then we disbanded the task force. When you read the statute, it's clear, this is not meant to be a one-time task force. This is an ongoing task force forever. The immunity didn't last one time, right? Did the immunity end in 1998? Did all of the benefits the companies got end? Did the lack of market protections end? No. The task force was supposed to continue to do this, but it didn't. And so, um, they had to make that embarrassing capitulation and I'll end my long monologue with saying that's okay when you look at the mandate for safer child of vaccines submitting by annual reports to

congress every two years putting a report together that's easy making recommendations just writing stuff out easy too and if they're not doing the easy parts of the mandate for safe your child vaccines do you really think that they were doing the hard part of the mandate section one which is actually doing the real hard work to make the vaccines, make sure there are only safe vaccines come out, and that they're as safe as possible, and they continue to be staffed afterwards. I think the question answers itself.

So Kennedy, essentially, though, has put this task force back together. He's now adhering to the mandate by the 86 Act. Do we assume then that he's also then going to, once they have some recommendations, you know, get back to delivering, these reports to Congress. Do we have any idea if he's had thoughts on that? I sure hope so. I suspect that I sure hope that's going to be. And I can tell you this much, I will be submitting to that task force on behalf of I can, a long list of recommendations. We have about almost 40 years

of catch-up to do. So we'll be making a list of recommendations. Fantastic. Aaron, thank you for your time. Thanks for explaining this historic moment. And thank you for being at this so long. never giving up. It's that tenacity and that endurance that has made us so successful that I can. I just want to thank you once again for all of your incredible legal work. And good luck on that fight in West Virginia. I know that one is just heating up, money pouring in from all over. So we're going to just keep telling our people we need help here. But you keep up. Don't stop that fight. I think once West Virginia goes down, I think the nation starts to sweep and the whole world starts looking. That's why I think that fight is getting so hard there. So keep up the

great work. Thank you.