The short film “Follow the Silenced” was released in May 2025 by Mikki Willis, a supporter of multiple COVID conspiracy theories and the author of the prior “Plandemic” film series. I’d like to get straight to my core argument: I am in support of people experiencing vaccine side effects getting medical care to get as back to normal as possible, but the way this film goes about this task is so exceedingly disingenuous that I have to push back. Here are the ways that “Follow the silenced” got it wrong. The biggest mistake this movie makes is to de-emphasize how much support they have received from hardline antivaxxers, while having multiple speakers emphasize that they aren’t antivax. They advocate throughout to follow the money – but not their own money. This essay intends to cover the highlights of their arguments.

Sharing the story of senator Ron Johnson is the most dishonest thing that this documentary carries out. I have debunked his most popular COVID19 talking points previously here.

The inclusion of the story of Ernesto Ramirez aims to draw attention to vaccine myocarditis. Since this writer is a cardiologist and has personally seen patients with vaccine myocarditis, I want to open first with sharing my sympathies to the family and agreement that it was a tragic situation. However, based upon the limited publicly available information, a few key facts do not check out. The autopsy report said that Ernesto’s heart was considerably bigger than a normal size heart and also had myocarditis. By fundamental physiology, heart inflammation takes time to damage a heart enough to cause it to be swollen. This significantly raises my suspicions for a prior additional heart condition like a dilated cardiomyopathy that was already there. However, no news report in the mainstream media cares to discuss this train of thinking. This makes me believe the prior unknown heart condition may have contributed, but the media that supports Mikki Willis will only be satisfied with calling it vaccine myocarditis. While that doesn’t make it better or bring him back, his story would be much clearer to a medical professional if he had precise documentation of what happened in those last five days and whether or not he had treatment or hospitalization for myocarditis. My personal stance on vaccine myocarditis is what it has been: all patients with chest discomfort after COVID vaccine should have medical evaluation.

The discussion of VAERS as usual misses the point in that VAERS is supposed to be a system designed to detect initial signs of vaccine side effects. It was never designed to make causal inferences or prove links, and this caveat has been placed on the website year after year. Anybody can report to VAERS including both medical professionals and patients. Saying that VAERS failed to notice the side effects is like saying the screwdriver isn’t helpful in driving your nail into the board.

The discussion of transverse myelitis and how it relates to the COVID vaccine forgets that COVID disease racks up far more neurologic symptoms than the COVID vaccine does (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X24001270 and Infectious Disease Society of America). It also forgets that molecular mimicry is a mechanism of autoimmunity of many viral infections, not just COVID. In addition, the movie forgets that every viral infection starts in the way they describe. The choice of emotionally inflammatory words is deliberate and scientifically inaccurate. While we can share sympathy for the gentleman who experienced transverse myelitis, what would actually have been scientifically helpful is initiative in understanding why some people develop this problem and others do not. The movie makes little effort to do this. Interested neurologists would want to hear about MRI findings, autoimmune blood tests, and perhaps spinal fluid analyses- but there’s none of that.

The description of Maddie de Garay left out a lot of context, and that missing context can be reviewed here.

Including Jessica Rose as a main character in the story leaves out that she has so many inadequacies in her understanding of basic biostatistics .

The inclusion of the story of vaccine associated clots is disingenuous because multiple epidemiological studies have shown that SARS-COV2 is a virus that generates lots of blood clots, in the vaccinated way less than in the unvaccinated (citation Infectious Disease Society of America). The most common reason a COVID vaccinated patient has a blood clot after the COVID vaccine is because they had a prior clotting disorder or they are the rare person who has severe COVID disease. The failure of the authors to thoughtfully discuss this epidemiology is a big hole in their argument.

It is disingenuous to claim that “they lied” about COVID vaccine effectiveness as a general statement. While some politicians were wrong about COVID vaccine effectiveness, COVID vaccine effectiveness during the first few months of its rollout was actually very good. When SARS-COV2 became more infectious, the effectiveness came down and all the infectious disease professionals/ physicians were generally accurate in assessing this change. As is true with many respiratory viruses, the best protection comes from multiple modes of protection like adding a good mask to vaccines. The movie merely wishes to paint “they” in general terms saying that everybody was wrong with describing COVID vaccine effectiveness, which this assertion by the movie writers was objectively wrong.

Attempting to write of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” as a “pandemic of the vaccine injured” is cruel to the families who lost loved ones due to COVID and the side effects of the disease. There are objectively more people who died of COVID worldwide than who had a serious life altering vaccine side effect (see World in Data and compare to what was cited in the movie). Normally I would think the moral high ground to gain more sympathy for your cause should not involve being cruel to another segment of the population, but the movie authors disagree.

It is disingenuous to claim widespread diagnosis code manipulation when we have data from multiple authors now assessing the presence of myocarditis, neurological issues, and postural orthostatic tachycardia after COVID vaccine (see PubMed). To sincerely believe this claim would require that researchers from many different countries are being equally manipulated to falsify diagnosis codes in the same way.

Their assessment of the DMED data is mistaken.

In conclusion: there is so much good data about COVID vaccines now that the movie producer should not have had to commit logical errors, rhetorical sleight of hand, and outright misrepresentation to get his point across.