The Highwire with Del Bigtree - TEXAS AG TAKES ON VACCINE INCENTIVES

Episode Date: February 14, 2026

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joins Del to discuss his new investigation into financial incentives that may influence pediatric vaccination practices. He outlines concerns about reimbursement structures, insurance policies, and COVID-era mandates that critics say altered medical decision-making and weakened informed consent. Paxton also weighs in on federal liability protections for vaccine manufacturers, hospital requirements, and the ongoing legal battles over parental rights in healthcare decisions.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

The rule of law in America and the ability to have these attorneys general, the general over all the attorneys of the state, is what a concept, right? Like the biggest badass attorney in the state, well, we have one here in Texas, and he's actually investigating the incentives that are going to doctors to force vaccinate, especially the state like this. You have a right to opt out, but what if your doctor isn't allowing you that right? What right do they have? And if they're doing it just to make more money, does that seem ethical? Well, it doesn't to Attorney General Ken Paxton here in Texas. Take a look at this. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is launching a statewide investigation into alleged financial incentives linked to childhood vaccine recommendations. A new investigation targeting what he calls a multi-level, multi-industry scheme by Big Pharma and Big Insurance to financial. pressure doctors into pushing childhood vaccines.

Paxton's office issued more than 20 civil investigative demands to large providers, including United Health Care and Pfizer. According to Paxton's office, the current framework has Texas kids receiving more than 70 shots from birth to age 18 as a condition to continue receiving medical care from many pediatric practices. His office also alleges that some families are being expelled from clinics or even denied treatment. based on vaccination status, while doctors pay and even employment may depend on how many vaccines they administer. The AG says this is all to protect Texas children and bring transparency to the medical care system. Here's the actual announcement came out from Attorney General Ken Paxton's office.

Attorney General Ken Paxton launches wide sweeping investigation into unlawful financial incentives related to childhood vaccine recommendations. Just a couple of excerpts. Attorney General Ken Paxton opened a landmark investigation into the multi-level, multi-industry scheme that has illegally incentivized medical providers to recommend childhood vaccines that are not proven to be safe or necessary. The wide-sweeping investigation will analyze an incentivization framework that has historically forced Texas kids to receive over 70 shots from birth to age 18 in order to continue receiving medical care. It goes on to say, I will ensure that big pharma and big insurance don't bribe medical providers to pressure parents to jab their kids with vaccines they feel aren't safe or necessary, said Attorney General

Paxton, I will not tolerate a carrot and stick approach to health care recommendations. Any provider or entity whose medical guidance is fueled by financial incentives from an insurance company, Big Pharma, or otherwise, will be exposed. I'll bet you're all dreaming that this was your attorney general. It happens to be my attorney general here in the state of Texas. It is my honor and pleasure to be joined by him now. Attorney General Ken Paxson, thank you for taking the time today. Yeah, thanks for having me out.

I really appreciate it. So, you know, what is this about, are you anti-vaccine? I'm sure that's what they say. This is an anti-vaccine attack. What really is motivating this investigation? No, I had vaccines. My children had some vaccines. This is about choice.

One of the things that we all get to see during COVID is this idea that we don't have a choice. The government is going to make us lose our job or our. our business, it's going to remove our job, there's social pressure. This should ultimately be a decision by an individual or a parent for those children to make the best decision that they believe is right for their children or for them, not some government any that doesn't have the right incentives or some business deciding what's going into your body that could permanently affect you. So that's what this is about.

This is about individual choice. I don't care if people get vaccines. If they should, they should, but it should be up to them. I completely agree. It's the heart of what our nonprofits called the informed consent action network, meaning informed consent is, you know, the rule of, it should be the rule of law all across a free country like the United States of America. What inspires you to get involved in something like this?

Is it that parents come out directly to you? Do you hear stories? Obviously, I've been reporting a lot, pediatricians saying, I get incentivized by insurance. And we are being told AAP, others tell pediatricians kick people out of your office if they won't get all of the vaccines. Are you hearing similar stories and where those stories coming from? Yeah, I have a lot of days. One is I have children. I have four children.

My own have six grandchildren. And I also hear these stories. And that's why we're investigating these 20 different companies because the decisions shouldn't be forced on us for profit motives. We ought to be given all the information and a choice. not be forced by getting kicked out of plans or have something else negative happen to you or your kids. This ought to be about individuals again, making their own choices and the best interest. And they're also, I mean, we have all the right incentives to make the best decision for ourselves. These companies don't have that incentive. They have one incentive, which is to make money.

