The US Centers for Disease Control never sent an urgent health alert it had drafted in May 2021 regarding a potentially fatal side-effect linked to the Covid-19 vaccinations it was promoting, and continued to push the shots without warning the public, according to a document obtained by Epoch Times on Wednesday.
In an inter-agency email titled “draft alert on myocarditis and mRNA vaccines” obtained by the Times, CDC official Dr. Demetre Daskalakis informed two high-ranking colleagues that he had attached “the most recent draft of an alert as discussed.”
The agency disseminates what it describes as “vital health information” to doctors and public health officials at federal, state and local levels through a system called the Health Alert Network. The warning was reportedly prepared for release via this network; Daskalakis’ email was dated May 21, 2021, but never saw publication.
While the exact text of the warning has not been made public, the CDC had been tracking cases of myocarditis – a potentially deadly heart condition – in individuals vaccinated with Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines for months, witnessing what it internally acknowledged was an alarming spike in cases, even as it continued to urge all Americans to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.
Two days before the email was sent, the CDC told state officials it was “closely monitoring” post-vaccination cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, a similar condition, and acknowledged that such cases “can be serious.” However, the public was not notified until weeks later – and the CDC continued to promote the jabs to all Americans, even after the risk was made public.
Instead of the never-released draft alert, the CDC later chose to inform healthcare providers about the danger in a document headed “clinical considerations” that lacked the forceful language or widespread distribution a Health Alert Network bulletin would have received. While it acknowledged the increased risk of myocarditis, it placed equivalent emphasis on the need to vaccinate everyone over age 11.
Last year, it emerged that both the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration had been made aware of a myocarditis “safety signal” triggered by an unusually large number of adverse event reports as far back as February 2021 – just two months after the mRNA-based vaccines received regulatory approval [emergency use authorizion].
Despite international news reports that vaccination with Pfizer and Moderna’s shots was associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis, the US regulatory agencies did not inform the public about the risk until after the jabs had been approved for patients between 12 and 15 years old – one of the age groups most susceptible to their deadly side effects.
January 17, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Vaccination during the third trimester of pregnancy is unprecedented and risky, since a vaccine induced fever could precipitate stillbirth or premature delivery of the baby. The CDC and the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex has told young mothers they should take the risk for theoretical protection of the newborn.
As of August 30, 2023, the CDC recommends: “Vaccination for pregnant people, 1 dose of maternal RSV vaccine during weeks 32 through 36 of pregnancy, administered immediately before or during RSV season. Abrysvo is the only RSV vaccine recommended during pregnancy.” Now the CDC is reporting that only Asian women in the US have topped 10% on the respiratory syncytial virus RSV vaccination rate while African American mothers remain the most conservative with under 5% rates of acceptance. For any mass vaccination campaign, these data would indicate a program failure. The mothers and families have been burned by genetic COVID-19 vaccines and unprecedented rates of injury, disability, and death. There is little appetite for a new vaccine during pregnancy among obstetricians, midwives, and expecting mothers.
These data on the lagging maternal RSV immunization campaign indicate that “vaccine mania” may be cooling in the United States. As a consulting internist and cardiologist, I do not recommend the new RSV vaccine for pregnant women. There are insufficient data on short and longer term safety. Theoretical protection of infants for an easily treatable illness is simply not compelling enough to risk the pregnancy altogether.
January 12, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, RSV vaccine, United States |
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A U.S. government-sponsored study published late last month in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal reported that most young children hospitalized for acute COVID-19 had not received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and were sicker to begin with than vaccinated children.
The authors’ conclusions are true on the surface, but their analysis ignored that more than 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated children were enrolled in their study.
Only 4.5% of trial subjects completed primary COVID series
Investigators led by Laura Zambrano, Ph.D., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist, recruited 597 children ages 8 months through under age 5 hospitalized for COVID-19 at 28 U.S. pediatric hospitals between Sept. 20, 2022, and May 31, 2023.
Unvaccinated subjects outnumbered subjects who had received at least one COVID-19 shot by 528 to 69, a more than 7-fold difference.
Children were grouped by demographic factors such as race, sex and geographic location, vaccination status (no vaccine, incomplete vaccine series or fully vaccinated) and underlying non-COVID-19 illnesses, or comorbidities.
Only 4.5% of the subjects had completed their primary COVID-19 vaccination series and 7% had received at least one dose.
Cases varied widely in severity, with 174 (29.1% of all subjects) admitted to intensive care and 75 progressing to life-threatening illness.
Fifty-one (8.5% of all subjects) required life support via invasive mechanical ventilation, and three required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a life-support treatment involving a heart-lung machine.
Based on results from both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, infants 8 months to under age 2 were more vulnerable to serious outcomes than children ages 2 to 4 years.
For example, the youngest subjects had more life-threatening illnesses and the greatest need for high-level respiratory support involving vasoactive infusions — intravenous treatments to maintain normal blood pressure and heart rate. Yet they also had shorter hospital stays.
Investigators concluded that most children hospitalized for COVID-19, including most children with underlying medical conditions, were unvaccinated. On that basis, they called for “strategies to reduce barriers to vaccine access among young children.”
Researchers tested kids for COVID but not other respiratory infections
Zambrano et al. also compared the Pfizer mRNA shot to the Moderna product. They found that children who took the Moderna product were somewhat more likely to experience a serious outcome, however, the numbers from both groups were small and the authors did not subject them to statistical analysis.
Based on their analysis they also calculated and reported, in their “results” section, that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were 40% effective in reducing serious outcomes. However, in their discussion (several sections later), they admitted that “vaccine coverage in this population was too low to evaluate vaccine effectiveness.”
There were two notable limitations to the Zambrano study. Even though the researchers recruited children who were only partially vaccinated the study’s design excluded children who had received any vaccination fewer than 14 days before hospital admission. Therefore no short-term post-vaccination adverse events were included.
Another limitation was that children were tested for COVID-19 but not for all possible respiratory infections, meaning “it is possible that RSV [respiratory syncytial virus], human metapneumovirus or other respiratory viral co-detections influenced disease severity.”
Media parroted authors’ conclusions
U.S. media (for example here and here) picked up on the Zambrano paper and repeated its conclusion that most hospitalized COVID-19 pediatric patients were unvaccinated — ignoring that the study included more than 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated subjects.
A deeper dive into the data reveals the extent of this error and the discrepancies between what Zambrano et al. reported and what they saw.
Tables 1 and 2 illustrate what the authors got wrong.
These calculations say nothing about the relative outcomes for vaccinated and unvaccinated children because Zambrano et al. either did not perform the relevant calculation — number of cases in each group divided by the number of subjects — or chose not to report the results it generated.
Instead of presenting the number of subjects experiencing the indicated outcome as a percentage of vaccinated or unvaccinated groups, they reported them as a percentage of all subjects experiencing that outcome. Since there were 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated subjects, this approach all but guaranteed the numbers among the unvaxed would be higher.
Here’s an analogy: In a hypothetical study comparing 10 coffee drinkers to 100 abstainers, five drinkers and 10 abstainers reported feeling nervous. Using Zambrano’s logic, 67% of people feeling nervous were abstainers, and just 33% drank coffee. This “proves,” according to Zambrano’s logic, that not drinking coffee doubles (67% vs. 33%) the risk of getting the jitters.
The correct way to view this data is that 10 in 100 abstainers, or 10%, felt jittery but 5 in 10 (50%) of coffee drinkers felt jittery, and that drinking coffee raises the risk of nervousness fivefold (50% vs. 10%).
Table 2 uses the same raw data as Table 1. But instead of reporting vaccinated and unvaccinated data as a percentage of all data, it first calculates the occurrence of these conditions or outcomes in each group and compares the inter-group differences.
Hospital stays were also on average one day shorter for the unvaccinated. The only area where unvaccinated children faired slightly worse was in underlying cardiac issues, but the authors did not address this small difference in their discussion.
Previous study used same tactic
A study preceding the Zambrano paper by three weeks used the same tactic to arrive at the same conclusion.
Tannis et al. compared many of the same outcomes as Zambrano in 6,337 unvaccinated and 281 vaccinated children ages 6 months to under 5 years.
All subjects had visited emergency departments for acute respiratory illness from July 2022 to September 2023.
By coincidence, Tannis also calculated vaccine effectiveness to be 40%.
Table 3 presents data from Tannis et al. with percentages reported by Tannis (Tannis %) and the actual values (Actual %).
Vaccinated children were also 68.3% more likely to harbor HCoV, an endemic coronavirus, than the unvaccinated. Similar to SARS-CoV-2 (the COVID-19 virus), HCoV can cause serious illness in immunocompromised individuals and the elderly.
Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., is a science reporter/editor for The Defender.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., holds a master’s degree in computer science and a doctorate in biomedical and health informatics. He practices data science by asking questions of databases that can reveal population-based adverse outcomes of medical interventions.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
January 10, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton (who goes by “Kelly”) on Oct. 30 lost her license to practice medicine in New York for writing eight vaccine exemptions in California between 2016 and 2018. New York was the third state to enforce this penalty, after Massachusetts and California. Sutton is now no longer able to practice medicine anywhere in the U.S.
Both the New York and Massachusetts medical boards adjudicated Sutton’s case on the basis of “reciprocal discipline,” rubber-stamping the Medical Board of California’s 2021 decision without allowing her to challenge the validity of the original findings.
Reciprocal discipline avoids the time and costs of relitigating. Therefore, like the Massachusetts Board of Medicine hearing last July, the October hearing in New York was just theater and the board never intended to allow Sutton to defend herself.
