A new documentary from producers Mikki Willis and Texans for Vaccine Choice provides insight into the all-too-often overlooked world of injuries caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.
“Follow the Silenced,” winner of best film at the 2025 Santa Monica International Film Festival, shares the heartbreaking stories of several Americans who took the vaccine and suffered life-changing consequences.
Some individuals were promised changes from the government itself that never came into fruition, while others were deplatformed from social media merely for sharing their stories.
Brianne Dressen, a mother of two young children and a former preschool teacher, left her job after falling extremely sick during a COVID-19 vaccine trial she participated in.
Dressen went on to co-found React19, a nonprofit organization that began as a small community of people like her who felt marginalized and silenced by health professionals after their experience with the vaccine.
Her organization even took part in behind-the-scenes conversations with Peter Marks, the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, as Dressen explains in the film, her group was consistently looked over by health professionals. Instead of receiving a vaccine-related injury diagnosis, many of the individuals were improperly diagnosed with anxiety disorders.
The documentary also highlights information that potentially implicates the federal government in suppressing the extent of vaccine injuries.
Clips from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous interview with Joe Rogan, which are also shown in the film, appear to confirm some of those suspicions.
“Follow the Silenced” features figures such as United States Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a pivotal figure in legitimizing the voices of those with vaccine injuries.
After premiering for the first time in Texas on Thursday night at the Bob Bullock Museum IMAX Theatre, several individuals featured in the film sat down for a panel discussion moderated by podcaster and evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein.
On the panel were Dressen, React19 Co-Founder Joel Wallskog, and Doug Cameron, an Idaho rancher who became paralyzed from the waist down after taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
Houston’s Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, while not featured in the film, was included on the panel. Bowden gained national attention for helping treat COVID-19 cases using monoclonal antibodies, but was eventually suspended from Houston Methodist Hospital and has been fighting to retain her medical license.
While all members of the panel agreed that more action was needed to stand up for vaccine-injured individuals, Bowden and Weinstein disagreed on how exactly to get there.
“How does one deal with an atrocity? Do you become strategic in order to reduce the chances that the atrocity will continue? Do you say that atrocities are atrocities, and you should shout at the top of your lungs? I don’t know about either one of these,” said Weinstein.
“Maybe going [to] guns at this moment against the people that are trying to do it isn’t the ideal strategy,” he added.
“I respectfully disagree,” replied Bowden.
While Dressen and Cameron have both been affected directly by the vaccine, they encouraged audience members to focus on the children hurt by it.
Dressen shared that one individual featured in the film, 16-year-old Maddie, could not make the showing on Thursday. She is currently living in a Ronald McDonald House in Florida with her mom, hundreds of miles away from her home in Ohio.
The medical care “is something that she could be getting in Ohio, and she can’t get it there because all of Ohio’s children’s clinics and the hospitals are controlled by the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, which was the main place where the Pfizer clinical trial rolled out,” said Dressen.
According to the film, the federal government has compensated only 30 COVID vaccine injury claims—a rejection rate of nearly 98 percent. React19, meanwhile, has helped compensate 165 vaccine-injured individuals.
Rebecca Hardy, president of Texans for Vaccine Choice, told Texas Scorecard that “Follow the Silenced” premiered in Austin to “a sold-out crowd of over 300.”
“As Executive Producers of this impactful documentary, Texans For Vaccine Choice is truly honored to share this film with our fellow Texans,” said Hardy. “Follow the Silenced demonstrates the love humanity is capable of in the face of unimaginable corruption by telling the stories of brave individuals who suffered physical and emotional pain and loss due to the COVID vaccines. Their fight to be heard and believed is a powerful testimony to the human spirit.”
You can watch “Follow the Silenced” here.