Right. You know, I had a chance to meet with you in the middle of COVID. We brought in some of our information on the COVID vaccine. It was a great meeting. One of the things that I found interesting was sort of the Attorney General's position and whether you have, I don't know if the term is standing, but could you actually bring a case? Like what is the, you know, there's only certain parameters with which an Attorney General can work.

Can you explain some of the difficulty of your position? You can't just bring any willy-nilly lawsuit you want on behalf of Texas. What are the elements that have to be in place for it to be of the interest that sits within your scope of reach? Well, this is a really challenging area, because the federal preemption for vaccine. So as long as it gets called the vaccine,

supposedly, you know, there's no liability. So you can produce any kind of vaccine with any kind of result, good, bad, destructive, and you're protected by federal law. Well, I don't buy that for state law. We have our own state laws that should stop any business from lying to consumers. And then when consumers rely on those lies,

they end up hurting themselves and there are damages. So in our case, we thought Pfizer lied to my constituents that the vaccine was not 95% effective. We believe it's less than 1% effective. So we sued them. And there was an argument, and we're still fighting this, that we don't have standing because we were preempted by the federal law over vaccines. We are making the argument, yeah, that law may apply to federal lawsuits, but it should not preempt states from protecting their citizens from deceptive trade practices, which I believe some of these manufacturers and insurance companies. companies are promoting. So your position is no matter what the federal law says is the federal government is allowed,

not allowed to poison Texas citizens. Is that essentially, you know, to put you in harm's way simply because they have some overarching perspective of the law? Yeah, you can't, you still can't, yeah, they can be protected federally from any laws. But we have state courts to protect and we have state laws that are different. I mean, the federal government, the state government are different. were created and they formed the federal government. We retain the powers that we didn't explicitly give the federal government. And this is one of them. If you come and lie to our consumers about

the benefits of something that is actually not beneficial and may be harmful, then you should be held liable. That's the only way we're going to be able to protect our citizens. Otherwise, they can get away with literally get away with murder, killing our kids and harming our kids and there's nothing that can be done. That doesn't seem right. And I don't think it's the law. I agree with you. It's going to be really fascinating to watch you go through this. And there's a lot of attorney generals across the country that seem to be speaking up now. COVID really seemed to awaken the beast, at least on the conservative side of politics. I never really thought of an attorney general as being politically oriented necessarily.

But where did, you know, for you personally, was COVID the first time you started bringing cases on, you know, or thinking about vaccines in a different way? Did that affect you in how you saw that roll out? Or is this something that's always been on your radar? No, I mean, I always wondered about it because it seems like there was an increasing number of vaccines that were required. And I've always wondered about, you know, their effectiveness. And it seemed like it was hard to know with the right thing to do with. So I always struggled with this as a parent. And so we made individual decisions about that.

But I think it was COVID that really sort of heightened my interest because it made no sense to me that we were being threatened. I mean, why should you care if I get the vaccine? If you're protected, if the vaccine is so effective to protect you, why should you care if I get it? And that really created suspicion on my part. When, what is the relationship between an attorney general and the governor? Do you have to, do you work on your own or does everything sort of get run up the ladder?

Are you cool with me bringing this case? What is, is that, are there rules to that and how you have to work? As on the state, there are a few states, I think, six or seven that the governor appoints the attorney general. So the attorney general answers to the governor is not independent. In Texas, I'm elected by the voters. I certainly work with the governor. I work with a lot of statewide officials, and it's important to me what they think. But in the end, I answer to the voters first and to other people second.

So I obviously have clients that I have to listen to. But a lot of these cases are Texas cases, and I'm the lawyer and I'm the client. And so that involves me listening to the voters and paying attention to what they want first and foremost. You also have a case on something we've talked a lot about on this show, which I think is super important. These hospitals that won't, for instance, give an organ donation or go through the organ donor process unless someone gets a vaccine. Here's the headline on that. Attorney General Ken Paxson warns Houston Methodist Hospital of alleged COVID-19 vaccine mandates for organ transplant patients. Tell me a little bit about how you got into this case and where that's at here in the state of Texas.