Instead, the New York board maintained that the purpose of the hearing was limited to determining what penalty should apply to Sutton’s state license in light of the findings already established in California.
Medical Board of California misinterpreted the law
Sutton, an integrative medicine physician practicing since the early 1970s, told The Defender that the Medical Board of California misinterpreted the law when it determined she violated “standards of care” when writing the vaccine exemptions.
Those exemption-specific standards — which came into effect in 2016 via Senate Bill (SB) 277, a California bill that stripped parents of the personal belief exemption for rejecting vaccines for their children — only stated it was up to the physician to decide on a medical exemption based on the needs of the child.
However, in 2019, California passed two more bills — SB 276 and SB 714 — designed to make vaccine exemptions even more difficult to acquire.
Specifically, when a doctor writes more than five medical exemptions per year (as of Jan. 1, 2020) or a school’s immunization rate falls below 95%, the California Department of Public Health (CPDH) has the right to review the medical exemptions.
Physicians since January 2021 are also required to use a standardized electronic exemption form submitted to a statewide database, and CPDH may revoke exemptions that do not conform to vaccination guidelines established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Sutton claimed the Medical Board of California applied its own definition of “standards of care,” in direct contravention to the standard established by SB 277.
“In California, any time a standard of care is written into statutory law, it is more preeminent than a community standard of care that is just held among the general opinion of doctors in practice,” she said.
Sutton believes the Medical Board of California was also applying laws derived from SB 276 and SB 714 that went into effect well after the date she wrote the exemptions.
The CDC’s and ACIP’s vaccine recommendations do not constitute mandates or requirements. According to Sutton, during the lobbying phase of SB 277, a doctor called ACIP and asked whether its recommendations should be considered mandates, and was told that they were only guidelines.
The ACIP guidelines do not mention the word “exemption,” according to Sutton, nor were the guidelines mentioned in SB 277.
“That’s the way guidelines have always been used in standards of care,” Sutton said, calling them “indicators, supports, references — but not mandates.”
Sutton said the mood of medicine is shifting away from a doctor exercising his or her own training and experienced judgment towards doing what the standards and guidelines say.
“This is decidedly against the quality of medicine because there’s no freedom to individualize for the patient,” she said.
Dissecting the California case
The California board revoked Sutton’s license for “gross negligence” and “repeated negligent acts” in issuing permanent vaccine exemptions for eight pediatric patients, saying the exemptions did not comply with standards of care and vaccine guidelines at the time.
The board’s sole expert witness, Dr. Deborah Lehman, infectious disease physician at the University of California, Los Angeles, dismissed Sutton’s claim that SB 277 clearly articulated standards of care regarding exemptions, saying those were not the “community standard of care,” Sutton recounted.
Sutton explained:
“SB 277 was brief and direct to the point. It said that if a child who is required to have vaccines receives a note from a physician stating that it is in the child’s best interests to not be vaccinated, then that suffices to fulfill the requirement and the child can go to school without having the required vaccines. The deciding factor is the physician’s discretion.”
The relevant clause from the bill states:
“If the parent or guardian files with the governing authority a written statement by a licensed physician to the effect that the physical condition of the child is such, or medical circumstances relating to the child are such, that immunization is not considered safe, indicating the specific nature and probable duration of the medical condition or circumstances, including, but not limited to, family medical history, for which the physician does not recommend immunization, that child shall be exempt from the requirements.”
Lehman said doctors must only grant an exemption when there is a contraindication to a vaccine and at no other time.
Lehman claimed the standard of care was determined by whether another physician would treat the medical issue the same or similarly. However, according to Sutton, she omitted the all-important phrase “in the same community.”
In the integrative medicine community in which Sutton practices, it is common for patients to receive more individualized treatments rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.
“It was kind of a force-of-personality situation that was successful in the setting of the courtroom hearing at the administrative level,” Sutton said. “And the board witness prevailed upon the judge to believe that the law had no meaning and that community opinion was higher.”
The California board also questioned Sutton’s decision not to request patients’ medical files or perform physicals in the cases for which she wrote exemptions.
“If I required a physical exam for every vaccine exemption, I could be accused of ‘padding the bill’ because the physical exam contributes nothing to the decision about the risk for a vaccine injury,” Sutton said.
Instead, Sutton’s process was primarily to review patient histories to understand if the child or a family member had suffered a negative reaction to vaccines.
She said:
“From my understanding and from the group of physicians that I worked with at the time — Physicians for Informed Consent — the risk factors for vaccine injury lie completely in the story of what’s happened to the child when they have had vaccines and what has happened to their blood relatives when those people had vaccines.”
After the passage of SB 277, Sutton said there was “a great deal of conversation” among doctors about how the law could be read and interpreted and how exemptions could be constructed rationally based on the scientific literature.
That literature showed several different areas of concern around vaccinations, including “The aluminum contained in vaccines can trigger neurologic issues and autoimmune disease,” Sutton said, adding, “There is the question of regression after vaccines and neurodevelopmental delays such as autism.”
“There’s also a higher risk of allergies, and then there’s the immediate reactions where a person collapses or has a seizure after a vaccine,” she said.
“A doctor has to make an extra effort in order to understand the historical pattern of vaccine reactions that would indicate risk of vaccine injury, or how to diagnose mitochondrial dysfunction,” Sutton said.
During the California hearing, Sutton shared extensive scientific citations supporting her medical decision-making, including research by Dr. Chris Exley on the dangers of aluminum in vaccines.
She told the board that it was neither intelligent nor humane to force a family to continue to vaccinate after one of their children had already died or been injured by a vaccine, and shared her clinical observation that unvaccinated patients are healthier than those who are vaccinated.
The California board also claimed Sutton neglected to provide informed consent to her patients requesting vaccine exemptions.
Sutton was uncertain exactly what the board meant here but surmised it was saying she did not adequately highlight the diseases that could develop if the parents failed to vaccinate their children.
Deeming the real issue with informed consent to be advising patients about the potential harms of vaccination, Sutton said, “I don’t think I repeated the CDC bylines.” Instead, she believed the parents who came to her for exemptions were already “more than aware” of the risks of childhood diseases.
From her point of view, there was already enough vaccine promotion happening with mainstream media and schools “echoing over and over” how “vastly dangerous chickenpox” and the other childhood diseases were.
The California board’s concern about Sutton not requesting previous medical records is based on the notion of “Don’t trust a single word the patient says,” Sutton said, an attitude that necessitates getting “every documentation” about adverse vaccine reactions before making a decision.
“That’s not the way medicine works,” Sutton said. “But that’s what was expected in terms of a medical exemption interview. It’s like building a legal case instead of a medical case.”
Further wrongdoing was implied by the California board in pointing out that a number of the exemptions Sutton wrote were for patients for whom she was not the primary care provider.
“That is implying that the primary care doctor knows the patient best,” Sutton said. “And that is good in a lot of ways, but it can be a problem for the patient if it’s a large practice that has been forbidden to give vaccine exemptions.”
Sutton said that if a patient’s need cannot be addressed by that group, even if it’s their primary care group, then it is akin to patient abandonment.
SB 277, the law in effect during the period Sutton wrote the exemptions, never had a requirement that exemptions be written by the primary care physician, or even by a pediatrician or pediatric infectious disease expert, according to Sutton.
“So their [Medical Board of California’s] statements were beyond the law and that’s what they were enforcing against doctors,” she said.
Although the board improperly focused on laws that went into effect in 2019 and later, Sutton said, “That very argument could not be persuasively made by the attorneys at the time.”
Board expert: ‘Science has been decided’ on vaccine risks
The Medical Board of California conducted a three-day “trial” for Sutton in June 2021 in an administrative court with a single judge and no right to a jury.
Three experts spoke on behalf of Sutton, while Lehman, the board’s single expert, testified against her.
Lehman lacked basic knowledge of vaccine risks and stated that all doctors should follow the CDC’s vaccine schedule.
When asked to quantify the risk of vaccine injuries, Lehman said, “I don’t need to cite articles in my report, because the science has been decided … If you want answers to these questions, I would refer you to the CDC.”
After denying any knowledge of Dr. Peter Aaby’s more than 400 articles on PubMed analyzing vaccine dangers, Lehman characterized the journal as “low impact” and Aaby as “anti-vax.”
Sutton’s witnesses were Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, pediatric neurologist, Dr. James Neuenschwander, family physician with vaccine expertise and Dr. LeTrinh Hoang, integrative medicine pediatrician.
They skillfully articulated the heterodox perspectives on vaccine dangers and referenced a number of recent studies on vaccine adverse effects, while noting the lack of data on vaccine safety or government studies comparing health outcomes for vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals.
“And on this very little evidence, people like the board expert are proclaiming to the high heavens these are safe and effective,” Sutton said. “All of these other concerns are irrelevant.”
Administrative court structure promotes ‘raw power’
In Sutton’s interactions with California, Massachusetts and New York, she observed a notable lack of due process when compared with civil and criminal courts.
In the proceedings with the Massachusetts board, one of the documents filed against her did not list any specific complaints, making it difficult for Sutton to defend herself. “I had to intuit what they were complaining about and then make up the answers,” she said.
When she brought this shortcoming to the magistrate’s attention, he confirmed that such detail is not required in administrative courts.
“The structure of the administrative-level courts promotes the raw power that’s exercised by the medical boards,” Sutton said, adding, “It’s not an exercise within the law and it doesn’t benefit the people, but only the administrative state itself.”
Sutton mentioned the Federation of State Medical Boards, which coordinates all of the medical boards in the U.S., sent out warnings to doctors about misinformation, masks, vaccines and exemptions related to COVID-19, she said.
