In the fall of 2021, the Food and Drug Administration told a federal judge in Fort Worth how long it would need to release the file behind its approval of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. The agency proposed 500 pages a month. At that rate, the plaintiffs calculated, the last page would arrive in 55 years.
The lawyer behind that calculation was Aaron Siri. On Jan. 6, 2022, Judge Mark T. Pittman ordered the agency to produce 12,000 pages by the end of the month and 55,000 pages every 30 days after that, calling the request "of paramount public importance." By the time the Pfizer and Moderna cases closed, the government had turned over more than 1.8 million pages. On Oct. 29, the court awarded Mr. Siri's side $612,728.55 in fees and $5,900.72 in costs. It cut his document-review hours by 40 percent and 60 percent for the two phases, and it declined to find that the agency had acted arbitrarily. [Confirm the figures against the order on PACER; they come from a FOIA Advisor summary.]
The case shows what Mr. Siri does: he finds records the government holds, asks for them in writing and sues when the answer is no.
Mr. Siri, 48, went to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, where, according to his firm's biography, he won four Prosser Prizes and was editor in chief of the Berkeley Business Law Journal. Before law he was an auditor at Arthur Andersen and a certified public accountant. He clerked in 2004 and 2005 for Aharon Barak, then chief justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, and spent more than five years as a litigator at Latham & Watkins. Rolling Stone, which profiled him in October, reported that he left Latham in 2011, at 34, to start his own practice. [Confirm with the firm the year Siri & Glimstad took its current name; no published source states it.]
His account of how he came to vaccine work, as he told it to Rolling Stone, begins with a case he inherited for a nurse who was disabled after a flu shot, his first look at the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In 2015 he took a pro bono challenge to New York City's preschool flu-shot rule. Del Bigtree, who founded the Informed Consent Action Network the next year, recruited him, and the network became the firm's major client.
The firm now lists 15 offices, from New York to Phoenix, and says it has more than 100 professionals. Its practice page runs from data breach and Telephone Consumer Protection Act class actions to asbestos and whistleblower work. But Mr. Siri told a Senate subcommittee in May 2025 that most of the firm's practice is vaccine work, and that it is "the largest vaccine practice in the country that does not represent pharmaceutical companies." When he presented to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory committee in December, his conflict disclosure listed 492 claims pending against the Department of Health and Human Services through the compensation program.
His docket has three parts.
The first is records. Besides the Pfizer and Moderna cases, the Informed Consent Action Network has filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act suits in the past two years, against the F.D.A., the C.D.C., the National Institutes of Health and, in one 2025 filing, the C.I.A. The group does not win them all. In October 2025, Judge Paul L. Friedman of Federal District Court in Washington denied its fee motion in a case against the C.D.C., finding that the agency had a reasonable basis to withhold employee names "because of documented harassment of public health workers."
The second is religious exemption. In 2023 the network announced that it would fund suits in every state without a religious exemption from school vaccine requirements. In West Virginia, Mr. Siri's team won a permanent injunction and a statewide class for Raleigh County parents in November 2025. The state Supreme Court of Appeals stayed it a week later and in October set the case for oral argument. In April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled the other way in a separate federal case, Perry v. Marteney. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote that the state's compulsory vaccination law is neutral and generally applicable; Judge Paul V. Niemeyer dissented.
The most consequential case is in New York. Three Amish schools were fined a combined $118,000 for not keeping immunization records on children whose parents object on religious grounds. The Second Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court sent the case back in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor, and on June 30 the Second Circuit affirmed again. On Sept. 28, Mr. Siri, Elizabeth Brehm and Walker Moller filed a petition for certiorari, with Lehotsky Cohn as counsel of record and First Liberty Institute. The petition, Miller v. McDonald, No. 26-438, asks the justices to apply Mahmoud, to consider whether New York's secular exemptions make its refusal of a religious one suspect and, in a third question, to reconsider Employment Division v. Smith. New York's response is due Dec. 2, after the court extended the original Nov. 2 deadline. [Re-check the docket before publication.]
The third part receives the least trade-press coverage: consumer litigation. In 2021 the firm sued GlaxoSmithKline in the Eastern District of New York over its "Big Bad Cough" advertising for the Boostrix whooping cough vaccine. The company dropped the campaign after the suit was filed. On Oct. 29, the Informed Consent Action Network announced a class settlement for New York residents. [Confirm the caption and terms from the order linked on the network's page.]
Any account of Mr. Siri must address his relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the health secretary, and his critics say it is the central question.