Yeah, so we are still looking at that. We're still looking at other hospitals. We were, you know, again, I was informed by just commonly get informed by constituents that just are experiencing some problem like this. And so we're trying to understand, are they really preventing people from like having life-saving treatment because they won't get a vaccine that's unproven and potentially risky? So that's what we're trying to find out because we think that is. unconscionable and wrong and if we discover that that is true we are going to do our best to stop it there's another topic we've covered earlier in the show which is the idea of transgender care Robert Kennedy Jr. and President Trump HHS has really come out now and

discussed that they are no longer supporting any use of sex reassignment or gender transitioning care for minors I think everyone would say as an adult this is a free country, but when it comes to children, you've gotten involved and weighed in on that. Here's that headline. Attorney General Ken Paxton, Sue's doctor for illegally providing harmful gender transition treatments to nearly two dozen Texas children. I'm curious because this seems to dance a bit of a fine line, Ken. I know that you are a huge advocate for parental rights. Our right to choose is a huge part of this. This seems to turn that on its head a little bit. If a parent wants to go in and get gender affirming care in the state of Texas,

there's laws been passed and say that's not allowed. How do you look at that? How do you navigate that sort of fine line? Well, first of all, I applaud the president, Robert of Kennedy, for doing this. We'd see the Biden administration several times over issues like this, where they were trying to force this down the state of Texas throat and other states as well. So we've been involved in this fight. So the difficulty with this and why I think it's different is, you know, when you transition a child, first of all, they are not mentally able to make the right decisions because their brains are not fully developed.

And to do something this permanent, we don't let minors do certain things. We don't let them sign contracts. We don't let them, we don't let them do a lot of, we wouldn't let them go into the military. We don't let them do a lot of different things until they're of age, which we consider 18 in most states. And there's a reason. They're not fully able to make good decisions because they're brains aren't fully developed. And these are decisions. Once you've made these alterations, whether it's chemically or through some type of, you know, physical surgery, you've affected somebody's life forever and there's no going back. It seems like this is one of those things where a parent should not be allowed to do this until the kid can make his own, the child can

make his own decision when he's more, you know, developed mentally. Do you feel like, I mean, you know, as being, you know, Attorney General in the middle of COVID. I mean, in this, we live in what seems like one of the most outrageous times, certainly in my experience of being alive in this country, where you had gender affirming care, you have men and women's sports, you have forced vaccination of children, but it all seems to have pharma in the background of it in some way. We have issues of SSRIs and school shootings and all.

all of this, what has it been like to be an attorney general in the middle of that? And do you feel like you are fighting or somehow involved with a battle against pharma more than you imagined you would when you started this job? Oh, absolutely, because I'm very pro-business. I have no problem with profit motive as long as it isn't deceptive and harmful to people. In this case, I mean, it's shocking to me that COVID, the way it was managed was so just insane. And so sort of controlling and maybe almost totalitarian from both a federal level, a state level, and a local level. And I'm not just talking about Texas. I'm talking about the whole country.

Decisions were being made by government that were affecting our everyday lives in all kinds of ways. And there were all these unanswered questions that I had to deal with that had never been, there's no precedent. So we were having to adjust every single day to try to. to figure out how to protect people from mostly the government who is supposed to protect us. And now in many of these decisions, whether there's COVID or transitioning or other issues like that, it feels like the government is doing harm to us. And I'm in a position of kind of being in between trying to protect people from the government. When you look forward at the future of Texas, when you look at the future of the United States

of America that's being challenged by these issues, do you look beyond our borders? I mean, you're just inside a state. Are you looking at the World Economic Forum, the WHO, are you aware of this sort of more global push for a lot of these things that seem to be affecting our government, especially under the previous administration? Is that in your mindset as you look at how you govern or work through laws here in Texas? Oh, absolutely. I'm looking at the origin of some of this stuff, and it is kind of a globalist mentality

that doesn't seek to benefit the people of this country. It's a more of a, you know, collectivist type thing where, you know, we don't want you in America to be, you know, prospering when nobody else is prospering or when other people are not prospering is enough. We're going to make this all fair. We're going to take from you because it's not fair that you have more. Well, I don't buy into that mentality. We have our own country.

We have our own laws. We have our own freedoms. And we need to protect our Constitution. I don't care about the globalist mentality of control. What I care about is the Constitution, the freedom that has been granted to us. by that document, which really is from God, not from the government, is really important for this country because it's such a great experiment that has worked so well. And even if you hate the country, it's hard to dispute the results, which are really remarkable. And it has created the greatest free country in the history of the world that provides more opportunity to any place in the history of the world.

Do you think if citizens we should be concerned right now that we could lose that freedom? I mean, I tend to talk a lot about it on my show. Do you think we're just overreacting that, you know, for those of us that are like, it really felt like we were about to lose free speech, we did in the middle of COVID? You know, where do you think we are at in America? Is our Constitution sound enough to just hold off that sort of global push? Or do citizens need to get more involved right now? What is your sort of, you know, statement to people in this country and especially in states like Texas that are really standing?

I've always stood for sovereignty and, you know, let your, you know, live and let live, if you will. Well, I don't remember who quoted who the quote was from, but, you know, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. And I think that's true today, just as it was 100 years ago or 200 years ago. If we don't watch out, they will, there are people that want to control us. They want to control the wealth. They want to control your life, your health care. There are just people, look at China at Xi Jinping. He wants to control everything.