“It’s a private, unelected group that’s been around for over 100 years,” she said. “It’s not visibly related to any government entity.”
Together with its partner agency, the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities, it forms an integral part of the administrative state that is undermining the doctor-patient relationship and helping to delicense doctors like Sutton.
Sutton said, “They are both in the same building at the same address in Euless, Texas. So there is a centralized organ to control medical boards around the world, which means controlling doctors around the world.”
“The coordination of COVID happened through organizations like that,” she added.
Doctors incentivized to ignore vaccine injuries
Sutton said the financial incentives to vaccinate everyone within a medical practice discourage doctors from connecting adverse health outcomes to the vaccines.
“The Blue Cross Blue Shield Provider Incentive Program manual of 2016 listed a $400 bonus to the doctor for every two-year-old who was on the CDC vaccine schedule on time,” she said, “as long as 63% of the practice was vaccinated.”
“That’s going to influence how you respond to a parent when they say, ‘Johnny had a seizure after the MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine,’” Sutton said, adding, “Do you put that in the chart as an MMR vaccine reaction? Or do you say, ‘Oh, it must be something else’?”
If a child has a febrile seizure, the doctor may well chalk it up to normal childhood fever rather than to a recent vaccination, Sutton said. “So we bias our own literature, our own notes, by the things that have been allowed in terms of financial incentives.”
Sutton said financial incentives must be removed from medicine to restore its integrity.
“It’s too much impact on physician judgment and motivations are not angelic,” she said. “We’re humans. So if somebody says ‘If you just get 10 kids vaccinated you’ll get $4000,’ I’m going to be looking for those 10 kids to vaccinate and I’ll be rationalizing to myself why that’s okay.”
Part of the problem, according to Sutton, is the state of the vaccine research literature that keeps doctors in the dark about the reality of adverse events.
“Vaccines have been very poorly studied,” she said. “Some of them were approved, like hepatitis B, after only four days in one case and five days in another brand’s case study — and it was approved for use in every newborn baby.”
Other vaccines have been studied for as long as 42 days, but none long-term, which is necessary to see the development of autoimmune diseases like asthma that don’t show up immediately after vaccination, she said.
“So the board expert could say there’s no evidence that an adverse event is related to vaccines, which is not accurate because the evidence is there — but it’s not in the evidence that the CDC accepts,” Sutton said.
According to Sutton, the CDC “very carefully curates” the articles and studies it puts on its website to support its own policies. If a CDC-sponsored study shows adverse vaccine reactions, it won’t appear on its website, she said.
Sutton shared the story of a former cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic who was training to do heart transplants when her 12-month-old daughter received an MMR vaccine and immediately regressed with severe autism. The woman had to leave the cardiology program and return to her home in Europe to care for her child.
Sutton said this woman claimed the CDC was researching a lot of topics, including that the rubella virus in the MMR vaccine persists in the body for a long time and results in granulomas in the case of immune-deficient children and sometimes immune-competent adults.
“This is not on the CDC website,” Sutton said. “So if we look at the nature of the research supporting our vaccine program, we would be astonished and staggered and ashamed because we’re injecting our children with very little evidence that these vaccines are safe or effective.”
Financial incentives in research and drug approvals are also highly problematic, according to Sutton.
“Medicine is no longer medicine,” she said. “It’s become co-opted as another business. Sickness is more profitable than health and mandates are more profitable than choice.”
“Otherwise, despite the efforts of individual doctors, the profession will be working against humanity and really becomes organized brutality instead of healthcare,” Sutton said.
‘The whole storm is not finished’
Sutton has exhausted or curtailed her administrative appeals with the states that have removed her license to practice medicine.
However, she and several doctors are planning to file a collective action in federal court in the spring. They are being supported by the nonprofit Physicians & Patients Reclaiming Medicine, where Sutton’s story is currently featured.
Meanwhile, Sutton keeps in touch with many of her colleagues who have suffered the same fate.
“They are recouping from the reputational and financial losses after being attacked,” she said. “So people don’t quit, but there is a lot of sadness about medicine.”
Sutton talked about the “diaspora” away from the state of California because of the discrimination that’s happened to families who had a health concern about a vaccine for their child.
“There’s been a lot of pain. So the whole storm is not finished,” she said.
Lacking a medical license, Sutton has turned to offering health education for a small group of clients. They meet monthly over Zoom, and individuals can discuss their concerns privately with her. But she no longer diagnoses, treats or does physical exams.
Sutton is currently preparing a course about integrative medicine to present to a group of acupuncture students.
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
January 9, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Human rights, United States |
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When Dr. Robert Sullivan collapsed on his treadmill three weeks after his second COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021, he fell into a “nightmare” ordeal that he said exposed glaring deficiencies in the nation’s vaccine safety monitoring system.
Diagnosed with sudden onset pulmonary hypertension, the healthy and fit 49-year-old anesthesiologist from Maryland attempted to file a report through the government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
But like others interviewed in a recent investigation by The BMJ, Sullivan hit barrier after barrier when trying to submit and update his report.
Almost three years later, still grappling with debilitating symptoms, Sullivan’s experience highlights the systemic problems with the U.S. adverse events monitoring system run jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
From doctors unable to file reports to disappearing data, limits on transparency and lack of resources to follow up on concerning vaccine reactions, experts warn VAERS is failing to detect critical safety signals.
According to one of those experts — VAERS researcher Albert Benavides, whose experience includes HMO claims auditing, data analytics and revenue cycle management — VAERS’ failure isn’t accidental.
“It is not broken,” Benavides wrote in his Substack coverage of The BMJ investigation. “VAERS runs cover for the big pharma cabal.”
‘They even delete legitimate reports’
Like others interviewed by The BMJ, Sullivan experienced limited follow-up after submitting his VAERS report. He received only a temporary report number months after his initial submission.
A physician named “Helen” (pseudonym) told The BMJ that fewer than 20% of concerning reports get follow-up, including many deaths she reported.
In consultation with Benavides, an audit by React19 found that 1 in 3 COVID-19 vaccine adverse events reports in VAERS were either not posted publicly or were deleted. React19 is a nonprofit that collects stories of people injured by the mRNA vaccines.
According to The BMJ, of those queried by React19, “22% had never been given a permanent VAERS ID number and 12% had disappeared from the system entirely.”
Benavides, who publishes the VAERSAware dashboards documenting many of the problems with VAERS, said there is even deeper dysfunction in the VAERS system — from inventing symptoms to deleting reports.
“VAERS does not publish all legitimate reports received,” Benavides told The Defender. “They throttle publication of reports. They even delete legitimate reports.”
For a system dependent on voluntary engagement, these restrictive policies keep critical data hidden, according to Benavides.
In 2007, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contracted with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) to review the VAERS system. In 2010, HPHC filed its r report, which determined that 1 in 39 people experienced vaccine injuries and that only around 1% of vaccine-related injuries or deaths are ever reported to VAERS.
The CDC, which operates under HHS, scuttled the study, refused to take calls from the researchers and declined to upgrade the VAERS system when a new, much more effective system was developed.
‘Blind spots are self-created’
VAERS “collects reports of symptoms, diagnoses, hospital admissions, and deaths after vaccination for the purpose of capturing post-market safety signals,” according to The BMJ.
But the limited transparency of VAERS data presents barriers to proper analysis, according to The BMJ’s investigation and researchers like Benavides.
The public — including doctors and other report submitters — can access only incomplete initial reports, not updates with vital details.
This means outcomes like death are often excluded if the initial report was for an injury and a subsequent death report was filed.
“I made the false assumption that my conversation [with VAERS] would result in an adjustment to the publicly reported case,” Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D., told The BMJ.
Whelan, a rheumatologist and researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, in 2022 filed a report of a cardiac arrest in a 7-year-old male patient after COVID-19 vaccination.
“I assumed that, since it was a catastrophic event, the safety committee would want to hear about it right away,” Whelan said. But nobody called him or requested an update after his submission.
“There was no mechanism for [updating] it,” Whelan told The BMJ. “The only option I had was to make a new VAERS report.” Without updates, the VAERS data showed that the boy was still hospitalized.
Whelan is one the authors of a recent critique of the Cochrane Review that concluded the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were not dangerous.
The problem with VAERS is not limited to a lack of adequate follow-up but to the incomplete and often inaccurate information found there.
“VAERS in effect allows typos, truncated lot #’s, UNK [unknown] ages, UNK vax dates, UNK death dates, etc. to pass through into publication,” Benavides said.
Benavides said specific data — including ethnicity, hospital names, attending physicians, submitter’s relationship to the patient, patient and submitter addresses, telephone numbers and emails — collected by VAERS are not published,
“Any blind spots are self-created, in my opinion,” he said.
Agencies maintain two separate VAERS databases — public gets to see only one
“There’s two parts to VAERS, the front end and back end,” stated Narayan Nair, division director for the FDA’s Division of Pharmacovigilance at a December 2022 meeting with advocates, according to The BMJ. “Anything from medical records by law can’t be posted on the public-facing system,” he said.
The BMJ investigation discovered that the FDA and CDC maintain two separate VAERS databases, one available to the public that contains only initial reports, and a private back-end system containing all of the updates and corrections.
“Anything derived from medical records by law” cannot be posted on the public-facing system, Nair told the advocates, according to The BMJ.
In an apparent contradiction to this claim, The BMJ noted the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), which collects post-marketing information on drug reactions, posts its updates publicly.
