The Highwire with Del Bigtree - LEGAL VICTORY IN WEST VIRGINIA: THE BATTLE OVER BODILY AUTONOMY

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Del sits down with ICAN’s lead attorney Aaron Siri to break down a pivotal legal win in West Virginia, where an ICAN supported lawsuit has secured a preliminary injunction allowing students to attend school with religious vaccine exemptions. They expose how the AAP, ACLU, and state education board are fighting parental rights—and why this fight is far from over. Aaron delivers a sobering reminder: rights are never won, only defended. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We had a huge breaking story this week in a very important case. Of course, this is the case in West Virginia. But before I get into that, let me just show you. At the top of the show, I said the AAP is against us. I mean, literally, I want you to really think about this. In this next segment, I want you to ask yourself, what other organization do I know or do I donate to that actually has won back religious exemptions, one back the ability to exempt your kid out of, you know, the vaccine program school.

We did it in Mississippi. We won back the university system in California so that now all college students can go to any UC school and not have to vaccinate. Of course, we have cases going on in many of these states that are, you know, have taken away your personal belief or religious exemptions. Some we can't talk about. We're about to talk about one right now. but when you are winning, when you're the one on the field, when you become the winning team, when you are Tiger Woods, guess whose poster is on the wall and who everyone wants to be? That's kind of how I see Aaron Siri, and that's who I think they're talking about in this AAP article.

Take a look at this. Medical versus non-medical immunization exemptions for child care and school attendance policy statement. This is what they go on to say. The AAP recommends that all states, territories, and the District of Columbia eliminate all. non-medical exemptions from immunizations as a condition of school attendance. That's the entire country, everybody. That's now, you know, what is that? 45 states they want to go after.

In addition, states and territories should develop policies to ensure that any medical exemptions are appropriate and evidence-based, meaning we don't believe there's such a thing as a medical exemption, and we've proven that in California. Folks, the fight is on. It's real. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Is that Newton? I think it is. Anyway, that is at play here. So while I was in the Grand Canyon, you know, just basking the sun and thinking about all we've achieved, there's someone that's going to try and take all of that away from us. Well, we've got a fight going on, really big one in West Virginia. Many have been watching. This is our, you know, legal update in that we have just pulled off a stay in that case. They are not going to, right now, that case is being held. Here it is. I can't as legal team secures preliminary injunction. in West Virginia Board of Education lawsuit.

Of course, at the heart of that is the law firm we work with Aaron, Siri, and Glimstead. You want to see them at work? Take a look at this. Legal battles surrounding religious exemptions for school vaccinations continue this time in a courtroom. The lawsuit was filed against the Raleigh County Board of Education and the West Virginia State Board of Education following a decision to follow the state's existing vaccine mandates. This is despite an executive order from Governor Patrick Morrissey meant to require religious exemptions for vaccinations. Judge Michael Froebel has officially granted a preliminary injunction to three Raleigh County students, allowing them to go

to school without required vaccinations. The court finds that the plaintiff has met the burden of four factors for the preliminary injunction. We've got state action here by these defendants denying my clients the ability to attend school. That's likely to go to the Supreme Court and I think I was reassured with what the judge said because it backed up what we've been saying since January. The judge's ruling in this case applies only to the children named as plaintiffs in this particular lawsuit here inside of Raleigh County. But there are a lot of people asking for that religious exemption. We just want to protect these families that have deeply held religious beliefs to give them the opportunity to go to

school. There's no reason why they shouldn't. I think everyone watching should also know. Westfordene is one of only five states in the nation that doesn't. have a statutory exemption for religious freedom. That's important. Well, this is a huge victory in many ways, but it's not over. Obviously, this is just, you know, a means to try and get to an end in a case that we have been battling for years. I want to bring on probably the greatest attorney in the world, Aaron Siri, at least in this

space and all the work we've been doing. Aaron, a huge moment here in West Virginia. but before we even get to that, what do you think of this statement made by the American Academy of Pediatrics, basically demanding a removal of any exemption out of the vaccine program across this country? I think that they just rung the death knoll to the vaccine program in this country in many ways. To gain the few additional percentage points that they want to achieve to, for parents, parents that have reasons to now vaccinate their children, they're going to seek to nationally crush their rights.