Mr. Siri was Mr. Kennedy's lawyer during the 2024 campaign. In December 2024, The New York Times reported, citing one unnamed observer, that Mr. Siri sat in with Mr. Kennedy at the Trump transition offices in Florida as candidates for health posts were questioned about their views on vaccines. It also reported that he had petitioned the F.D.A. on behalf of the network to suspend approval of the stand-alone polio vaccine until a placebo-controlled trial was run. Senator Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, issued a statement the same day. Mr. Siri called the story a "hit piece" and told NewsNation that his client "does not want, and never expected, the vaccine to be withdrawn."
In October 2025 The Times reported that Mr. Siri had helped vet candidates for the advisory committee. Rolling Stone reported this October that Mr. Kennedy has consulted him by speakerphone in department meetings. Mr. Siri's reply, by email, was: "I do not provide the secretary with legal or regulatory advice."
The public record shows that he has testified before Congress three times in two years: before a House Judiciary subcommittee in June 2024, and twice before Senator Ron Johnson's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in May and September 2025. In December 2025 he gave a 76-slide presentation on the childhood vaccine schedule to the C.D.C.'s advisory committee, the body whose membership The Times said he had helped shape. Dr. H. Cody Meissner, a member, called part of it "a terrible, terrible distortion of all the facts."
His critics are on the record, and they are not on the fringe. Dr. Stanley Plotkin, who developed the rubella vaccine, told The Times that Mr. Siri in a position of influence "would be a disaster." Dr. Paul Offit of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia said: "You're substituting a theoretical risk for a real risk." Art Caplan, the New York University bioethicist, said: "He's the wrong guy, with the wrong conflicts." Dr. Jake Scott of Stanford has published point-by-point rebuttals. He cites a 1980 placebo-controlled hepatitis B trial and a 12,191-child saline-placebo pneumococcal trial against Mr. Siri's claim that childhood vaccines were never tested against a placebo. Daniel Salmon of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Vaccine Safety was more measured: Mr. Siri raises "points that are worthy of exploration."
News organizations describe him differently. The Times calls him "a prominent vaccine critic." The Associated Press: "a lawyer who worked with Kennedy on vaccine litigation." STAT: "vaccine critic." Axios and NBC News: "anti-vaccine lawyer." Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician, called him "a trial attorney who makes his living suing vaccine manufacturers."
In the sources reviewed for this story, Mr. Siri does not dispute the labels. He disputes the claims. He says he has never sought to force a vaccine maker off the market, and that the polio petition was about informed consent. He gave Rolling Stone one sentence on his position: "The only position my firm takes on vaccines is that everybody should be free to get as many vaccines as they want." To the advisory committee in December he said, "Mandates make vaccines political." On Joe Rogan's program this year: "I'm just a lawyer. I'm just repeating to you what the data reflects."
He published a book in September 2025, Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines, under his own imprint, and read the audiobook himself. He told Rolling Stone before the interview that it would not cover anything personal, and this story does not.
For lawyers who bring cases, the method is the part that can be examined apart from the cause. Mr. Siri started his own practice in 2011. It rests on Freedom of Information Act requests written to be litigated, a funder who pays for cases that do not settle, and a willingness to take the same question to every court that will hear it. He lost in the Fourth Circuit in April and filed at the Supreme Court in September.
Siri & Glimstad is an Oliver & Ginger client. Quotes are from published interviews, congressional testimony, court opinions and the Supreme Court docket. [Confirm before publication: the fee figures against the order; the GSK settlement caption; the Miller v. McDonald docket status; the firm's founding year and headcount; the Siri portrait credit, "Courtesy of Siri & Glimstad."]
Sources
Supreme Court docket, No. 26-438 · Petition, Miller v. McDonald, Sept. 28, 2026 · Perry v. Marteney, 4th Cir. No. 24-2132, April 8, 2026 · ICAN v. CDC, D.D.C., Oct. 10, 2025 · Siri written testimony, Senate PSI, May 19, 2025 · CDC, Siri ACIP slides, Dec. 5, 2025 · Siri & Glimstad bio · Federalist Society bio · Rolling Stone, Katherine Eban, Oct. 8, 2026 · NYT, Dec. 13, 2024 (reprint) · NYT, Oct. 3, 2025 (reprint) · STAT, Dec. 5, 2025 · NBC News, Dec. 2025 · Axios, Dec. 13, 2024 · KFF Health News, April 10, 2025 · FOIA Advisor, Oct. 30, 2026 · WV MetroNews, Oct. 5, 2026 · ICAN, GSK settlement, Oct. 29, 2026 · Jake Scott, Dec. 10, 2025. Full notes: research_notes/Aaron Siri profile/siri.md