Sullivan, who met Nair years before COVID-19 and considers him a friend, told The Defender that if this “very bright, kind and caring person” could not fix VAERS, “I don’t think it’s fixable.”
CDC says it reviewed 20,000 reports of deaths — none were related to COVID shots
Withholding outcome data like deaths obscures critical safety signals, experts contend.
James Gill, a medical examiner, reported the death of a 15-year-old patient after vaccination, but the case was dismissed by the CDC despite autopsy evidence, according to the BMJ investigation.
Physician “Helen” told The BMJ that after filing reports on her medical patients, including six who had died, she received only a single request for medical records on the death and two for hospital-admitted patients.
The standard operating procedure for COVID-19 vaccine reports in VAERS, according to The BMJ, is for reports to be processed quickly and for “serious reports” to receive special review by CDC staff.
However, while some other countries have acknowledged the probable connection between the mRNA vaccines and death, the CDC, while claiming to have reviewed nearly 20,000 death reports, has yet to acknowledge a single death linked to the COVID-19 vaccines, The BMJ said.
Benavides provided The Defender examples of VAERS “deleting legitimate reports,” not just duplicates or false claims.
“VAERS even deleted dead Pfizer Trial patients,” he said, claiming that this report, for example, was not a “duplicate” and did not appear to be fake.
Benavides said:
“There are currently about 50 deaths that are not counted as deaths because the correct box is not checked off.
“There are thousands of reports and about 100 deaths in ‘UNKNOWN VAX TYPE’ in VAERS. Read the narrative to see these are clearly C19 jab-related deaths.
“There are over a thousand cardiac arrests where they are not marked as dead, and I question if they actually survived because there is no mention of ROSC [return of spontaneous circulation].”
“Why couldn’t VAERS populate the ages of these dead kids before publication?” Benavides said, pointing to this report on his website.
Physicians report only FDA-recognized adverse events
Ralph Edwards, former director of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre and until recently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, told The BMJ the regulators may be relying too heavily on past epidemiological data, especially for new types of adverse events. “If something hasn’t been heard of before, it tends to be ignored,” he said.
Without guidance to report potential risks, doctors also face barriers. “Physicians are only willing to talk about FDA-recognized vaccine adverse events,” stated physician “Helen” in a 2021 meeting between the FDA and physicians and advocates, according to The BMJ.
Svetlana Blitshteyn, a neurologist and researcher at the University at Buffalo, New York, told The BMJ if physicians are not educated to look for a specific condition, they’re unlikely to test for it or know how to treat it.
Sullivan told The Defender he believes his experience of developing pulmonary hypertension after taking the mRNA vaccine is one such safety signal the CDC and FDA are overlooking — a condition he believes many athletes have unknowingly developed.
Sullivan co-authored a paper of his and one other similar case of post-vaccine pulmonary hypertension. According to the paper:
“Pulmonary hypertension is a serious disease characterized by damage to lung vasculature and restricted blood flow through narrowed arteries from the right to left heart. The onset of symptoms is typically insidious, progressive and incurable, leading to right heart failure and premature death.”
“Athletes are canaries in the coal mine,” Sullivan told The Defender, speaking of the unusual numbers of athlete deaths since the rollout of the vaccine. Sullivan thinks that those with superior physical conditioning, like him, stand a better chance of survival with early detection.
However, he said, “Athletes will get echocardiography, and it will be essentially normal. The only way to tell for sure is to do a right-heart catheterization” that can identify the anomaly.
Sullivan believes the lives of many athletes could still be saved if the reporting system recognized and investigated the signal — and said he would be happy to join a project dedicated to this goal.
He also told The Defender he believes many of the sudden deaths reported in the 25- to 44-year-old age group are a result of this hidden condition.
‘The buck stops with the CDC for reforms’
Critics point to choices by the CDC as compounding VAERS’ passive design and understaffing issues.
Despite over 1.7 million reports since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, staffing was not boosted accordingly, according to statements the CDC made to The BMJ.
A Freedom of Information Act request by The BMJ revealed Pfizer has nearly 1,000 more full-time employees working on vaccine surveillance than the CDC. Records showed in 2021, Pfizer on-boarded 600 additional full-time employees to handle the volume of adverse reports and planned to hire 200 more.
Physician “Helen” in The BMJ article called for an end to the “negative feedback loop” whereby the FDA fails to list adverse reactions because passive surveillance systems like the FDA’s don’t display them, while at the same time, because of that lack of disclosure, “physicians are blinded to the adverse reactions in their patients, and thus aren’t reporting them.”
“The buck stops with the CDC for reforms needed to open up data,” Benavides told The Defender, adding several suggestions that could immediately improve VAERS:
“Revert back to pre-January 2011 when VAERS did append initial reports with follow-up data, including death. Take off the arbitrary 30-minute time limit to file a report before getting kicked off. Make the process easier to submit follow-up data.”
When asked why the incompetence of VAERS had been allowed to continue for so long, Sullivan told The Defender, “Because of the lack of product liability” for the vaccines “and the surge to defend economic interests.”
Sullivan said he’d like to see the following changes to the system:
- Pharmaceutical advertising banned.
- Pharmaceutical company revenues devoted to advertising instead be spent on R&D.
- The tax money collected on pharma profits be directly sent to victim injury funds.
Yale cardiologist takes on study of COVID vaccine injuries
Benavides said he spoke with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) Monday and is also in discussion with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to address the concerns with VAERS, including the under-publishing of reports.
“That’s a long overdue prospect and it would be incredible to actually get some analysis by that committee,” he said.
Another bright spot comes from news reported in The BMJ’s investigation that Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and researcher at Yale University, has been recruiting members of React19 to study their vaccine injuries.
“We are working hard to understand the experience, clinical course, and potential mechanisms of the ailments reported by those who have had severe symptoms arise soon after the vaccination,” Krumholz told The BMJ.
Sullivan told The Defender that medical science is “just beginning to catalog the damage to the heart” from the vaccines but that “in order to treat something, you have to diagnose it” — and that, because of the shortcomings with VAERS, “we have yet to scratch the surface of that.”
Sullivan, now almost three years into his ordeal, is outliving his initial prognosis.
“I have a grim diagnosis hanging over me, but I’m optimistic because I’m still here,” he said. “I had something bad happen to me, but I’ve met so many amazing, wonderful people along the way who are just interested in truth.”
“I’m going to live the best and most productive life I can with the time I have left,” Sullivan said, helping others who “have this cloud hanging over their future.”
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
November 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA |
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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) accused federal public health agencies of displaying an “appalling” lack of transparency with the American public during the pandemic, depriving them of “the benefit of informed consent.”
In a letter sent Oct. 25 to the heads of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health, Johnson said that even now, “As new and alarming information continues to come to light, federal health agencies continue to stonewall and gaslight Congress and the public.”
The lawmaker pointed to an FDA-funded study published this month that identified a potential safety signal linking mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to seizures in children ages 2-5.
Johnson questioned whether the CDC was aware of these findings last month when it recommended everyone 6 months of age and older be vaccinated to protect against COVID-19 this fall and winter.
Johnson said the leaders of these agencies — Xavier Becerra, Dr. Robert Califf, Dr. Mandy Cohen, and Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D. — have failed in their duty to be transparent with Americans regarding what they knew about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
As a result, they “have not even come close to ensuring that doctors can provide informed consent on a new gene therapy masquerading as a ‘vaccine’ that was rushed to market without adequate safety or efficacy testing,” he said.
The Wisconsin senator has been a vocal critic of the federal COVID-19 response and an outspoken advocate for people injured by the vaccine. In 2022, he led a roundtable discussion with doctors and scientists to shed light on what was known so far about the vaccines.
Johnson has also accused the CDC of colluding with Twitter to censor his own social media posts about the vaccines.
In his letter, the lawmaker wrote that the agencies’ refusal to respond to the “vast majority” of his questions and information requests “only heightens [his] level of suspicion.”
He listed over a dozen letters he sent requesting information on the COVID-19 vaccines that the agencies “have failed to adequately address.”
These included requests for data about vaccine lots linked to high rates of adverse events, information suppression on social media and the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program.
The CDC and FDA also failed to fulfill Johnson’s requests for their adverse events surveillance data and their analyses of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, database.
Children’s Health Defense also is suing the FDA to respond to its Freedom of Information Act requests to make that same data available.
Johnson listed 11 other outstanding requests he made regarding the other aspects of the pandemic.
But these make up only a partial list of over 60 public letters Johnson said he has sent to government agencies concerning various aspects of the pandemic.
“It is well past time for U.S public health agencies to be transparent,” he said.
Johnson requested the agencies respond by Nov. 8 to questions about what they knew about the risks COVID-19 vaccines posed to children, when they knew it and how they plan to address those issues.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
October 29, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, United States |
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The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) knew in April 2021 that the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was linked to heart damage on an unprecedented scale for a vaccine — but they hid that knowledge from the public while pushing vaccine mandates, according to emails obtained by DailyClout through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The emails show the White House communications team struggling to craft a cover-up message on email chains that included Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to President Biden; CDC Director Rochelle Walensky; Dr. Janet Woodcock, then-acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Dr. Francis Collins, then-director the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
A number of high-level public health officials worked with upper-echelon leadership to craft a “Myocarditis Email” that minimized the relationship between COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and myocarditis,” said Amy Kelly, program director for the War Room/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Analysis Project.
According to Kelly, the officials included: Ian Sams, COVID-19 response and special assistant to the president and senior advisor and spokesman for the White House; Abbigail Tumpey, then-associate director for communication science for the CDC’s Public Health Infrastructure; and Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman, CDC lead on maternal immunization and CDC chief of Infant Outcomes Monitoring Research and Prevention Branch.