What do people do when you take away their rights? When you throw their children out of school, even though they have a reason, whether it's a deeply held religious belief, whether it's some other deeply held reason, whether it's because their child suffered a medical issue that the CDC won't recognize and hence states won't recognize. What do you think that does to those parents? It turns them into lifelong advocates that are going to fight these products. And they're just products.

And if the AAP were smart and it wanted to protect its holy grail, its products, from quote unquote being politicized, it would stop politicizing the products. And the way that it politicizes them is by taking away people's rights, forcing them to get them that they don't want. Almost everybody in this country, most kids get these products. in the states that have checked the box exemptions, which is about 45 of them, they still have far above 90% vaccination rate. Back in the early 80s, the vaccination rate in this country for the only three routine vaccines at that time was in the 50 to 60 percentage points,

according to the CDC data. Okay? And everybody was pretty much fine. Here we are. They're at well over 90% often, and yet they decide that they need to crush. It's always blaming the unvaccinated for everything. This is not about health. If they cared about health, they care about the chronic disease epidemic. They have overseen in the last 40 years the largest decline in childhood health in recorded human history. Yeah. I've overseen that. But you know what? You don't hear them talking about that. You don't see them talking about raising the national arm about that. You know why? Because as that chronic disease goes up, so does the profits of their members. They're a trade organization.

They're a medical organization. They're there to assure the profitability of their members, and those are pediatricians and other similar doctors. Chronic disease line goes up. That's good for business. Vaccination rates go up. That's good for business. What's not good for business is if those lines go in the other direction.

I'm not saying, not trying to infer an evil intent. They're just doing what they're supposed to do. They're a trade organization. We're supposed to look out for the best financial interests of their members, and that's what they're doing. But they made, I think, a tragic mistake in what they're doing by saying, let's crush the rights of people around the country. It didn't work out in California, did it in 2014.

It in many ways emboldened and created folks like Udell, who have come out and at SB 277 have decided to, it is part of the motivation, I'm sure, to go in a fight with regards to these mandates. And I'll end by saying this. if you want to get people to vaccinate, to persuade them on the merits. Don't do what every other folks that have power do in the past when they can't persuade you in the merits, which is bully you, engage in thuggery, engage in the worst kind of conduct.

And that's what the AAP did here. They can't persuade you on the merits. And so their solution is we're just going to say, you can't have rights. We're going to crush your rights to make you do what we want, even though we're we can't persuade you. That is the absolute worst form of conduct. I agree. I think you're absolutely right. You know, of course, I was, I guess as they call it, I hear this word a lot now radicalized by SB 277. I just said, no way. There's no way you have the right to forcibly inject my children with 72 vaccines at that time, especially when, you know, you know, my generation only had to get

10 vaccines. And in other countries, fully vaccinated is like 20 vaccines. So you aren't even They're not even consistent on what being vaccinated means, yet they're going to enforce it at that level. And as we've just seen, they don't even want to see people get paid back if they are injured. They don't want to see that program fixed. So you're right. Across the board, all they care about is the bottom dollar bottom line. And they're standing up for, you know, the trade. So while that is their interest, you're in a case, there's also, you know, in West Virginia, I want to talk about that.

but in that case, the ACLU is fighting against us. We're funding this case in West Virginia right now that you're on. Explain that to me. What is up with the ACLU? Here's this article. I'll just read one excerpt from it. The loudest voices in West Virginia are added again the time suing over governor over his executive order granting families the right to religious and philosophical vaccine exemptions for school-age children.

The ACLU, along with several county school boards, and bureaucratic backers are fighting tooth and nail to crush parents' right to decide what is best for their child. I mean, they're coming out of the cracks in woodwork. ACLU is fighting us in court. First of all, why? And how's it going? Okay, so two things. The ACLU knows as much about vaccines, I think, actually, as the AAP. So, for example, like in this AAP statement that they put out, they said, oh, pertussis,