He thinks that he is deserving of this power. And that's not uncommon. People that are in power tend to view themselves as deserving that power and the people and the rest of us are just not as worthy and so That's not the view of our country. It's a bottom-up approach where everyone's worthy everyone has a vote But you better pay attention most power has to be taken away by force Whether it's with a rock back in the old days, bow and arrow or you know a bazooker or a tank, but with our country You don't have to do that you just go vote You stay involved, you stay engaged, you stay educated, and you get to control the power by voting and by being educated about what the truth is. But you have to work at that, and the great thing is it's nothing like what every other country in the world used to have to go through from the beginning of time, which is you had to go to war to take people out.

We don't have to do that. And so there is a responsibility behind that, and people need to pay attention, or we will be back to that same type of force mentality, which is what you have in countries like China and Russia and others. You seem to still have faith in our voting system, in our political system. A lot of people have given up. They're like, oh, it's rigged, everything's rigged. What do you say to those people? I say they're partly right. I think it is rigged in many states.

I think, you know, I have fought voter fraud in this state regularly, and it does happen. Other states that don't have any real protections, there's no photo ID. They have mail-in ballot fraud every day. And they cheat. And I think that's something that's, you know, I'm running for U.S. Senate. One of the things I care about very greatly is requiring that we have photo ID and that we have protections on mail-in ballots so that people can't cheat. Because if you can cheat in California, you're affecting my elections. You're affecting my freedom.

You shouldn't be able to cheat in any state, at least at the federal level. And so it's very important that we protect those elections because nothing else matters. If our vote doesn't matter because they're cheating in these states or they're cheating in my state, we are in trouble because we don't actually control any of these issues. Lastly, you said you have children, you've got grandchildren. Congratulations on that for your beautiful, healthy family. When you think about them, are you hopeful for the future? Look, I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't hopeful. I still believe that we are the greatest country that has ever been created.

And we have a responsibility. Yeah, there's assault from outside and inside, from global leaders all over the world, want to take us down. and they want to control us. And there are people inside this country that don't believe in that. They think that they're elitist and they think they can better tell us. It's like this whole mandate on vaccines. Those are elitists that think that they can tell us when the reality is it has been assumed

from the beginning of this country that it's the individual that has that responsibility and that they have their best interests in mind rather than some government leader telling me what I need to do. And I understand we have to have laws and all of that, and I believe in the rule of law, but in the end, it should be based on voting, not a few members of an oligarchy in Washington, D.C. or in a, you know, foreign country like Brussels that tell us what to do. You know, I know I said it was my last question, but you triggered something when you said, you know, that it'd be legal as an attorney general in a state like Texas. Should we ever have an experience like we had during COVID, being forced to wear masks, being forced to lock down, turning our neighbors in these things. What do you recommend to a citizen?

You know, we know some of our founding fathers said you should reject laws that, you know, go against your rights. How do we determine that? How do we know when there's a moment we would just say, oh, hell no, I do not believe that is a just law. What is our position as citizens in complicated situations like there? Is there a way to inspire how you should think about your place in those moments? Yeah, you know, what I've always done is I go back to the Constitution first.

It's such a genius document. And these fundamental rights, what I love about the Declaration of Independence is that it sets out the standard, which is these are inalienable rights given to us not by any government leader. They don't control us in this country. It's one of the, there's no other document like that. And if our government oversteps it spells, according to the Declaration of Independence, we have a right to overthrow that government. The government needs to answer to us.

And so whenever you start thinking about the government telling you what to do, you need to balance it between what the Constitution allows them to do versus what they're actually doing. And if they are overstepping their constitutional role and they're exerting too much power at the executive branch or in Congress or a judiciary, then we need to change. We need to fight back or we will lose our freedoms. We will be controlled by other people and we will lose the ability to make our own decisions. And that's not the place I want to live.

Well, Ken, you are making Texas a great place to live. You are a critical part of it. I am so thankful for the work that you do here. It's one of the reasons I left California and moved to Texas. Godspeed to your continued efforts and your journey. Thank you for watching out for the children of this state. And really thank you for representing being

beacon of light and hope for sovereignty, for the right to choose, for the right to free speech. You truly are a spectacular light in this country, which I agree with you is the greatest country in the world. So I want to thank you for taking the time today to share your thoughts on these really important subjects right now. Well, thank you for having me on and thank you for enlightening people because this is the type of information that's crucial to making the right kinds of decisions for our families and for our future. Absolutely. Take care. I look forward to having you on the show in the future. Thank you.

All right, thank you.