The FOIA emails were obtained by Edward Berkovich, one of 250 volunteer attorneys Kelly oversees on the DailyClout and War Room Project to analyze the court-ordered, FDA-released 450,000 pages of Pfizer’s records on its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine — records the drug maker tried unsuccessfully to keep private for 75 years.
The War Room-DailyClout Project was founded by bestselling author and journalist Naomi Wolf, a former advisor to the Clinton campaign, in collaboration with Steve Bannon, former advisor to President Trump and podcaster on “The War Room.”
In addition to volunteer attorneys, Kelly oversees approximately 3250 volunteer doctors, nurses, scientists and others who are reviewing the documents. They’ve issued 89 investigative reports, including the Oct. 18 report on the myocarditis cover-up evident in FOIA emails.
“Astonishingly, the emails reveal that the most senior of leaders, all the way up to the White House, knew about heart damage linked to mRNA vaccines,” Kelly said. “Yet they “colluded behind the scenes to conceal this side effect from the American people.”
Anyone can study the three FOIA releases of emails at dailyclout.io, Kelly said.
“What I think most important is to see who all is involved,” she said. “I believe 105 different people are on the emails, a whole slew of people at the White House, CDC, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, NIAID, Pfizer, some children’s hospitals and organizations and some other external people,” Kelly said.
“My takeaway from seeing this is that everyone, all over the public health agencies, knew there was an issue” with myocarditis dangers linked to the COVID-19 vaccines, Kelly said. Yet “when you read through the emails, you see they are crafting messages to downplay the significance of myocarditis and the vaccines, all the the way up to the White House.”
Emails show the Israeli Ministry of Health tried to alert the CDC in late February 2021 to the problem, Kelly said.
“They said, ‘We’re seeing a myocarditis signal and we’re happy to share information with you,’” she said. “The CDC actually didn’t even respond to the first email as far as I can tell. So the Israeli Ministry of Health emailed again March 2, ‘Hey we’re seeing this myocarditis signal, we’re concerned, let’s discuss it if you want.’”
White House created 17-page script to ‘keep everyone on message’
The FOIA email trove was a frequent topic of discussion Saturday at the “Summit for Truth,” which brought together leaders of the health freedom movement at the Bethel Christian Fellowship church and community center in downtown Rochester, New York.
Wolf was the keynote speaker in a lineup that included Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Ryan Cole, attorney Bobbie Ann Cox, and Brownstone Institute publisher and writer Jeffrey Tucker.
Wolf spoke about her journey from feminist icon to outcast from the liberal media establishment when she questioned the safety of the COVID-19 shots.
She has written two books on her experience investigating and reporting on the pandemic. They include, “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” and the forthcoming “Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age.”
During a panel discussion Saturday, Wolf called the White House involvement in a cover-up of vaccine dangers “absolutely shocking.”
Berkovich’s FOIA request was aided by “a whistleblower at the CDC,” Wolf said, who was “throwing the White House under the bus.”
“In addition to the pages he had asked for, he got 46 pages he didn’t request that showed the White House communications team was “freaking out at the highest levels in April of 2021, because news of blood clots and heart damage had reached them,” Wolf said.
“Instead of coming clean with the American people and pulling this injection off the market, they looped in Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, Dr. Walensky and created a script,” she said.
It was “a 17-page script, their word, which is wholly redacted, to keep everyone on message and downplay the dangers. And in fact if you recall from 2021, rather than pulling this injection off the market, they mandated it. They doubled down and mandated it.”
Wolf said the emails reveal “a massive crime.”
They show a template was prepared to email to “POTUS, which stands for president of the United States,” to keep the president up to date on the email discussions among the top U.S. public-health officials on myocarditis and vaccines, Wolf said.
“Dr. Wallensky was on the emails, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins,” she said. “The entire White House communications team was driving the discussion.”
“They were reacting to the fact that blood clots and heart damage had been presented to them at scale and that the American Association of Pediatrics was warning them about myocarditis in teens, a serious, sometimes fatal disease that needs constant management. Instead of coming clean with the American people… they doubled down and made a strategy to cover it up.”
Public-health officials went ahead with mandates for the Pizer COVID-19 vaccine, “knowing it was killing people,” Wolf said.
Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most highly published cardiologists in the world, said the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines should have been pulled from the market in January 2021, after “no more than 50 deaths” — the previous government standard to guarantee the safety of a biologic product.
McCullough said FDA records show the agency expected a myocarditis risk from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines as early as Oct. 22, 2020.
Nearly two months later, Pfizer “covered up 38 additional deaths” linked to their vaccine before the Dec. 10, 2020 meeting of the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
“If they had reported these deaths, there would have been a three- to four-fold excess cardiovascular risk with Pfizer in the core slides at the Dec. 10, 2020 meeting and Pfizer would never have been approved,” he said.
McCullough said the myocarditis cover-up has killed untold thousands of Americans.
He pointed to his research paper with other scientists including Dr. William Makis. They performed a systematic review of “all published autopsy reports involving COVID-19 vaccination-related myocarditis” through July 3, 2023.
The paper concluded “there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death from suspected myocarditis in cases where sudden, unexpected death has occurred in a vaccinated person.”
McCullough and colleagues concluded that “urgent investigation is required for the purpose of risk stratification and mitigation in order to reduce the population occurrence of fatal COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis.”
Dr. Bruce Boros, a Key West, Florida cardiologist who was one of the first American physicians to use ivermectin for early COVID-19 treatment based on his resarch of the emerging literature, said recent studies show that the RNA from the COVID-19 vaccines “goes right to the heart.”
A study that applied the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine to heart muscle cells in culture “showed direct evidence that within 48 hours there was heart dysfunction, mechanical and electrical chaos,” Boros said.
Young athletes dropping dead from heart failure at unprecedented rates are “almost assuredly suffering” myocarditis symptoms brought on by the shots, he said.
“Everybody who received the shot had some damage to the heart muscle,” Boros said. “They knew it in the preclinical studies and they covered it up. All the signals were there, the FDA went ahead and approved it anyway.
“It’s all a money game, a eugenics game, and they’re continuing to say you need to get a booster,” Boros said. “Now every child in the world should get this shot for a virus that has been falsely normalized as dangerous when the risk, especially for children, is essentially zero when it comes to death,” he said.
“It saddens me,” Boros concluded. “We need to remember this was created as a bioweapon, and hold our government accountable.”
Mike Capuzzo is the managing editor of The Defender. He is a former prize-winning reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, a science writer, and a regional magazine founding editor and publisher who has won more than 200 journalism awards as a writer, editor and publisher.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
October 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, HHS, NIAID, Pfizer, United States |
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NBC News on Tuesday led its online broadcast with what the network said was the biggest news in the world: “President Biden to visit Israel and vaccine hesitancy on the rise for pregnant women.”
As the winter respiratory illness season rapidly approaches, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the first time is recommending four vaccines during pregnancy: the flu vaccine, Tdap vaccine (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis, or whooping cough), RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccine, and the COVID-19 vaccine.
But more women are saying “no” to their doctors who recommend COVID-19 and the other vaccines — even shutting down conversations with, “I’m not going to talk about it,” according to the NBC News report.
“We are meeting more resistance than I ever remember,” said Dr. Neil Silverman, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at UCLA Health. “We didn’t get this kind of pushback on this scale before the pandemic.”
“Now all vaccines are lumped together as ‘bad,’” he said.
NBC based its report on a CDC study, “Influenza, Tdap, and COVID-19 Vaccination Coverage and Hesitancy Among Pregnant Women,” published in the agency’s Sept. 29 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Medical experts interviewed by The Defender criticized the CDC’s recommendations and its report on vaccine hesitancy.
One of those experts, Dr. James Thorp, a Florida physician, board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology who has practiced obstetrics for more than 42 years, urged more women to say no to COVID-19 vaccines, in particular, which he called “an abomination of science and an abomination of a corrupted health care system.”
By continuing to push dangerous mRNA COVID-19 vaccines on pregnant women, Thorp said, the CDC is breaking the “golden rule” of pregnancy.
“The golden rule of pregnancy is you don’t ever, ever use a novel substance in pregnancy, ever,” he said. “And you don’t have to be a physician or nurse, you don’t have to have any education, to know that.”
Only 27% of survey respondents took COVID booster shot
The CDC study analyzed data from an internet panel survey conducted from March 28 to April 16, 2023. The CDC surveyed 1,814 respondents who were pregnant at any time from October 2022 to January 2023.
Key findings include:
- Only 27.3% of women chose to take the COVID-19 bivalent booster vaccine before or during pregnancy during the 2022-23 flu season, nearly half the percent who agreed to take some other vaccines, the signal in the study indicating fear of COVID-19 vaccines tainted other vaccines, public health experts said.
- Skepticism about vaccines has ballooned to taint the flu shot in the eyes of pregnant women, though the flu shot has been given to millions of pregnant women over several decades. Last year, the CDC study found, 47.2% of expectant mothers got their flu shots, down from 57.5% who got their flu shots during the pre-COVID-19 2019-20 season.
- Among most of the 2,000 women who were pregnant during the peak of last year’s cold and flu season, or when the survey was conducted in March and April, almost a quarter said they were “very hesitant” about getting a flu shot, a significant increase in “vaccine hesitancy” over the 17.2% who said they had reservations during the 2021-22 respiratory illness season.
- 55.4% of women with a recent live birth elected to receive Tdap vaccination during pregnancy, a number inching back from pre-pandemic levels, but “self-reported hesitancy towards influenza and Tdap vaccination during pregnancy increased among pregnant women from 2019–20 to 2022–23.”
