ICAN Attorney Aaron Siri Rebuts NY Times “Hit Piece” Through Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, Media Appearances

The Informed Consent Action Network’s (ICAN) lead attorney, Aaron Siri, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed and appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show to counter the article published in the New York Times two weeks ago. The NY Times wrote an article titled, “RFK Jr.’s Lawyer Has Asked the FDA to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine.”

Siri has spent the last two weeks responding to the criticisms and allegations written in the NY Times article and subsequent media coverage. He also appeared on The HighWire, News Nation, and Fox News. In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Siri wrote: “Reports recently published in the New York Times and elsewhere mischaracterize the contents of three petitions my firm filed with the Food and Drug Administration from 2020-22 on behalf of a client, Informed Consent Action Network.”

The petition, filed in 2022, refers to one of six licensed polio vaccines in the United States – a vaccine marketed as IPOL. Siri said the NY Times mischaracterized the petition by referring to the IPOL vaccine, approved by the FDA in 1990, as “the polio vaccine” when it is only one of six.

Siri said the authors of the NY Times “hit piece” either know they are lying, or they are not fit to be journalists at a high school newspaper. He said they neglected to report on the petition’s reasoning and the request’s full context. The petition requests the FDA to “withdraw or suspend the approval for IPOL for infants, toddlers, and children until a properly controlled and properly powered double-blind trial of sufficient duration is conducted to assess the safety of this product.” The reasoning for the petition is that the IPOL vaccine relied upon a new technology at the time it was licensed and, further, it was licensed based on safety data collected for only three days and there was no control group.

Siri has vehemently denounced the “newspaper of record” for failing to tell the whole story about the substance of the petition and the source of the petition. He said the headline should have focused on a vaccine being injected into children which was only safety tested for three days.  Furthermore, the petition only called for the withdrawal of IPOL for infants, toddlers, and children until a proper safety trial is conducted. In the meantime, there are 5 other licensed vaccines for polio in the United States.

In his WSJ op-ed, Siri wrote “The mainstream media is deliberately stoking fear and outrage about vaccines in an attempt to derail Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services.” Siri clarified that he is a lawyer for RFK Jr. and other clients, including ICAN. Kennedy was not involved in the petition to revoke the approval of the IPOL vaccine for children, and, according to Siri, was completely unaware of the petition.

In addition to Siri’s multiple media appearances and WSJ op-ed, he also wrote a lengthy 10-part thread on X responding to the claims made in the NY Times article. Siri wrote that ICAN allowed HHS and its sub-agencies the opportunity to provide adequate safety data for IPOL before filing the petition. “ICAN filed FOIA requests with FDA for the trial reports to support the safety of IPOL and the reports provided were plainly deficient to support safety,” Siri wrote. “ICAN also separately carefully evaluated and published regarding the available safety data.”

“In contrast, the NYT hit piece does not cite any actual data or studies, just anecdotes and unsupported assertions,” Siri continued. “The hit piece’s only response regarding the plainly deficient trial to license IPOL (which again was a novel product, using effectively cancerous cells to grow the virus), does not come from FDA, but rather from a Sanofi representative, the company that makes and profits from selling this product.”

The Sanofi representative claimed the FDA relied upon more data before approving and licensing the product. Siri said that if that is true, the licensure documents from the FDA should have been updated to reflect additional data beyond the pre-licensure three-day safety trial.

Siri added, “In fact, ICAN already demanded via FOIA that the FDA produce ‘A copy of the report for each clinical trial relied upon by the FDA when approving IPOL in 1990’ and the documents provided in response by FDA make plain ICAN’s petition and safety concern are more than valid, as laid out in ICAN’s petition for the world to read. But the NYT reporters writing the hit piece plainly do not care about truth and accuracy.”

The NY Times included a quote from “The Godfather of Vaccines” Stanley Plotkin, who made a statement about Siri. “I find him laughable in many ways — except, of course, that he’s a danger to public health,” Plotkin said. Siri responded, “Plotkin wasn’t laughing when I deposed him for 9 hours, which he described as ‘a traumatic experience’ that left him ‘exhausted’ and ‘bloody.’” Siri’s lengthy deposition of Plotkin is available to watch on The HighWire and is segmented into five parts.

Siri, when appearing on The HighWire, also noted that Dr. Plotkin referred to other data that supports the safety of certain vaccines during his deposition with Siri. Siri issued a subpoena to ask for that information, and Dr. Plotkin filed a separate lawsuit to “quash that subpoena.”

Siri also took issue with the NY Times statement that he “subjected” Dr. Stanley Plotkin and Dr. Kathryn Edwards to depositions when they both volunteered to be experts in the respective cases. These leading vaccine experts made many admissions during their testimonies that counter the public’s understanding of the safety testing of vaccines.

Dr. Edwards was also quoted in the NY Times as saying “You’re taking the leaders in vaccinology, the people that have spent their whole lives studying these vaccines and seeing their impact, you’re marginalizing and making them look like they are prostitutes of pharma.”

When Del Bigtree asked Siri what he thought of the quote, Siri directed people to watch the first two hours of Dr. Plotkin’s and Dr. Edwards’ depositions to see if the facts provided evidence that they are “prostitutes of pharma.” “I didn’t make them take money from pharma,” Siri said. “I didn’t make them be advisors. I didn’t make them be consultants. I didn’t make them sit on advisory boards.”

A clip of Siri’s deposition of Dr. Edwards has gone viral where Siri asks if the clinical trials relied upon to license vaccines were designed to rule out that the vaccine causes autism. Dr. Edwards responded: “No. You badgered me into answering the question the way you want me to, but I think that that’s probably the answer.”