Fact-Checking the Liam Neeson-Narrated Anti-Vax Documentary
The false and misleading narratives in Plague of Corruption revisited.
On Thursday, Important Context revealed that actor Liam Neeson, a longtime Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, narrated a recent anti-vaccine documentary celebrating the rise of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., whose tenure has seen rising deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases.
As we reported, the pro-Kennedy film, Plague of Corruption: 80 Years of Pharmaceutical Corruption Exposed, is overstuffed with false narratives related to vaccines and features interviews with fringe figures, including the secretary himself.
Our story, however, only scratched the surface in terms of the misinformation promoted in the film. Now, we have broken down, in detail, more of the various misleading claims promoted in the film.
“There is no liability for vaccine makers”
Central to Plague’s conspiratorial narrative is a claim that vaccine manufacturers are immune from liability for the harm caused by their products.
Kennedy confidently declares that the “companies have no incentive to make a safer vaccine because they cannot be sued.” He asserts that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, passed in 1986, gave manufacturers blanket liability immunity “no matter how grievous your injury is, no matter how toxic the product, no matter how negligent the company.”
Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California San Francisco College of the Law and leading expert in vaccine law, explained that his assertion is false.
“Mr. Kennedy knows that the Vaccine Act does not give manufacturers absolute immunity,” Reiss told Important Context. “You can sue manufacturers for a range of claims—including negligence—after going through vaccine court. Mr. Kennedy has made money off litigation against Merck over their Gardasil (HPV) vaccine, so when he says there is absolute immunity, he is lying and he knows that.”
The case of Alexis Lorenze
Throughout its 90-ish-minute runtime, Plague bombards the viewer with graphic images of blood clots, animal experimentation, and alleged vaccine injuries.
The film features an interview with Alexis Lorenze, whose story of supposed vaccine injury went viral on TikTok in 2024. Lorenze claims that she had a severe allergic reaction to vaccines administered to her in the hospital, which worsened her Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria (PNH), a rare blood disorder. She is shown with severe swelling, bruising, and pain, claiming her symptoms began 10 minutes after receiving the shots.
Although vaccines can contribute to a PNH flare up, Lorenze also tested positive for parvovirus B19, which was a more likely cause of her severe symptoms, according to Science Feedback.
Experiments on orphans
One of the more visceral narratives presented in Plague centers on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Kennedy, who wrote a conspiratorial book about Fauci, accuses the scientist of greenlighting unethical experiments on Black and Latino orphans during the 1980s AIDS crisis. He calls the drug trials “the most barbaric, brutal experiments that you can possibly imagine” and claims Fauci “just got rid of all the guardians and let those companies do whatever they wanted to those children.”
“He should be in prison for what he did to those babies and those little kids,” Kennedy says.
Fauci did oversee the funding of clinical trials on HIV positive children—some of whom were in foster care—between the late 1980s and 2005. Over 80 percent were conducted by the NIH, not pharmaceutical companies. There were recordkeeping and other issues with the studies, but an independent review found that safety protocols were followed and no children died as a result of the treatments.
The children, however, were incredibly sick and experimental drugs were their only option for what was a near-universally fatal illness. Kennedy based his claims on a 2004 BBC documentary that the broadcaster itself apologized for, admitting it was biased toward the views of AIDS denialists.
Military “Experimentation”
Another misleading narrative in Plague surrounds the military’s COVID vaccine requirement implemented under President Biden. That suggests that servicemembers were illegally used as test subjects for un-approved, experimental COVID vaccines.
Again, the reality is starkly different. By the time the mandate order was issued in August 2021, the FDA had fully approved the Pfizer vaccines.
In Plague, Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Sam Shoemate (Ret.) claims that the FDA-approved, and Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) versions of those shots were used interchangeably. This is significant, Shoemate explains, because the president is the only person who can waive a servicemembers’ informed consent for a non-FDA approved treatment under a national security purview, which Biden did not do.
“These were not harmless mistakes,” Neeson narrates.
Yet, the FDA-approved and EUA vaccines had the same formulation.
Plague suggests that the result of the ‘experimentation’ was an increase in certain chronic conditions, including cancer and miscarriage, among servicemembers. The apparent increase, however, was attributed to underreporting in the Defense Medical Surveillance System in 2016–2020. The mRNA shots are not linked to cancer or miscarriage.