Dr. Denise Jamieson, vice president for medical affairs at the University of Iowa Health Care and a spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told NBC News that “even prior to the pandemic, it was a struggle to get pregnant women vaccinated.”
She said she is dismayed that “Tdap is just barely recovering from pre-pandemic levels” and “the number of women vaccinated for Covid is disappointing.”
Dr. Linda Eckert, an OB-GYN and global health and immunization expert at the University of Washington, said more of her patients have “a bias … about how they feel about a vaccine.”
When Eckert recommends a vaccine, more pregnant women now reply, “I’m not going to talk about it,” she said.
Dr. Melissa Simon, an OB-GYN at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, decried the rise in vaccine “myths, what I would call blatant disinformation that is intended to be more politically charged, not based in science.”
Pregnancy ‘much safer’ without ‘risks of vaccination’
Thorp, a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine who sees 6,000-7,000 high-risk pregnant patients a year, said he was horrified by the unprecedented level of complications, miscarriages and fetal deaths among his pregnant patients and their unborn children after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are “the deadliest drug in the history of medicine, whether you call it a vaccine, a drug, a gene medicine, a medical intervention, whatever you call it,” he said. “And they knew it. The CDC knew it. HHS knew it. Pfizer knew it and tried to bury the data, which showed 1,223 deaths from its vaccine in the first 10 weeks, for 75 years.”
Thorp cited the more than 1 million illnesses and disabilities and thousands of deaths following COVID-19 vaccination reported in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), run by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“If you take all the other vaccines in the U.S. in the last century and do a literature search,” he said, “the deaths and illnesses associated with the mRNA vaccines dwarf the dangers of all other vaccines combined.”
Captured government agencies and major media have for nearly three years continued to ignore the most dire vaccine impacts in U.S. history, which are especially tragic for pregnant women and their unborn children, Thorp said.
In December 2022, Thorp was the lead author of a groundbreaking preprint article on the dangers of COVID-19 vaccines to pregnant women and unborn children. The article was peer-reviewed and published in spring 2023 in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
The study analyzed adverse events after COVID-19 vaccines experienced by women of reproductive age, focusing on pregnancy and menstruation. It used data collected by the VAERS database from Jan. 1, 1998, to June 30, 2022, to compare injury reports on flu vaccines versus COVID-19 vaccines.
The study found that COVID-19 vaccines, when compared to flu vaccines, are associated with a greater than double rate of reported “menstrual abnormalities, miscarriage, fetal chromosomal abnormalities, fetal malformation, fetal cystic hygroma, fetal cardiac disorders, fetal arrhythmias, fetal cardiac arrest, fetal vascular malperfusion, fetal growth abnormalities, fetal abnormal surveillance, fetal placental thrombosis, low amniotic fluid, preeclampsia, premature delivery, preterm premature rupture of membrane, fetal death/stillbirth, and premature baby death.”
“Pregnancy complications and menstrual abnormalities are significantly more frequent following COVID-19 vaccinations than Influenza vaccinations,” the authors concluded.
According to Thorp, when he first alerted the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology — the most powerful of the three medical boards in his specialty — about the signals in VAERS, the board threatened to decertify him for spreading “misinformation.”
The board has since backed off, Thorp said, because “they know they’re wrong and I’m right.”
Thorp said he proved, with documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, another one of the three major OBG-YN medical societies, took “large sums of money” from the federal government to participate in “the largest 5th generation psyops warfare in the history of the world, a massive propaganda program to bury the data,” and threatened 61,000 doctors with loss of board certification that would end their careers if they deviated from the government line that the vaccines were “safe and effective and necessary.”
The CDC and other public health authorities, backed by major media, “targeted my patients with their propaganda,” Thorp said.
“They targeted women because women make all the healthcare decisions, not men,” he said. “And they went after women because pregnant women are the most vulnerable population in the world, not children, not the elderly. If you can capture pregnant women when you’re implementing a drug you can convince everyone in the world they should follow.”
Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, disputed that any of the four CDC-recommended vaccines during pregnancy is necessary, but he said the COVID-19 vaccine is especially dangerous.
“It is my belief that the safety of those vaccines have never been truly proven, especially in terms of them leading to increased rates of many chronic illnesses in childhood,” he said.
Kory said he was appalled by what he said was an ongoing propaganda campaign of misinformation. “This is both absurd and unsurprising,” he said. “The level of pharmaceutical industry influence is being revealed to more Americans on a daily basis.”
Kory pointed to the CDC’s “truly alarming,” maternal mortality data for 2021. “My recommendation to the CDC is to focus more on why so many American mothers died suddenly in 2021, rather than continuing to blindly recommend mass vaccination of that patient population.”
Using the CDC’s mortality data from its March 16, 2023, report, Kory created a chart breaking out mortality rates for pregnant mothers under 25 years old. It showed a 38% increase in deaths for all mothers of all races and more than an 83% increase for young Hispanic mothers.
Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender he was “concerned that unnecessary vaccines during pregnancy will cause fever in some women.”
“Fever is one of the most common triggers for miscarriage, stillbirth and premature labor,” he said. “Pregnancy is much safer when left to the natural progression of gestation without the risks of vaccination.”
“As a mother, the first thing I did, the first thing all mothers do, is evaluate what you’re consuming because it’s going directly into your baby,” said Laura Sextro, CEO of The Unity Project, a California-based nonprofit that fights for medical freedom and parental rights. “Pregnant women cut out fish because of high levels of mercury and lead, or maybe stop drinking Diet Coke.”
While mothers “go to great lengths to protect their child in the womb,” she urged more to become aware of the dangers of “injecting yourself” with the mRNA vaccine, which poses risks, both proven and unknown, to mothers and children.
“It’s an atrocity we’re seeing,” she said. “We’re seeing a dramatic uptick in spontaneous abortion in certain trimesters after women are given this vaccine.”
Sextro advised pregnant women that “the best way to protect you and baby is always make sure you’re asking questions.”
“If you’re not getting answers, it’s your right as a parent — just because the baby is in the womb doesn’t mean you’re not a parent — it is your responsibility to make sure that you stay informed and protect your child.”
Mike Capuzzo is the managing editor of The Defender. He is a former prize-winning reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, a science writer, and a regional magazine founding editor and publisher who has won more than 200 journalism awards as a writer, editor and publisher.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
October 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CDC, United States |
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Pandemic restrictions were an unmitigated failure, and the evidence base against the politicians and “experts” who imposed them and demanded compliance continues to grow.
And it raises some substantial questions about holding those responsible accountable for their actions. Especially as mask mandates return in certain parts of the country, with hints of more on the way.
Recently a new government report from the United Kingdom was released to little fanfare, which not-so-surprisingly mirrors the fanfare resulting from the release of new data from the CDC itself, showing how vaccine efficacy has fallen to zero.
Finally, Rochelle Walensky did acknowledge publicly that the vaccines couldn’t stop transmission. However it was already far too late to matter.
But all along the agency has strongly stated that the mRNA shots were effective at preventing hospitalizations. Or at least that the latest booster was effective, tacitly acknowledging that the original 2=dose series has lost whatever impact it once had.
What The Evidence Says About NPI’s
The UK’s Health Security Agency (HSA) recently posted a lengthy examination on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions at preventing or slowing the spread of COVID-19 in the country.
And at the risk of revealing a spoiler alert, it’s not good news for the COVID extremists determined to bring mask mandates back.
The goal of the examination was laid out succinctly; the UK’s HSA intended to use primary studies on NPIs within the community to see how successful or unsuccessful they were at reducing COVID infections.
The purpose of this rapid mapping review was to identify and categorise primary studies that reported on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented in community settings to reduce the transmission of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK.
Streamlined systematic methods were used, including literature searches (using sources such as Medline, Embase, and medRxiv) and use of systematic reviews as sources to identify relevant primary studies.
Unsurprisingly, they found that the evidence base on COVID interventions was exceptionally weak.
In fact, roughly 67 percent of the identified evidence was essentially useless. In fact two-thirds of the evidence identified was modeling.
Two-thirds of the evidence identified was based on modeling studies (100 out of 151 studies).
There was a lack of experimental studies (2 out of 151 studies) and individual-level observational studies (22 out of 151 studies). Apart from test and release strategies for which 2 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) were identified, the body of evidence available on effectiveness of NPIs in the UK provides weak evidence in terms of study design, as it is mainly based on modelling studies, ecological studies, mixed-methods studies and qualitative studies.
This is a key learning point for future pandemic preparedness: there is a need to strengthen evaluation of interventions and build this into the design and implementation of public health interventions and government policies from the start of any future pandemic or other public health emergency.
Modeling, as we know, is functionally useless, given that it’s hopelessly prone to bias, incorrect assumptions and the ideological needs of its creators.
The two paragraphs which followed are equally as important.
Low quality evidence is not something that should be relied upon for decision making purposes, yet that’s exactly what the UK, US and many other countries did. Fauci, the CDC, and others embraced modeling as fact at the beginning of the pandemic. They then repeatedly referenced shoddy, poor quality work because it confirmed their biases throughout its duration, with unsurprising results.
And this government report concurs; stating simply and devastatingly, “there is a lack of strong evidence on the effectiveness of NPIs to reduce COVID-19 transmission, and for many NPIs the scientific consensus shifted over the course of the pandemic.”
Of course the scientific consensus shifted over the course of the pandemic because, as we learned, it became politically expedient for it to shift.
