by Matt Lamb
At the height of the COVID-19 mania in the early months of the Biden administration, the liberal smear machine fully mobilized to brand any vaccine skeptics as “conspiracy theorists.” Now a new U.S. Senate report confirms that some of those concerns were entirely legitimate. But you won’t hear about it from the same legacy press that slammed any questions about the efficacy of the shot as “disinformation.”
The report, titled “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals,” stems from an April hearing of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. That subcommittee is chaired by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), one of the leading voices in Congress who demanded more transparency on the potential risks of the COVID shot.
While Sen. Johnson had held previous hearings on this issue, the April hearing was bolstered with valuable new information – “11 million pages of documents” on how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) covered up safety concerns about the vaccine. The report specifically found that government officials ignored flaws in the vaccine safety system’s algorithm which hid red flags for the COVID shot – a bombshell revelation that vindicates many of the vaccine’s detractors.
Sen. Johnson said his committee had “faced impenetrable stonewalling” until Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stepped in and ordered the release of this important information.
Once the information went public, it quickly became clear why career bureaucrats in the public health establishment were so determined to hide it. The very government agencies charged with flagging potential issues with drugs and vaccines had allegedly ignored “safety signals” within the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). This government database is specifically intended to help health officials flag potential problems with vaccines by relying on reports from patients and doctors.
The statistics are shocking. As Johnson noted in a self-published op-ed on X, the vaccine safety system shows “1,676,100 cumulative worldwide adverse events and 39,099 deaths associated with the COVID-19 injection, with 9,332 (24%) of the deaths occurring within 2 days of injection.” Many of these could have been avoided, as they “occurred well after federal health officials should have informed the public about the risks.”
Yet according to the report, FDA vaccine safety leader Peter Marks ignored warnings “that the algorithm they were using to analyze… [VAERS] would mask or hide COVID-19 vaccine adverse event safety signals.” This validates what many conservatives and medical freedom advocates had said since the vaccine’s rollout about how officials were ignoring serious safety concerns.
For months, officials allegedly ignored warnings from their own data analysts who identified “25 safety signals, including sudden cardiac death, pulmonary infarction, cerebral artery occlusion, basal ganglia stroke, agonal rhythm, and Bell’s palsy” associated with the COVID vaccine. These warnings did not come from random conspiracy theorists, but rather from accomplished and credentialed individuals and patients themselves.
Two such individuals were Dr. Ana Szarfman, who worked on drug evaluation for the FDA, and Dr. William DuMouchel, the chief statistician for Oracle. Dr. DuMouchel developed a data mining algorithm for the FDA to track potential safety concerns with the vaccine.
Using this algorithm, Dr. Szarfman “identified dozens of statistically significant safety signals for adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines” and then “immediately shared her findings with other FDA officials,” particularly those “responsible for COVID-19 vaccine safety surveillance.”
But instead of thanking Szarfman for bringing these important issues to their attention, FDA officials instead ordered her to “cease and desist” her research. Consider that – an employee within the agency’s “drug evaluation” team was specifically being ordered to stop evaluating an experimental new vaccine.
Given the political context, it is no wonder why officials ignored their own experts – the warnings came throughout spring and summer 2021, right as the Biden administration was pushing mass COVID vaccination on the American public and employers were being encouraged, and then ordered, to mandate the shot for workers. Meanwhile, some big city mayors were demanding that everyone present their vaccine passport in order to eat at a restaurant or go to a movie theater.
At the same time, university leaders were demanding all students receive the vaccine. If data became public showing that young people had reasons to fear heart inflammation (myocarditis) or that kids were not truly at risk from the virus, then the campaign for widespread vaccination would face even more resistance. Yet those who raised concerns about adverse effects from the vaccines were labeled as conspiracy theorists or accused of literally killing people.
“They were far more concerned about not causing vaccine hesitancy than they were about informing the public of adverse events,” Senator Johnson explained. “They wanted to ensure that the injections would receive full licensure approval so that President Biden could mandate them to the military and millions of civilians, including healthy college students.”
The left’s willing partner in this strong-arming of the American public was the liberal media – and even some nominally independent and conservative outlets. But perhaps most shamefully of all, even today, with the deception fully exposed, most mainstream media outlets are refusing to touch the story.
The same legacy press journalists who constantly lecture us about the need for an honest and independent media are intentionally ignoring one of the biggest public health scandals in American history because it might make them look bad. Senator Johnson has spent months trying to draw attention to his findings, only for the media to bury the story.
Johnson even reported that the op-ed he published on X was ignored by major news outlets, both liberal and conservative. Furthermore, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, and MSNOW have all allegedly refused to cover the report. As Johnson put it, the media’s cover-up led to “millions [being] harmed after being denied their right to fully informed consent.”
This report should serve as a wake-up call and spur more demands for accountability from the so-called “experts” we are supposed to trust to ensure vaccines are safe and effective. Americans deserve the truth — no matter how inconvenient it may be for those in power.