Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Tuesday demanded public health agencies provide complete and unredacted documents about the development and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, after learning of extensive redactions in documents released in response to multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
In a letter sent Tuesday to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Johnson said the redactions make the documents nearly impossible to comprehend and obscure the public’s understanding of issues like myocarditis and pericarditis linked to vaccines.
He also called out the agencies for not responding to his own requests for COVID-19 vaccine safety information. He wrote:
“The lack of transparency from your agencies during the Biden presidency has been appalling. Your agencies’ refusal to provide complete and unredacted responses and documents to my numerous oversight letters on the development and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines has hindered Congressional oversight and has jeopardized the public’s health.”
Johnson, an outspoken critic of the government’s handling of COVID-19-related information, sent over 60 public letters requesting more transparency on virus origins, early treatment and vaccine safety.
“What is clear from these excessive redactions, however, is a concerted effort to obscure Congress’ and the public’s understanding of your agencies’ detection of and response to COVID-19 vaccine adverse events such as myocarditis and pericarditis,” he wrote.
Johnson’s latest request demands the agencies preserve and release unredacted documents, specifically three documents he said comprised “only a small fraction” of the documents on myocarditis and pericarditis that the agencies “continue to conceal.”
Johnson gave the agencies until Dec. 3 to respond, warning that if the agencies don’t comply, he would take further action, including issuing subpoenas once he becomes chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the next Congress.
CDC delayed telling public about link between vaccines and myocarditis
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientists Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., in 2022 published a study showing the CDC delayed reporting the incidence of myocarditis to the general public for three months after the first statistically significant signal appeared in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database.
CHD, attorney Ed Berkovich, The Epoch Times and others submitted FOIA requests seeking more information about what the public health agencies knew and when.
In his letter, Johnson cited responses to those FOIA requests as examples of how the agencies obstructed attempts by the public to hold them accountable.
For example, heavily redacted documents indicate that then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky had received Pfizer documents regarding myocarditis and pericarditis by May 22, 2021. However, the Pfizer report provided via FOIA was completely redacted except for the cover page, making it impossible to decipher what Walensky learned and when.
Johnson included the FOIA documents in his letter so the public could see the extent of the redactions.
The documents showed that after receiving the FOIA data, Walensky and other CDC officials considered whether to issue a public warning about the risk of myocarditis from vaccination. They drafted a Health Alert Network (HAN) for the website, which is how they communicate “urgent public health incidents” with public information officers, practitioners, clinicians and local public health officials.
The draft alert sent to Walensky was redacted when the CDC produced documents in response to a FOIA request. A partially unredacted email to either a Moderna or Pfizer employee indicated that the agency was debating the pros and cons of issuing a HAN, but didn’t “want to appear alarmist.”
The agency never issued the alert. Instead, the CDC said on its website that there were “increased cases of myocarditis and pericarditis” reported but the CDC continues to recommend the vaccine for everyone ages 12 and up.
Johnson requested all documents about the alert, but the CDC has not provided them.
In Johnson’s third example, the Biden White House sent top public health officials 17 pages of talking points for a “tough QA” on COVID-19. In the FOIA documents, all the topics are redacted, making it impossible to know what the White House was communicating.
“Ultimately, despite your agencies’ awareness of the risks associated with the COVID-19 vaccines, the main talking point from these and other public health officials was uniform and entirely deceptive: the vaccines are safe and effective,” Johnson wrote.
Pattern of stonewalling and evading by government health agencies
Risa Evans, staff attorney at CHD, told The Defender that over the last several years, CHD has filed several FOIA requests with the FDA, CDC and National Institutes of Health seeking records connected with post-authorization safety monitoring of COVID-19 shots.
“We have found that obtaining these records is a challenge, due to a mix of denials, redactions and delays by the agencies,” she said.
When the agencies failed to respond to FOIA requests for records related to safety signals, CHD filed multiple FOIA lawsuits seeking the requested documents.
In one case the FDA requested at least 18 months to fulfill the request — after it had already delayed 14 months.