As their paragraphs on the available evidence show, there was little solid, high-quality data showing that NPI’s were having a significant impact on the spread of the virus, a reality that had been predicted by decades of pandemic planning.
But the consensus shifted towards NPIs and away from something approaching Sweden’s strategy or the Great Barrington Declaration, simply because Fauci, the CDC, and other “experts” demanded it shift to suit their ideological aims.
The few high-quality studies on say, masking, that were conducted during the pandemic showed that there was no benefit from mask wearing at an individual or population level. And that is why the Cochrane review came to its now infamous conclusion.
Instead of acknowledging that they were relying on poor quality evidence, the “experts” operated with an unjustified certainty that their interventions were based on following “The Science™.” At every turn, when criticized or questioned, they would default back to an appeal to authority; that the consensus in the scientific community unequivocally believed that the evidence showed that lockdowns, mandates, travel restrictions, and other NPIs were based on the best available information.
After initially determining that the UK should follow Sweden’s example and incorporate a more hands-off approach that relied on protecting the elderly while allowing immunity to build up amongst the younger, healthy populations, Boris Johnson panicked, at the behest of Neil Ferguson, and terrified expert groups. Tossing out decades of planning out of fear, while claiming publicly to be following science.
Instead, a systemic, detailed review of the evidence base relied on by those same experts has now concluded that there never was any high-quality information suggesting that pandemic policies were justifiable. Only wishful thinking from an incompetent, arrogant, malicious “expert” community, and unthinking, unblinking compliance from terrified politicians using restrictions and mandates without care or concern for adverse effects.
While this new report wasn’t specifically designed to determine how effective NPIs were in reducing transmission, it’s clear and obvious conclusions give away that answer too.
If it were easy to prove that COVID policies and mandates had a positive impact on the spread of the virus, there would be dozens of high-quality studies showing a benefit. And those high-quality studies would be covered in this report, with a strong recommendation to reinstate such mandates in future pandemics.
Instead, there’s nothing.
Just exhortations to do better next time, to follow the actual high-quality evidence and not guesswork.
Based on how little accountability there’s been for the “experts” and politicians who lied about “The Science™,” there’s little doubt that when presented with the next opportunity they’ll be sure to handle it in exactly the same way.
Abandoning evidence in favor of politics.
Ian Miller is the author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.”
October 10, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Covid-19, UK, United States |
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Facebook has once more found itself at the helm of controversy regarding the censorship of accurate information concerning COVID-19. This is not the maiden voyage of the social media giant into the tempestuous waters of information control; earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded to having stifled truthful content about the pandemic at the behest of establishment voices.
His admission followed on the heels of both the US government and the World Health Organization declaring the curtain call on the COVID-19 public health emergency. This prompted Meta to retrench its medical “misinformation” policy, albeit the platform seemingly persists in its endeavor to silence certain narratives.
As reported by Public, the latest instance of censorship came to light when Facebook initiated a fact-check, labeled, and curtailed the visibility of an article titled “Covid Vaccine mRNA In Breast Milk Shows CDC Lied About Safety.” The scrutiny led by Facebook was not aimed at debunking the veracity of the article but instead was targeted at what it deemed as “missing context.”
The article, based on a recent Lancet study, brought to the public’s attention evidence of trace amounts of vaccine mRNA in breast milk, a finding that contradicts previous assurances by the CDC.
Despite the fact that these women were side-stepped in the original vaccine trials, they were given the green light for vaccination, based on the CDC’s now-questionable advice.
Facebook’s audit extrapolated the “context” that pregnant women ought to proceed with vaccination, thereby sidelining the primary discourse of the article which was to shed light on the misleading information dispersed by the CDC.
The methodology employed by Facebook in this instance extends beyond a mere examination of facts. By reducing the spread of the article, the platform effectively stifles a critical examination of the claims made by government health authorities, thereby undermining the public’s right to be informed and to engage in crucial discourse.
Facebook’s ongoing dalliance with censorship, especially of critical health-related information, raises significant questions about the role of social media platforms in the contemporary information ecosystem. The unfurling narrative underscores the necessity for a transparent, decentralized, and accountable framework for information dissemination, one that is immune to undue influence and serves the collective endeavor for truth.
October 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Facebook |
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The U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) is recommending for everyone six months of age and older to get vaccinated against both flu and COVID-19 this autumn, and in a new ‘Check-In with Dr. Cohen‘ video, CDC Director Mandy Cohen even suggests you can make life simple and get the shots at the same time. See the below screen shot.
In a would-be humorous ad featuring American football star Travis Kelce on doing ‘Two Things At Once,’ Pfizer is likewise promoting the idea of topping up the annual flu shot with a COVID-19 shot.
Note that the ad contains a caption which states, “The CDC recommends getting your COVID and FLU SHOTS at the same visit if you’re due for both” (capitalisation in original).
But is it safe to get the Covid and flu shots at the same time?
Well, neither the CDC nor the manufacturer know. An August 30th BioNTech press release on the EU’s authorisation of Pfizer and BioNTech’s “XBB.1.5-adapted” COVID-19 vaccine includes the following paragraph in the ‘Important Safety Information’ section.
Interactions with other medicinal products or concomitant administration of COMIRNATY, COMIRNATY Original/Omicron BA.1 or COMIRNATY Original/Omicron BA.4-5 with other vaccines has not been studied.
Apparently, this is “important safety information” which has not reached Mandy Cohen and the CDC.
October 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Mandy Cohen, United States |
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‘A Panopticon of Epic Proportions’
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to establish a national “public-private” network to sweep up unprecedented amounts of individual and community data and develop artificial intelligence (AI)-driven models to predict disease outbreaks.
That infrastructure will then help local, state and national health officials identify and implement appropriate “control measures” to manage potential disease outbreaks.
As part of this effort, the agency last week announced an estimated $262.5 million in grant funding over the next five years to establish a network of 13 infectious disease forecasting and analytics centers to coordinate this work across the U.S.
The funding provides roughly $20 million each to 11 universities that were actors in COVID-19 modeling and response. The list includes the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which oversaw the Event 201 simulation and the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health, where Ralph Baric initiated gain-of-function research.
Two of the centers will be private entities — Kaiser Permanente Southern California and a “disaster preparedness organization” called International Responder Systems LLC, whose relevant experience includes running tabletop exercises for weaponized Anthrax outbreaks and helping to manage the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Some centers will work with U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) researchers and bioengineering firms to develop new AI and machine-learning-based modeling tools and platforms to track and predict disease outbreaks across the country.
Others will work with insurance companies, healthcare providers, local health departments and others to collect data from people’s search histories, personal communications, social media posts, wastewater, health records and more.
They will also pilot new tracking and prediction tools in adjacent neighborhoods or among specific demographic groups and scale up “successful” pilot projects.
The grantees will form the Outbreak Analytics and Disease Modeling Network (OADM) through cooperative agreements with the CDC, which will be an active partner in the work.
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” told The Defender :
“What they’re constructing is a panopticon of epic proportions, which will be inescapable in the future and will make for surveillance, not only of people’s behaviors, but also, as they’ve said themselves, of their very thoughts.”
He said the COVID-19 pandemic response provided a paradigmatic example of the dangers of predictive modeling.
“The use of modeling is a very poor predictor of infectious disease, and it has been abused in the past, in particular with reference to COVID-19.”
Rectenwald, who is also a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, cited the work of Neil Ferguson, the physicist at Imperial College London who, along with his team, created the epidemiological model in early 2020 that predicted the catastrophic global death toll from COVID-19.
Ferguson’s model was used to justify social distancing, masking and lockdowns.
But his predictions — which were criticized at the time by experts such as Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D. — turned out to be wildly exaggerated in real-world tests.
“I would anticipate further abuses with this CDC modeling network being set up,” Rectenwald said.
‘A National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases’
The network is spearheaded by the CDC’s new Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), set up by the Biden administration to model, predict and control the course of disease outbreaks across the country.
“We think of ourselves like the National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases,” Caitlin Rivers, Ph.D., a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist and associate director for science at CFA told The Washington Post last year when the White House formally launched the initiative.
“Much like our ability to forecast the severity and landfall of hurricanes, this network will enable us to better predict the trajectory of future outbreaks, empowering response leaders with data and information when they need it most,” the CDC said in its funding announcement for the initiative.
Just as the weather forecast helps people to decide whether to take an umbrella with them when it predicts rain, for example, a disease forecast can help people decide if they should bring a mask, or have a birthday party inside or outside, Rivers told the Post.
In July, Eric Rescorla, former chief technology officer at Mozilla who was tapped to be chief technologist for CFA, told Politico it is “a startup in government” that will need a lot of government funding and that will work very closely with private industry.
The surveillance ‘the American people want and deserve’?
CFA was formally established as part of the CDC in January of this year, but it has been in the works at least since January 2021, when Biden announced plans for the agency in the administration’s first national security memorandum.
CFA received its first $200 million in August 2021 from the American Rescue Plan Act.
Then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who consistently pushed for legislative and other changes to “modernize the public health data policy framework” when she was in office, said at the time:
“This new center is an example of how we are modernizing the ways we prepare for and respond to public health threats. I am proud of the work that has come out of this group thus far and eager to see continued innovation in the use of data, modeling, and analytics to improve outbreak responses.”
CFA began making grants in Oct. 2021, awarding $21 million to five academic institutions — including Johns Hopkins and Harvard — and $5 million to the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy to develop disease modeling capabilities.
CFA worked with academic partners to model, predict and “warn” the government of the omicron spread from November to December 2021.