We have to achieve a 95% immunity rates to prevent the spread of pertussis. Even the AP apparently doesn't understand that these products work, that pertussis vaccine does not stop transmission, which is incredible. And then they all are recently citing to this ridiculous CDC publication, which I'm going to be addressing soon. That claims that millions of lives were saved over the last 20 years from vaccination, which the only problem with that is just statistics. You know, it's a problem because when you actually add up just the,

deaths in the year prior to each vaccine's introduction, you can never reach even thousands of kids, let alone millions of kids. Wow. It's just nonsensical. That'll come and do course. But here's the thing. The ACLU, the ACLU is an organization that is supposed to protect civil and individual rights. And I will tell you, when I went to law school at Berkeley, okay, there was something called Free Speech Square in Berkeley,

where the civil rights movement in many way was launched to fight to assure people's right to speech. Look, I may not like neo-Nazis marching through a Jewish town in Illinois, but the idea was I'll fight to the death for their right to do it, because protecting their rights to free speech protected all of our rights for free speech. Okay? Right. That's what the ethos was. That was the ethos of the ACLU back then.

It has completely lost its way. that the ACLU will come in to say that children should be kicked out of school rather than protect their right to attend school is just, it's like the world has gone upside down for me in many ways. Yeah. Look, think about it like this. You know, these kids, they don't disappear when they're kicked out of school. Remember, this lawsuit is just about they're not going to school. They don't disappear. Their parents don't lock them in cages.

They don't get put in a box in a basement. They're otherwise part of society, period. They're going to ball games. They're going to the market. They're going to the playgrounds. They're meeting in homeschool pods. In West Virginia, they can have as many kids in a pod. One of our clients explain that they go into this homeschool pod with a hundred children at a religious facility.

We're broken up into classrooms. So they're basically going to school. They're just homeschooling. You know, they're talking about, well, we can't have clusters. of unvaccinated kids, you're creating a cluster of 100 unvaccinated kids. So it's not about health. Come on, give me a break. It's not about, it's about your religious beliefs. You believe protested vaccine for stops transmission, even though the evidence shows it's the opposite. Because that's your belief. It's no different than a religion. But the thing is,

they want to replace the religious beliefs of these parents with their religious beliefs. and what really makes them mad is that these parents refuse to adopt their religious beliefs about these products and not abandon their own. I think the other thing that makes them mad is that to some degree or creates cognitive dissonance is that these unvaccinated kids,

they don't suffer from these chronic health issues. Right. And he apparently stood dead set and making sure that these kids are just as healthy as the average American kid. Yeah, which is not. It's a sad reality. It's terrible.

All right, so tell me about this case. We've been at it, you know, for years. Just tell me where we're at right now, this stay that just happened. What is a stay for people that maybe, you know, don't watch enough legal shows? What just took place and how did you win it? So the technical term is an injunction. An injunction? And what the judge orders is a preliminary injunction in this case.

So I'll give you the lead up to it. Like many of the lead, a lot of the lead work we do, you know, the pharmaceutical attorneys and the industry attorneys are smart in how they do things. They often don't just go in and try and kill, so to speak, in one false swoop. It's more of death by a thousand cuts. And in many respects, a lot of the league work we do is try to move things by inches, right? We are now, we brought multiple lawsuits in California. We've won, you know, the last two. We're now on another one.

And we try to move out the precedent, slow piece by piece. So in West Virginia, for example, we first got an injunction that prohibited the state of West Virginia from not providing schooling to homeschoolers. So in West Virginia, if you don't want to attend school, you can be in their public school remotely. And they said, you can't do that unvaccinated. You're in your home anyway. It's so ridiculous. But whatever. So we got an injunction.

the state against the school board that was refusing to honor that child's religious exemption and the judge says no you need to honor it so we got that then we had a separate federal lawsuit that seek to broaden that and as that process was going along the governor ended up agreeing with our position the governor of Patrick Morrissey credible who was the when he was the attorney general when we started the case actually ended of filing an amici brief in support of our position, interestingly, even though technically he then had to get outside attorneys to represent the health department. Talk about a weird situation.

And so that whole legal maneuvering was going on. He became governor. And what he did is he passed an executive order affirming that the state law in West Virginia does require religious exemption. So we said, great, we dropped our federal lawsuit. We said we've now gotten all of the relief that we've sought. and the state health department in West Virginia started issuing religious exemptions for kids to attend school. Great. We thought it was all over.