“The agencies’ failure to respond to our requests in a timely and open fashion is particularly ironic in light of recent statements by Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, calling for more transparency as a way of combating vaccine ‘hesitancy,’” Evans said.
The FDA also famously attempted to delay documents related to the licensing of Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine for 75 years.
The U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic also investigated Dr. David M. Morens, a 25-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, after it was revealed he used his personal email address to evade FOIA requests for communications related to the origins of COVID-19.
Emails made public during that investigation also showed that Morens connected Fauci to Kaiser Health News reporter Arthur Allen through a “secret back channel.”
Jablonowski, who was among the first to detail the deception around myocarditis, told The Defender if the public health agencies aren’t compelled to be transparent, they can’t be held accountable.
He said the FDA and the CDC, “are not transparent in matters of myocarditis resulting from the COVID-19 vaccines. They are opaque, hidden behind redactions, and not accountable to the American people or members of Congress.”
“This is a rot in our government, and it spreads well beyond the confines of myocarditis, the CDC and the FDA,” he added. “How far beyond? We won’t know until we broadly investigate the actions and actors.”
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 23, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception | COVID-19 Vaccine, HHS, United States |
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US President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), declaring that the former Democrat will ensure that “everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals [and] pollutants.”
Trump announced his choice in a social media post on Thursday evening. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to public health,” he wrote.
“HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming health crisis in this country,” he continued. “Mr. Kennedy will restore these agencies to the traditions of gold standard scientific research… to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
The New York Post claimed the previous day that some of Trump’s closest advisers were pushing for Kennedy to be given an advisory position, but that the former Democrat was “stubborn” in demanding control of HHS.
If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other sub-agencies. Kennedy has been vocally critical of all of these agencies, and vowed to enact sweeping reforms if placed in charge of them.
A long-time vaccine skeptic and proponent of organic agriculture, Kennedy has promised to “get processed food out of school lunch immediately,” to recommend that fluoride be removed from the water supply, and to crack down on the use of chemical pesticides and herbicides in farming.
Kennedy announced last October that he would run for the presidency as an independent candidate, ending his bid to challenge President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party’s primary elections. He suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump in August, citing Trump’s support for free speech, his promise to end the Ukraine conflict, and his willingness to tackle what Kennedy called “the chronic disease epidemic” afflicting American children.
November 14, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, FDA, HHS, NIH, United States |
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The National Toxicology Program (NTP) on Wednesday published a controversial report linking fluoride exposure to neurotoxic effects in children, after public health officials tried for years to block its publication and water down its conclusions.
The report, which analyzed published studies on fluoride’s neurotoxicity, concluded with “moderate confidence” that higher levels of fluoride exposure in drinking water are consistently linked to lower IQs in kids.
It’s the first government publication to concede what fluoride researchers have long reported: that the chemical added to the drinking water of hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and celebrated as one of the 10 greatest health achievements of the 20th century carries a serious risk of neurological damage, particularly for pregnant women and young children.
“The NTP monograph provides more than sufficient evidence against the deliberate exposure of humans to fluoride through intentional fluoridation of drinking water,” said risk analysis scientist Kathleen Thiessen, Ph.D., who was not involved with the study but co-authored the 2006 National Resource Council study on fluoride toxicity.
Thiessen told The Defender, “A conclusion of ‘moderate confidence’ of neurotoxic effects, especially on unborn and newborn children, ought to mean an immediate elimination of water fluoridation and minimization of fluoride exposure to the population.”
The report reviewed existing studies that assessed the relationship between fluoride exposure and neurodevelopmental effects in children and adults from across the world, including places where fluoride occurs naturally in groundwater and places like the U.S., Canada and Mexico, where it is intentionally added to drinking water or food.
The authors concluded that exposure to drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams per liter (mg/L) is consistently associated with lower IQ in children. That’s only twice the amount the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends be added to drinking water in the U.S. to prevent tooth decay.
Most environmental toxins regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are more strictly controlled. Typically, human exposure is banned at 30 times the level of their known toxic effects. None of the chemicals regulated under the Toxic Substances Control Act are permitted at a margin of less than 10.