In December 2022, the CDC renewed its partnership with Peter Theil’s CIA-linked data mining firm Palantir, signing a $443 million contract “to employ scalable technology to plan, manage, and respond to future outbreaks and public health incidents” — an award meant, in part, to “help support innovation” for CFA.
Earlier this year a GOP House subcommittee tried to cut funding to the center, but CDC Director Mandy Cohen told STAT News she was fighting for the funding. She said:
“Folks want us to be ready to know of threats and to respond quickly. Well, we need data and visibility to do that. And so that is money that will help us to see threats and respond to threats faster. And that’s what I think the American people want and deserve.”
But Rectenwald warned that rather than protecting people this system will be a threat to anyone who doesn’t comply with coercive public health directives. He said:
“The surveillance that they’re unrolling here has great potential for infringement on privacy and also for targeting individuals and groups for non-compliance, and as such, abuses of their civil rights and liberties.
“This system will be capable of locating individuals and communities that are not abiding by the coercive measures being ‘recommended.’ And then they can impose even harsher restrictions on these same people. So this is a very, very pernicious prospect.”
CFA reveals ‘a revolving door’ between biotech, government health agencies and the DOD
Rectenwald told The Defender that the CFA collaboration reveals a revolving door phenomenon that we see in government more generally.
“We have government officials being drawn from the private sector and then granting awards that go back to the companies for which they worked, or to which they’re headed. There’s a lot of collusion underway here,” he said.
CFA is headed by Dylan George, Ph.D., who has spent his career moving between U.S. government health agencies, and the DOD and just prior to being tapped to head up CFA, he had a five-month stint at biotech firm Ginko Bioworks.
Ginkgo Bioworks is one of the only private firms explicitly named as a partner on one of the CFA grant awards, with Northeastern University. It is also a key partner in developing other global pandemic surveillance and predictive programs, such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute.
Besides Ginko and Palantir, CFA’s website indicates it partners with “many” public and private organizations. In April 2022, CFA convened a conference called “CFA: 101 for Industry.”
At the conference, George, along with representatives from Databricks, Peraton, Microsoft, RTI, Dell Technologies Redhat/Carahsoft, Optum Serve and Maximus Public Health Analytics, gave presentations on the importance of “public-private partnerships” to CFA’s work.
The industry representatives also discussed their current and past collaborations with CDC to develop the tracking and analytic tools and platforms CFA hopes to ramp up.
Panelists included Michelle Holko — formerly of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), principal architect scientist at Google Cloud for healthcare and life sciences at the time of the conference in 2022, and currently chief strategist for Defensive BioTech — who spoke on the origins of CFA’s disease forecast research in DARPA.
Holko, also a former fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Johns Hopkins Center for Biosecurity, talked about the value of Google search histories and personal digital interaction data to affect public health outcomes.
They provide key information, she said, “because, you know, a person’s desire and willingness to get vaccinated has a huge impact on what’s to happen with a public health crisis,” she said.
‘A new age of public health’: example data collection, prediction and control projects
Data can be used to understand people’s desire, but also “everything that’s going on in their environment, and in their thoughts and in their circle,” Holko said, which has serious implications for public health.
To illustrate how such data could be used, she explained how Google collaborated with the state of California during the COVID-19 pandemic to mine people’s search data and other personal data. They developed a “vaccine willingness score” for each individual person whose data they analyzed.
Then they positioned mobile vaccine vans in neighborhoods with low vaccine rates but some willingness to be vaccinated.
“They were able to take a 25% gap between the lowest quartiles of the Healthy Places index and the highest quartiles and just flip that right upside down,” she said, adding that such targeting addresses a health equity issue.
Holko also talked about the value of wearables in capturing biological data, which, she said, might make it possible to detect a pathogen inside of a person’s body even if they aren’t experiencing symptoms.
Rivers added that it would be important for public health agencies like CFA to get the things they need — like the ability to go out and swab anyone whose data they need directly — rather than having to depend on other adjacent data sources like biometric data, social media data, etc.
Researchers at RTI presented their RTI Synthetic Population project where they have modeled a “synthetic population” of over 300 million individuals, each representing a U.S. person, with their attributes, age, race gender, income, education attainment, job and whatever other data they can glean, which they then use to project epidemiological events.
There were many such presentations.
The overall takeaway was that the contemporary availability of massive amounts of data has created a “new age of public health” and a mandate for new tools to capture and analyze data using novel applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
George said many of the people in the room had been dreaming of a forecasting network like CFA for almost a decade, and they had been “right to be opportunistic” about the “window of opportunity” that presented itself for them to finally set it up.
The ‘extremely ironic’ list of grantees
The OADM is the first major initiative by CFA and sets up its infrastructure across the country. The 13 centers in the network will act as networks themselves.
As the CDC put it:
“In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC has worked collaboratively with state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments, public health organizations, academia, and the private sector to improve and scale outbreak response and provide support to leaders to prevent infections and save lives.
“This national network will build on these collaborations and improve outbreak response using data, modeling, and advanced analytics for ongoing and future infectious disease threats and public health emergencies.”
Awardees include:
- Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security received $23.5 million for its project, “Toward Epidemic Preparedness: Enhancing Public Health Infrastructure and Incorporating Data-Driven Tools.” It will create partnerships with “public health stakeholders” and it will train students, practitioners and modelers — including meteorologists — to use modeling and analytic tools.
- The University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health was awarded $22.5 million to support the creation of the Atlantic Coast Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Analytics, which will develop methods, tools and platforms for disease modeling and coordinate them among the 13 funded partners in the network.
- Northeastern University won $17.5 million for an “innovation center” called “Epistorm: The Center for Advanced Epidemic Analytics and Predictive Modeling Technology.” Epistorm will coordinate efforts among ten healthcare systems, research organizations and private companies to use data from wastewater surveillance, social media, and hospital admissions and apply AI and machine learning tools and other predictive analytics. The consortium’s academic members include Boston University, Indiana University, the University of Florida and the University of California at San Diego. Other members include Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, MaineHealth, Northern Light Health and Concentric Ginkgo Bioworks.
- The University of California at San Diego (UCSD) won $17.5 million to “develop innovative tools and networks” that analyze data sources to determine their predictive power. Data sources will include molecular epidemiological data, wastewater and air surveillance; exposure notification systems (smartphones and contact tracing), internet searches and posts, “legally available clinical data,” and scenario-based simulations. The team will pilot test their innovations among vulnerable populations in San Diego, including homeless people and drug users. UCSD will also partner with other California universities and LANL.
- A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and University of Massachusetts Amherst was awarded $27.5 million to scale up decision-support tools that have been used in previous outbreaks. They will partner with two dozen other entities, including local public health agencies. Northwestern University received $1.7 million in funding to support these efforts.
- Carnegie Mellon University will receive $17.5 million to expand on work it did during the COVID-19 pandemic, gathering daily data “from health care systems, technology companies, medical test results, insurance claims and surveys” to steer policy and public health decisions by applying machine learning and AI tools. It will work with public health agencies and with healthcare providers like Optum to make healthcare data available to researchers.
- The University of Michigan School of Public Health won approximately $17.5 million to establish the Michigan Public Health Integrated Center for Outbreak Analytics and Modeling, which will develop modeling and data analytics tools and pipelines to be integrated into the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services systems.
- The University of Minnesota School of Public Health and the Minnesota Department of Public Health (MDH) will receive $17.5 million to develop predictive tools by surveying individual community interactions and developing machine-learning algorithms to identify symptom clusters. They will work closely with the Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium, a partnership between the MDH and the 11 largest health systems in the state.
- A team of researchers at Emory University will receive $17.5 million to “innovate” new analytical methods, tools and platforms to inform public health decisions.
- Clemson University will work with the University of South Carolina, Medical University of South Carolina, Prisma Health, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, Clemson Rural Health, and South Carolina Center for Rural and Primary Health Care to integrate forecasting and decision-making tools.
- The University of Utah received $17.5 million for its new ForeSITE (Forecasting and Surveillance of Infectious Threats and Epidemics) center, which will “provide data and tools” to guide decisions about emerging public health threats. It will do this through partnerships with the national Veterans Affairs health system and hospitals and health departments in Utah, Washington, Idaho and Montana.
- Kaiser Permanente Southern California will work in partnership with academic modeling teams based at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, using its 4.7 million members as a basis to “develop and test strategies to improve use of public health data.”
- International Responder Systems will work with the University of California, Los Angeles, and Primary Diagnostics “to deliver an enhanced outbreak analytics diagnostic system and a continuous education program to upskill our public health workforce.
Rectenwald said:
“It’s extremely ironic that these universities and institutions have been chosen to undertake the research and modeling. For example, the University of North Carolina Gilling School of Global Public Health initiated gain-of-function research, which was then undertaken in Wuhan, but funded by the NIH through EcoHealth Alliance.
“So isn’t it ironic that this school, the university research center that had a great deal to do with the gain-of-function research that led to COVID-19, is now getting 4.5 million annually for five years?
“It’s an outrage.
“And the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is receiving $23.5 million from the CFA to conduct its project. Curiously, the same center was also the host and organizer of two major events, the CLADE X simulation and the Event 201 simulation, both of which forecasted, in advance of COVID-19, almost the exact scenario that unfolded.
“I wouldn’t trust that Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins with this kind of money and this kind of power to direct the behavior of governments, health organizations, localities, and states in response to anything because they forecasted the kinds of draconian lockdowns, masking, and forced vaccinations that took place in response to COVID-19.
“Likewise, in this scenario, I would expect them to advocate the exact same kinds of measures.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
September 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Human rights, United States |
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