‘Follow the Silenced’: COVID-19 and a Counterculture of Truth

In part 2 of this documentary review, we see how the film gives voice to Americans who were injured by the COVID-19 vaccine.

An immunization nurse carries a tray with a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at Borinquen Health Care Center on May 29, 2025 in Miami, Florida. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he will no longer recommend that healthy children and pregnant people get COVID-19 shots. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The first of this two-part review of documentary “Follow the Silenced” (FTS) reveals how Big Pharma and health agencies together silenced diseased or dying COVID-19 vaccine-injured Americans. The second part follows how those silenced finally made themselves heard.

One of the film’s narrators says that that if viewers want to know what’s happening and why, “Follow the money.” He clarifies this: If you want to know the truth, “Look at who’s being silenced.”

Center for Popular Democracy staged a street-theater simulation of a heist outside Pfizer's New York headquarters on April 25, 2022 to call for equitable global access to coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines and treatments. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

FTS shows that truth. The vaccine-injured painstakingly connect in many ways: phone, messaging apps, video calls, and in person. These connections help them give each other strength and support to eventually speak up as one.

The film features former clinical trial participants Brianne Dressen and Maddie de Garay, retired gastroenterologist Dr. Danice Hertz, among dozens of others. They offer each other firsthand empathy that their caring families couldn’t.

Dressen’s doctors “wanted nothing to do with” the Plasmapheresis and Intravenous Immunoglobin (IVIG) that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) specialists recommended for her. Dressen says that, although this treatment protocol is not a silver bullet, it’s helping her bounce back.

Dr. Avindra Nath’s NIH report confirmed that, while refined mRNA templates have now improved, the safety profile of newer vaccines are “not without side effects, including those that affect the nervous system.”

Admitting that vaccine-makers are legally protected from side effects, Nath called on the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Union, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and others to investigate, prevent, and treat vaccine-induced adverse events. Nath can’t advocate publicly for the vaccine-injured but cheers their determination to speak up. He adds that most adverse events are treatable if early intervention is secured.

Can one secure early intervention if the establishment keeps calling the vaccine-injured troublemakers liars and undermining their experience?

Cornered, vaccine-injured groups lobby Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) to mobilize public and media support. At a press conference he convened, Sen. Johnson championed informed consent before experimental vaccinations.

Sen. Lee facilitates meetings where the vaccine-injured can challenge Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials on their public narratives. Both senators face flak for nurturing allegedly conspiratorial groups that ply misinformation, yet they persist with their advocacy.

Help From the Health Establishment

Slowly, the vaccine-injured begin to understand the scale of unexplained spikes in critical illness. They’re helped by medical establishment insiders such as physician’s assistant Deborah Conrad and nurses Tammy Gleason and Jennifer Bridges.

In a tense three-minute sequence, a critical care physician chose to remain anonymous because she’s trying to protect her license from being punitively withdrawn. She did, however, challenge the FDA’s blinkered recording of adverse events.

Before and after photos of Lyndsey House, healthcare worker who was injured by the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Courtesy of Lyndsey House

Later, she says that contrary to President Joseph Biden’s assurances that the vaccinated would not get COVID-19, most of those who’d been fully vaccinated contracted the “Delta variant.”

The vaccine-injured discover that staff positions on the FDA and Big Pharma operate like revolving doors. One screen grab shows how senior pharma executives often end up with senior positions in the FDA.

A voiceover says, “Almost half of the FDA’s funding comes from Big Pharma so they pay to get a drug approved.” The degree of influence may be debatable, but it’s too substantial to be ignored. Vaccine-injured campaigners used the Freedom of Information Act route to extract vaccine data being hidden from the public. However, the FDA pleaded with courts for 55 to 75 years (recent ruling changed to just a few months) to compile and eventually release that data.

Whistleblowers within the health agencies do help. Their bosses, however, threaten punitive action if they continue advocating for these patients or covertly access databases to expose inexplicable spikes in critical illness. Heroically, many health professionals ignore these warnings at great risk to themselves.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Theresa Long, who holds a master’s degree in public health, flags anomalies in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) vaccine data. If 2020 is considered a baseline, 2021 showed nearly twice as many cases of acute pericarditis and pulmonary embolism; nervous system diseases were up tenfold.

At a roundtable he convenes, Mr. Johnson says, “Telling the truth in today’s cancel culture is not necessarily easy.” Highlighting DMED data anomalies, he adds, “The [Department of Defense], the Biden administration is on notice; they must preserve these records and this must be investigated.”

A narrator adds that less than 24 hours later, the DMED system shut down, preventing further access; a week later figures had been fudged to erase the 2021 spike.

Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports for all vaccines that had hovered around 30,000 for three decades, stood at over 700,000 by the end of 2021.

Rushed Science

FTS shows Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services, inviting the vaccine-injured to speak at a rally in Washington, where they launched React 19, a new, publicly sponsored nation-wide network of doctors and clinics to recognize and treat vaccine injuries. Dressen says, React 19 has “no corporate donors. Just ordinary people. … We’re doing the government’s job with no money and a lot of power against us.”

According to the WHO Global Vaccine Market Report, COVID-19 vaccines dominate ($20 billion, 27 percent share across all vaccines) at over twice the value of the next vaccine cluster.

By 2023, on the back of WHO-enabled global rollouts, thanks to the likes of Pfizer and Moderna, the mRNA segment alone accounted for 32.3 percent of the entire vaccine market. That’s how big the stakes are and just how far Big Pharma may go as future variants emerge.

An immunization nurse carries a tray with a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at Borinquen Health Care Center on May 29, 2025 in Miami, Florida. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he will no longer recommend that healthy children and pregnant people get COVID-19 shots. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

For all its flaws, it’s a tribute to America’s democracy and relative transparency that Team FTS managed to expose vaccine-induced harm. It’s harder to replicate such exposés in totalitarian states such as China. Other filmmakers can use FTS as a model to expose global-scale cover-ups in other democracies.

Dressen says, “It’s hard to tell our stories, but we’re going to fight, and we’re going to stand for truth. Our lives depend on the truth coming out.”

Is there hope? First, the FDA’s asking vaccine-makers to transparently elaborate on vaccine risks. Second, the NIH is revisiting handling of adverse events. Third, clinical neuroscientists are requesting comprehensive safety evaluations of mRNA vaccines. Finally, social media chiefs are regretting their complicity. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg says he’d deferred to the administration on handling, but probably wouldn’t again, “knowing what I know now.”

The vaccine-injured clarify that they’re not against the science. They only want it to be robust enough before it finds its way into public health policy and practice. They aren’t against vaccination per se. They’re against enforced vaccination without sufficiently informed consent and without adequate support for those struck by adverse events, no matter how rare.

Their plea to lawmakers is to cut across party lines, eschew extreme positions (for or against vaccines per se) and to focus instead on adequate safeguards for all.

Before the closing credits, a text grimly announces that “as of April 2025, the federal government has compensated only 30 [COVID-19] vaccine injury claims [with] a staggering rejection rate of more than 98 percent. Though their voices may be suppressed, the truth will rise, unstoppable and unyielding, until justice prevails.”

"Follow the Silenced." Follow the Silenced

You can watch “Follow the Silenced“ on the FTS website, and YouTube. 

‘Follow the Silenced’ Documentary Director: Matthew Lynn Guthrie Running Time: 1 hour, 43 minutes Release Date: May 15, 2025 Rated: 4 stars out of 5

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