The researchers found that almost all of the high-quality studies identified — 18 out of 19 — found a link between fluoride exposure and lower IQ in children. And 8 of 9 high-quality studies that looked at neurodevelopmental links other than IQ also found a link.
They said they were less confident that there was a consistent link between low levels of fluoride exposure in water and neurodevelopmental issues, and that more research is needed in that area. However, they also noted that water is not the only source of fluoride exposure.
“Additional exposures to fluoride from other sources would increase total fluoride exposure,” the report stated. “The moderate confidence conclusions may also be relevant to people living in optimally fluoridated areas of the United States depending on the extent of their additional exposures to fluoride from sources other than drinking water.”
Thiessen said pregnant women are often exposed to higher levels of fluoride because they drink much more water than others. And formula-fed infants are also at particularly high risk.
“While fluoridation of drinking water is the main source of fluoride intake for millions of people in the U.S., and probably the easiest to eliminate, it is not the only source of fluoride exposure, with toothpaste and tea probably being next in importance,” she said.
Fluoride advocates like the American Dental Association (ADA), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the CDC argue that adding fluoride to water is an important public health practice because it prevents tooth decay by exposing teeth to low levels of fluoride throughout the day and strengthening teeth.
Federal health officials have been recommending water fluoridation for more than five decades. However, in the last several years as the NTP report has moved closer to publication, support for the practice has appeared to wane among some public health officials.
The U.S. surgeon general in 2015 officially lowered the recommended dosage for water fluoridation from 0.7-1.2 mg/L to 0.7 mg/L after considering adverse health effects. And in 2020, out of concern for the forthcoming findings in the NTP report, the U.S. surgeon general’s office declined to make a public statement endorsing the practice.
A spokesperson for the CDC told The Defender in a statement that the agency continues to support water fluoridation at current recommended levels.
“These recommendations are based on current scientific evidence and prioritize the safety, security, and health of all individuals,” the agency said. “Continued research is needed to better understand the health risks and benefits associated with low fluoride exposures.”
The spokesperson also said, “While concerns have been raised about potential risks associated with high fluoride exposure, it is important to note that these concerns are primarily based on studies conducted in countries with higher fluoride exposure than in the United States.”
However, some of the highest quality studies to date have been done in Canada and Mexico, where exposure levels were the same as exposure levels in parts of the U.S. And a paper published in JAMA Network Open in May found that children born to women exposed during pregnancy to fluoridated drinking water in Los Angeles were more likely to have neurobehavioural problems.
The ADA, AAP and EPA did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
The long road to publication
For more than two decades, researchers have drawn a link between fluoride exposure and neurodevelopmental issues. In 2006, the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science released a report on fluoride toxicity that identified serious health issues associated with fluoride exposure and called for further research.
The NTP, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responsible for producing scientific research meant to inform policymaking, in 2016 began working on its review of fluoride’s neurotoxicity in humans.
After six years and multiple rounds of peer review, the NTP finalized its report in May 2022 — but public health officials within multiple agencies across HHS blocked its publication, according to emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.
The NTP was compelled to send the report out for another round of peer review. Each round of peer review compelled the NTP to walk back some of its conclusions in what critics called an attempt to “delay it, to water it down.”
Former NTP director Dr. Brian Berridge told The Defender the report received unprecedented scrutiny because of challenges to the report by biased stakeholders. He said he believed it was an outcome of public health agencies’ desires to protect the practices they already have in place.
A draft version of the report was made public in March of 2023 under court order.
The order came as part of a lawsuit filed in 2017 by Food & Water Watch, Fluoride Action Network, Moms Against Fluoridation and other advocacy groups and individuals suing the EPA in a bid to force the agency to prohibit water fluoridation in the U.S. due to fluoride’s toxic effects on children’s developing brains.
After initial hearings in June 2020, presiding Judge Edward Chen placed the trial on hold pending the release of the report. After plaintiffs introduced evidence of agency attempts to suppress the report, Judge Chen ordered its release in draft form and the trial continued in January and February of this year.
The report, along with four major fluoride studies using birth cohorts — where researchers collect epidemiological data during pregnancy and then from children over their lifetimes to study a variety of health outcomes tied to environmental exposures — was key evidence in the trial.
