Follow the Silenced

The Hidden Story of the Human Cost of Censorship

As the full title of the new documentary, Follow the Silenced: The Hidden Story of the Human Cost of Censorship, makes clear, one of the egregious things that the government and health care providers routinely do to the vaccine-injured is to gaslight them. Fresh from the 2025 Santa Monica Film Festival, where it received “Best of Festival” and “Best Director” awards, Follow the Silenced powerfully conveys this double whammy, showing that censorship of vaccine injury stories is strategic and intentional.

Brianne Dressen humbly provides the film’s moral compass. Through moving pre- and post-injury video footage, the movie documents her journey from rock climber, involved wife and mom, and founder of a preschool to severely injured clinical trial volunteer who gradually comes to realize that medical, corporate, and regulatory entities are purposely giving her the runaround. Because, by her own admission, she is “stubborn,” we see how she persists through cringe-inducing meetings with the FDA’s Peter Marks and eventually founds the non-profit REACT19 to offer financial, physical, and emotional support to individuals suffering from long-term Covid-19 vaccine injuries. “We’re doing the government’s job with no money and a lot of power against us,” she wryly comments.

For some viewers, individuals featured in the film will be familiar faces—whether from speeches at the January 2022 “Defeat the Mandates” event in Washington, the hearings held by Senator Ron Johnson, or the Children’s Health Defense book, Profiles of the Vaccine-Injured. Their collage of testimonials steadily conveys critical themes such as the unprecedented symptoms caused by the injections (“like acid going up and down in my veins”), the intense victim-blaming (“it’s all in your head”), the professional and corporate cowardice (“we toe the company line”), and the strenuous top-down efforts to keep stories of vaccine injury (censored as “false information”) off of social media and out of public view.

One anecdote describes the Stanford-based Virality Project, an initiative to “detect, analyze, and respond to incidents of COVID-19 vaccine disinformation across online ecosystems”—providing a chilling example of the growing interoperability of IT systems and the “data beast’s” expanding reach.

Follow the Silenced does not venture into the territory covered at Bailiwick News by Katherine Watt, who has meticulously described the clever legal infrastructure that makes it possible for the military-medical-industrial complex to injure, kill, and gaslight with impunity; as Watt observes, “no one can be found in legal violation of a rule they were never required to comply with, nor can anyone be found to have failed to meet an evidentiary standard they were never required to meet.” It is unclear whether those interviewed in the film have grappled with the intentionality of the Great Poisoning, which makes the gaslighting that much more tragic.

Nevertheless, the combined impact of their stories makes for compelling and important viewing. As Dressen resolutely states, “Our lives depend on the truth coming out.”