By Emily Kopp
Sen. Ron Johnson said in a letter Monday that he will continue to push for documents about deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine after the “blockbuster” revelation in November that the Trump administration had verified deaths in children.
The letter, exclusively shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation, seeks more details about those deaths and the passive U.S. vaccine safety surveillance system and complacent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bureaucracy under the Biden administration that delayed their reporting for years.
“Nobody wanted to admit that these things were causing death. This is absolutely a case of willful ignorance,” Johnson said in an interview with the DCNF.
Dear Readers:
The senator’s inquiry builds on a
Nov. 28 memo by top vaccine regulator FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad announcing the topline results of an investigation that he tasked career staff with completing on pediatric deaths following the COVID vaccine. Prasad called for stiffer vaccine approval standards, including a requirement that most new approvals require a randomized clinical trial.
The letter requests from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “all records referring or relating to the review of the 96 reports of death following a COVID-19 vaccine … including but not limited to, any memorandum or report created following that review and the data underlying the reports.”
“I am grateful that we now have individuals at our federal health agencies who care about vaccine safety and efficacy. I am, however, disappointed that despite having subpoenaed HHS for the type of data and information described in Dr. Prasad’s memo, it does not appear to have been provided to my office,” the letter reads.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This is a profound revelation. For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children. Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced, at the behest of the Biden administration, via school and work mandates, to receive a vaccine that could result in death. In many cases, such mandates were harmful. It is difficult to read cases where kids aged 7 to 16 may be dead as a result of covid vaccines,” Prasad wrote. “There is no doubt that without this FDA commissioner [Marty Makary], we would not have performed this investigation and identified this safety concern. This fact also demands serious introspection and reform.”
“One reason I’m writing this letter is that this memo needs much greater attention. This should be a blockbuster,” the Wisconsin senator told the DCNF.
Johnson, who has investigated the issue of COVID vaccine-linked adverse events since June 2021, also seeks more clarity about why FDA only examined a fraction of total reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). He noted that the 96 deaths scrutinized by FDA staff in its investigation represents a sliver of the raw VAERS reports of 9,299 deaths worldwide within two days of vaccination.
Distinguishing which VAERS reports indicate genuine fatal side effects and which represent mere coincidences requires autopsy reports, which regulators and physicians often do not request because of a ideological reluctance to acknowledge that vaccines can carry risks, Johnson told the DCNF. Johnson said he has spoken to families who suspected a vaccine injury but struggled to obtain autopsies.
“With some of these officials at federal health agencies and within the medical establishment, vaccines are religion. The do not want to muddy the water with facts,” he said.
Johnson’s letter notes that Prasad acknowledged a culture at FDA “where vaccines are exculpated rather than indicted in cases of ambiguity,” and that the true number of deaths is likely higher.
Johnson has as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations investigated the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of COVID vaccines and booster shots to healthy young adults and children.
His committee uncovered internal federal documents showing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, per a May report. The investigation also found that top officials at FDA obstructed a warning to pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after the May 2021 authorization of the Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15-year-olds, months after Israeli health officials first detected the safety signal in February 2021.
Johnson’s letter highlights missing safety studies that the drugmakers never conducted.
Under the Biden administration, the FDA waived the responsibility of the drugmakers to conduct post-market studies that they had pledged to regulators, scientific advisors on the FDA Vaccines and Related Products Advisory Committee, and the public that they would complete. These uncompleted studies include promised research into subclinical myocarditis, undocumented rates of heart inflammation without obvious symptoms, Prasad’s memo states.
Johnson’s letter reveals the committee has not received any records from HHS about the liability shield for COVID-19 vaccines.
A public health media personality reported on Dec. 11 that FDA staff had downgraded the certainty with which it can attribute some the deaths to the vaccine in the weeks since Prasad received their top line results — echoing prior leaks from career officials aimed at undermining FDA’s new bosses.
Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Acting Director Tracy Beth Hoeg first concluded in a separate analysis that there were in fact deaths in children in the summer, but career staff leaked the results to reporters who “portrayed the incident as Dr. Hoeg attempting to create a false fear regarding vaccines” soon after, per Prasad’s memo.
Johnson’s letter seeks documentation of Hoeg’s meeting, including “a list of all attendees.”
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