The trial concluded on Feb. 13, and Judge Chen has not yet issued a decision.
The report finalized yesterday consists of one part of the NTP’s research. The other part, a meta-analysis, is forthcoming in a peer-reviewed journal.
NTP Director Rick Woychik said in a statement to The Defender that the delay in the report’s publication was due to an attempt to “get the science right” because “fluoride is such an important topic to the public and to public health officials.”
Woychik emphasized that water fluoridation “has been a successful public health initiative.”
Michael Connett, attorney for the plaintiffs in the case against the EPA, said the final version of the report, “confirms and actually further strengthens the NTP’s prior conclusions,” because the finalized version includes a supplemental review of more recent literature published between 2020 and 2023, which also finds a consistent link between fluoride exposure and adverse neurodevelopmental effects.
Connett added:
“Here you have an expert body of the US government confirming that fluoride is a neurotoxicant. That by itself is a very significant conclusion and should really prompt the question among policymakers and the public as to whether we really want to be adding a neurotoxicant to our water supply while questions remain about the precise doses that caused this effect.”
‘We didn’t sign up to add a neurotoxicant to our water’
The number of scientists and health professionals opposed to fluoridation has increased over the last several decades. Thiessen said the final publication of the monograph — and the forthcoming meta-analysis — provides important evidence for their position and might signal a change in the status quo public health position on fluoride.
“One hopes that it will help convince many more professionals that one of the 20th century’s top 10 public health achievements has in fact been terribly misguided from the beginning.”
The lawsuit brought public attention to the debate over water fluoridation ongoing among scientists working in public health for years, with many mainstream outlets addressing an issue that had often been disregarded as a conspiracy theory.
Connett said the government report ought to raise public concern and get more people asking questions about fluoridation. He said:
“This isn’t what people signed up for when we started adding fluoride to the water. We didn’t sign up to add a neurotoxicant to our water. We signed up for something that could help our teeth. Now that we know that it can affect their brain, we really need to go back to square one.”
Fluoride Action Network board member Rick North told The Defender that awareness about issues with water fluoridation has been growing for years.
“Fluoridation is a house of cards and it’s going to fall. It’s only a matter of when. The NTP report just made it sooner.” He said he hopes the final release of the report means a decision in the case against the EPA will come soon.
“For more than four years, Judge Edward Chen has waited for the final NTP report. Now he’s got it — even more scientific backing that fluoridation is an unreasonable risk to human health,” he said.
Stuart Cooper, Fluoride Action Network executive director, said the publication of the report was historic. “This report, along with the large body of published science, makes it abundantly clear that the question isn’t whether fluoridation is safe, but instead how many children have been needlessly harmed,” he said.
The report sometimes makes contradictory statements, Kim Blokker, a board member of Moms Against Fluoridation, told The Defender, showing the influence of the public health agencies on the reporting. “Do not be fooled by this attempt to muddy the waters of this otherwise definitive report, which contains more than enough evidence to prove the shockingly detrimental effects of fluoride exposure in young children.”
Kristie Lavelle, another board member of Moms Against Fluoridation, told The Defender they were happy to see the report finally published. “The time has come for fluoride to lose its status as a protected pollutant and to be treated the same as other recognized toxins such as lead and arsenic.”
With the publication of the report, she said, “We are one step closer to creating a world where clean water, air and food, and consequently vibrant health are the norm for our children and grandchildren.”
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.
August 22, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, HHS, United States |
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A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official on Wednesday evaded lawmakers’ questions about her agency’s response to the pandemic and its failure to produce requested documents related to COVID-19 vaccine approvals, vaccine mandates and booster guidance.
Melanie Egorin, Ph.D., HHS assistant secretary for legislation, was the sole witness to appear before the hearing held by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
“When the Select Subcommittee requested documents, HHS ignored our letters and provided suspect excuses,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chair of the subcommittee, in a statement released before the hearing. “When we asked for important testimony, HHS seemed to purposefully mislead Select Subcommittee investigators.”
