As Dr. Anthony Fauci’s right-hand man, David Morens, was charged this week with conspiracy and destruction of federal records in the COVID-19 cover-up, another scandal over the vaccine was unfolding on Capitol Hill.
According to a new Senate report and congressional testimony on Wednesday, Biden administration health officials deliberately ignored warning signs of possible serious reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine, including heart attacks, strokes, Bell’s palsy and sudden cardiac death.
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Within three months of the vaccines being rolled out, in March 2021, red flags were fluttering out of the weekly data dumps from doctors and patients reporting health problems after the shots, according to internal emails and meeting notes provided by the Department of Health and Human Services to Sen. Ron Johnson’s Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
But when the FDA’s senior medical officer, Dr. Ana Szarfman, whose job was to monitor the vaccine data for warning signs, repeatedly raised the alarm throughout 2021, she was ignored, and emails show her colleagues tried to stop her from using a newer, more accurate statistical methodology to investigate the data.
Finally, in September 2021, the same month that President Joe Biden announced vaccine mandates for all federal workers and large companies, she was told to “cease and desist” her analysis.
On Sept. 9, 2021, Biden announced his vaccine mandates, with an implied threat to the roughly 80 million Americans who had not taken the COVID jab and who he accused of prolonging the pandemic, and putting everyone at risk, even though the vaccine did not stop transmission of the disease.
“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” Biden said. “And your refusal has cost all of us.”
On Sept. 16, Dr. Peter Marks, a staunch supporter of the COVID-19 vaccines who at the time led the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told another senior FDA official in an email that Szarfman (who has since retired) “has been asked to cease and desist, because the strategy that she is using could create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric.”
Avoiding email trail
Marks also complained that Szarfman’s work has “become a major distraction.”
The documents uncovered by Johnson’s investigation staff point to the same alarming secrecy and efforts to avoid accountability that landed Fauci’s adviser, Morens, in trouble.
The secrecy included instructions from FDA officials to discuss findings in person rather than over email and stopping or limiting the distribution of the weekly vaccine-safety reports with the alleged intent of avoiding FOIA requests.
On March 26, 2021, Szarfman, shared with colleagues her analysis of COVID-19 vaccine adverse events using the superior, newer “data mining” methodology that had found more than 20 statistically significant “safety signals” or potential red flags, associated with the COVID-19 vaccines that were not previously detected by FDA’s current methodology, “including sudden cardiac death, Bell’s palsy and pulmonary infarction.”
Her analysis was conducted with Dr. William DuMouchel, the then-chief statistician at Oracle and the inventor of the data-mining algorithm.
However, “rather than warn the public or hold distribution of the vaccines for further investigation, records appear to indicate that Biden health officials ignored the statistically significant safety signals uncovered through the new methodology and were more concerned about Dr. Szarfman’s efforts rather than her troubling findings,” the interim report found.
In April 2021, after Szarfman emailed colleagues with another data-mining analysis that apparently underscored the limitations of the FDA’s current system, one senior FDA official wrote to his colleagues, “[b]efore we potentially reach out to Ana, we should meet internally — many considerations not suited to email . . .”
Szarfman continued to bring her reports to colleagues, but they were ignored.
In August 2021, about a month before Szarfman was directed to “cease and desist,” Dr. David Menschik, a senior FDA colleague of Marks, told a CDC official that the FDA planned to limit distribution of its weekly vaccine data-mining reports, which used to be sent around the FDA and CDC, citing “data-security reasons.”
But emails among CDC officials uncovered by Johnson’s investigators point to a potentially more nefarious reason for the FDA’s decision to stop distributing its data-mining reports.
In a November 2022 email, one CDC official noted, “I think that because of the FOIAs [Freedom of Information Act requests] we may have asked FDA to stop sending these weekly data-mining outputs.”
The damage was done
According to Johnson’s staff report, “in the months and weeks leading up to the FDA’s decision to discontinue its distribution of the weekly data-mining reports, there were several public requests made to CDC and FDA for that information.
“On May 9, 2022, about two months before the FDA stopped sending CDC its weekly data-mining reports, Children’s Health Defense sent a FOIA request to CDC for the [vaccine] data-mining analyses.
“On June 23, 2022, 19 days before FDA sent its final weekly data mining report, Sen. Johnson wrote to then-CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky requesting the same information.
“Then, on June 30, 2022, 12 days before FDA’s last distribution, the Informed Consent Action Network submitted a FOIA request to FDA for the [vaccine] data-mining records.
“In light of these public and congressional requests, the timing of the FDA’s decision to end the distribution of its weekly data-mining reports seems particularly suspect.
“The notion that Biden health officials took steps to limit the distribution of COVID-19 vaccine safety data in order to avoid more internal review or public scrutiny, it is completely unacceptable.”
Democrats on the subcommittee, like Sen. Richard Blumenthal, were at pains to point out during the hearing that COVID-19 itself caused serious injury and death, calling as their witness a 41-year-old woman, Maria Young, who was hospitalized for two months and almost died in the months before the vaccines were developed.
Of the 8 billion vaccine doses administered worldwide, multiple large studies suggest there has been no increase in long-term mortality among vaccinated people.
However, the damage was done by the COVID cover-up and lies.
They have driven widespread distrust of vaccination, including tried-and-true lifesaving vaccines.
Miranda Devine: The Biden admin’s COVID vaccine cover-up and lies can no longer be denied – or the damage it caused https://t.co/lwMbAK321W pic.twitter.com/wIBtT8Mqh3
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) April 30, 2026