Nope. Because then the unelected board of education in the state of West Virginia decided that those religious exemptions shouldn't be honored. So they told all the schools in West Virginia don't honor the religious exemptions. So then you got some school districts that were honoring it, some that weren't. And so what we did is we have now sued the state board of education, and that's the lawsuit you're just talking about. Okay. And we did, on behalf of three families, four kids, three of them were rising seniors, one's going into a preschool. And the judge from the bench, as you saw in that video clip, issued a preliminary injunction saying to the state,

uh, under the state law in Mrs. in, excuse me, in West Virginia, you need to honor those religious examinations. that were brought by the that were granted by the state health department so we're now let's put it this way in the current lawsuit we've got the governor supporting us we've got the health department supporting us and now we're just down to the board of education fine so this is like in some ways i guess you could call it mop up so we're gonna you know around the circle on this and you know i we're going to restore a religious exemption to west virginia one way or another it's going to happen through this legal proceeding if not the state legislature is going to pass

that if not this executive order is going to be honored, but it's going to happen. And, you know, and then we're on our way to then the four remaining states. If we don't add any more, you know, Aaron, just how many years? I want people to get a sense of this because, you know, we celebrate these lawsuits, especially when they start coming to a head like they are right now. They get very exciting. We're close to the wind. We can see the finish line.

But this case, I think I remember started, I mean, first of all, I've been going to West Virginia and meeting with the health department there since 2016, when I stopped there with Vaxed and giving speeches and talking to politicians and trying to push legislation. But legally we started funding legal cases. It had to be three, two, three years now, hasn't it, that we've been fighting in West Virginia? Yes.

I mean, our law firm has over 90 cases that we're handling right now that are supported by ICANN or where ICANN is the plaintiffs. So we have over now, I think that's just a federal court, actually. We think we might have more in state courts. We have a lot of, we have a lot of lawsuits going on. And ICANN, as I've said in the past, one of the things I love about ICANN is that you folks rarely fundraised, from what I have seen, based on cases that are filed. You fundraise based on the wind, so that's great. Because, you know, it can be disruptive otherwise.

and a lot of organizations, you know, everybody makes their own choice and how they do that. In any event, by the way, can I just say, thank God you're a winner because we wouldn't make any money, we would be able to bring in the money to keep going if you weren't so good at winning. So it, you know, it takes two to tango on that front. But I appreciate that. But this climate now, do you see a change in the climate with ACLU, with AAP? It looks like, you know, at first when you were fighting, no one was paying attention, the war, you know, every financial interest in pharmacies

be paying attention to you and I can in the suits that we're now bringing. Do you feel, is the pressure, you know, heating up out there? Oh, absolutely. Look, the pharmaceutical industry and the accoutrements to that industry, right? There's a hospital industry.

There's a whole universe of medical organizations that have a financial interest in these products, continuing to multiply. They have invested an incredible amount of money in lobbying efforts, federal and state levels. And at the state levels, part of that lobbying effort, of course, is to get rid of exemptions. Well, one is to mandate the products and then two is to get rid of exemptions. Because obviously, if you want to be able to predict whether or not your product is going

to sell and you're going to profit, if it's mandated, then it's a lot better for you. You're a lot more likely to sell more products. And once you can also start that mandating machine, the more products you can kind of add to it. You know, if you actually look at many states, for example, like even West Virginia, most of the vaccines that are mandated in Massachusetts, Virginia, three out of the six, including the end of the months, which is one of the other, is before. We're not mandated until 2015. Okay. 2015 you're going to mandate products for you know that for basically things that you didn't need to at that point right but the reason is because they want to

comply and and you know the pharmacy industry and those around them are smart about this they don't just come in and say it'll be a man for everybody in the whole country no first they start with the preschoolers then elementary school then middle school then high school then college mandates then nurses then all medical threshold, then preschool teachers. And the scope and the circles kept going wider and wider during COVID, no doubt, the hope was that those mandates were going to come and stay because that's a great platform on which to launch a product.