“This pattern of avoiding accountability to the American people can not, and should not, be tolerated any longer,” Wenstrup added.
In November 2023, the subcommittee subpoenaed HHS. During Wednesday’s hearing, Wenstrup and other Republican lawmakers again threatened the agency with a subpoena and “further congressional action.”
HHS ‘continues to stonewall this committee’
In his opening remarks, Wenstrup launched into a scathing criticism of HHS and Egorin, who heads the office that responds to legal requests the agency receives.
“I’ve read your opening statement,” Wenstrup said. “Frankly, it’s somewhat insulting. There’s no significantly relevant facts or data in there. There are no explanations for the questions we have. In fact, it raises more questions than it does answers.”
Remarking on the November 2023 subpoena, Wenstrup said HHS “assured us things would improve and your testimony was unnecessary. The department’s compliance has not improved to this day.”
Wenstrup cited documents HHS provided “with unnecessary and some illegitimate redactions” and “documents that are simply unrelated to our request,” including “hundreds of pages of news articles,” which Wenstrup said, “simply seems to be a tactic to inflate your productive page count.”
Egorin claimed that redactions in records HHS provided to the subcommittee were meant to protect “personal information” of “government officials” and “public servants” mentioned in the documents, “for their personal safety.”
“The COVID-19 pandemic should not be partisan, it should not be controversial, but it needs to be based on facts — facts that you have that we are not getting,” Wenstrup said.
Noting that Congress created HHS, funds the agency and “has the absolute right” to oversee it, Wenstrup said, “The department’s honesty and cooperation is non-negotiable.”
Wenstrup outlined instances when the subcommittee requested documentation from HHS, including information about the origins of COVID-19, the process of approving the COVID-19 vaccine, the Biden administration’s school reopening guidance, the implementation of COVID-19 mandates, COVID-19 booster guidance and other issues.
HHS was largely unresponsive, Wenstrup said.
Regarding requests for HHS records on COVID-19’s origins, for instance, Wenstrup said the documents the subcommittee received were “more redacted than FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] productions” or were “non-responsive to the questions or [were] copies of press articles.”
Wenstrup said it took “two follow-ups, a subpoena threat and scheduling transcribed interviews” before HHS delivered documents regarding the Biden administration’s school reopening guidance.
For requests related to the implementation of COVID-19 vaccine mandates and booster recommendations, Wenstrup said HHS has “not produced a single document.”
In response to a request for records related to the use of personal email by an employee of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), Wenstrup said HHS did not deliver documents on the basis that “It was an internal investigation.”
Wenstrup said that’s “an excuse that’s not founded” because the subcommittee is conducting its own investigation and has “oversight over HHS.”
Egorin acknowledged that her office “serves as the primary link between the department and Congress, which includes facilitating responses to Congressional oversight.” But she also frequently relied on pre-prepared talking points.
“HHS has a demonstrated record of working diligently across a broad range of oversight requests from Congress including this subcommittee and is committed to continuing to engage in good faith,” she said, adding, “We have produced 35 productions totaling more than 10,000 pages, including a production just this week.”
Egorin also praised her agency’s mission to enhance “the health and well-being of all Americans.” She said:
“We accomplish this mission every day by providing effective health and human services by fostering sound sustained advances in the sciences, underlining health medicine and the social services.
“We protect Americans from health, safety and security threats both foreign and domestic and we oversee the safety, effectiveness and quality of foods, drugs, vaccines, and medical devices.”
Egorin also used the hearing as an opportunity to praise the Biden administration, saying that HHS would “continue to work to ensure Americans are safe and have access to care and support they need,” citing the agency’s administration of “more than 7 million COVID vaccines.”
HHS accused of ‘intimidating witnesses and interfering with their testimony’
Wenstrup brushed aside Egorin’s claims, arguing that she and her agency have attempted to “run out the clock” of the current Congressional session.
In one exchange, Wenstrup asked Egorin whether the 274 pages the subcommittee received “regarding the approval of the Pfizer COVID vaccine” was “the entirety of responsive documents in the department’s possession.”