It's just good business. It's good business. If I'm sitting there and I say, hey, we got a product. We got to sell it to a market. I got a great way to get to market, but just mandate it. What's that going to cost us? Well, lobbying dollars this much. This is what it costs us to have an advertising complaint.

to persuade people, this is what it would cost us to lobby to get it mandated. Mandating is probably going to be cheaper. And I think that's the road a lot of these companies have gone down. And so this is very disruptive to their business model, I think. And it's disruptive also to the zealots, I will call them, who are, when it comes to vaccines. I mean, like some of these reporters, my goodness, like at the New York Times, for example, They just, they just are, they appear incapable of objectively. They cannot objectively look at these products.

They just have these beliefs and they're so entrenched in them. They just can't look at it. A vaccine injured child in my eye is not, for some reason, just cannot be viewed the same as an adult injured by infectious disease in their eyes. Like they simply cannot see it. And it's so clear to me they can't see it. One is just an accepted casualty of war. It's just, you know, we have to accept it, and the parents just have to live with it.

And no matter how much chronic disease, no matter how much suffering these products caused, you should have to accept it. Whereas we cannot accept a single child injured by any infectious disease ever, ever. If they can't engage in that process objectively, they shouldn't be engaged in journalism. and that same problem exists with people across this country who are making decisions, unfortunately. So we have to fight against that, too, every day. Well, you are bringing that fight, and they are drawing these fights out. West Virginia has taken years.

We've been years now in California, other states, as you said, over 90, maybe 100 cases all going. I want to thank you for all the work that you've done. I did get some time. It's been so busy, but it's great to take some time off and just really think about the things that I'm thankful for. And I have to say, Aaron, I'm thankful that I found you, that I can and we were able to come together and do this work.

You're the best there is, and I know how hard you're working, and I know it's just getting harder and harder. And I wanna thank you for your courage and your passion and the work that you're doing. And I wanna congratulate you for yet another win this week in pulling off this injunction. And we look forward to the final nail on that coppins so that we can really have

a religious exemption back in West Virginia, and we can focus on the other four states. But there's no one like you. Just keep up the good work, and I see you've got that great team. It's fun to see some new lawyers getting some press there on your team, just dynamic individuals. It's very exciting. Well, those are very kind of words. I'm very honored to do the work that I get to do,

and they've probably got about 50 people at our firm that do work related to I can. Sometimes it's more in a given month. But for your audience, I would like to add one point about rights and I think it's important. And it's that the time to be most cautious and careful about one's rights is actually when you've secured that. Because when it seems like you have vanquished the other side, so to speak, and you have fully secured your rights, that's actually when they're gathering the forces on the other side. Just like you gather forces and we gather forces, so to speak, when our rights are taken. taken away from us, right, to go and fight when they're not getting what they want, so to

speak, when they're losing these cases, when exemptions are being extorted, when the right to choose now exists, it's easy to get complacence in those times. But it's precisely when you have, it feels like you have totally won. That is the moment to be most guarded about your rights. Rights are never won and lost. They are in a constant eternal battle against those that want to take it away from you. You never win the war. You just have to fight. And I had a young attorney asked me at the firm,

when we win this thing, I say, you don't win this thing. You never win. I said, when I'm long and gone, you keep fighting, all right? That's what needs to happen. Because there is always going to be those who come to take away your rights. You just got to constantly push back. And this right, the right to bottle the autonomy when it comes to medical intervention, the right to say no is a true fundamental right.

We've talked about it many times. and we've constantly got to be fighting back against the government and those forces that want to take that right away. So there'll never be a nail in the coffin, but there'll be a lot of, you know, it's like the pendulum. We might be able to get it so far down. The other side seems like they're dead, but, you know, never underestimate the Phoenix rise.

All right. Aaron, keep up the good work. I want you to get back to that work. I appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you for all that you do. Once again, congratulations. And I can't wait to hear, as you make progress in the other states.

We won't talk about them, as we said, until we start seeing the wins we're looking for there. Here it is. We have the five holdout states. We're freeing the five West Virginia, we believe, is going to go down any day now, and we will finally see that be gold. But remember, we've fought them off in Hawaii.

There's other states that have tried to, you know, eliminate exemption. So, you know, this, you know, this Hydra wants to grow other heads. Aaron, appreciate it, and we'll see you. you soon. Keep up the great work. Thank you, Doc.