Egorin replied, “We did produce documents and we are happy, if that is a priority for the subcommittee, to go back and continue to work with your committee to respond to that request.”
When Wenstrup pressed for an answer as to whether HHS would “produce every responsive document in the department’s possession,” Egorin said, “What I commit to you is to continue to work with the staff’s priorities and to continue to do productions. Some of the requests that we got were incredibly broad.”
Wenstrup countered:
“You argue that our search terms are too broad despite the fact that we have continually negotiated with your staff to scope these requests.
“If you don’t want to answer my questions about process, that’s fine, but I’m going to continue to ask them and the record will show that you’re not answering.”
Wenstrup also accused Egorin and HHS of obstructing witness testimony. “The night before each interview, you personally issue a memo to the subcommittee and the witness, instructing the witness as to what they can and cannot testify to.”
Rep. John Joyce (R-Penn.) accused HHS of “stonewalling” multiple House committees, including the Committee of Energy and Commerce, saying that requests from both bodies “have been ignored repeatedly” by HHS.
Joyce mentioned an Aug. 1, 2023 request concerning the development and implementation of vaccination policies and mandates, saying the subcommittee received no documents.
“And yet you told me that you have been responsive. Is there a reason why this information has not yet been produced?” Joyce asked.
“We have shown a good faith accommodation to work with this subcommittee and the Committee on Energy and Commerce,” Egorin claimed. “We did provide a response and if it is a priority for the subcommittee, I’m happy to continue to work with you and work with the staff.”
“We on this side don’t see that responsiveness,” Joyce said.
Regarding documents pertaining to an NIAID employee’s use of personal email, which Wenstrup described as an “illegal … evasion of transparency laws,” Egorin said that she “cannot speak to internal investigations and timelines, but I’m happy to get back to you.”
Wenstrup, pressing Egorin, produced a memo in which she appeared to instruct the NIAID employee not to divulge information regarding his official work.
Egorin acknowledged that she personally approved the memo, saying it was “a longstanding practice of the department” to provide such memos, which she claimed were “advisory.”
“It seems the department council treats these memos as mandatory and I think there is an argument to be made that even by issuing them, the department is intimidating witnesses and interfering with their testimony in violation of the law,” Wenstrup said.
NIAID is the agency formerly headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Subcommittee accused of obstructing preparations for ‘the next pandemic’
In contrast to Wenstrup’s animated opening statement and line of questioning, the subcommittee’s standing member, Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) posed a softer set of questions, appearing to praise the work of HHS while claiming Republican subcommittee members were obstructing preparations for “the next pandemic.”
“The department has also worked to make a dozen current and former federal officials available for more than 80 hours of testimony, correct?” Ruiz asked. “And just to confirm, you’ve made all these efforts on a voluntary basis, correct?”
“I’ve called for a focus on the forward-looking work of preventing and preparing for future pandemics,” Ruiz said, “But instead of doing this work, our first hearing of the new year is focused on creating a false narrative … for Republicans’ partisan gain.”
“This is not putting people over politics, this is putting politics over people and the critically important work of preparing for future pandemics,” Ruiz added.
Ruiz also appeared to promote the zoonotic theory of COVID-19’s origin — that the virus crossed over from animals to humans.
In one instance, he asked Egorin, “What steps has HHS taken to prevent, control and respond to the emergence of zoonotic diseases?”
Egorin responded, “One of the things coming out of the COVID pandemic and other lessons learned is really looking at how we do better at data collection and coordination across the department.”
“There is no consensus as to whether this leaked from a lab or whether it was a zoonotic origin,” Ruiz later claimed. “We should be focusing on what the administration is doing to help prevent a future pandemic, whether it’s a lab leak or whether it’s zoonotic.”
“We have not seen or heard so much as a shred of evidence substantiating their claims of a coverup of the pandemic’s origins or suppression of the lab leak theory on the part of Dr. Fauci,” Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) said.
In February 2023, the Department of Energy found SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged from a lab leak at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
HHS accused of covering up SARS-CoV-2 origin
During the hearing, lawmakers addressed EcoHealth Alliance, which has been implicated in gain-of-function research at the WIV, the alleged site of the SARS-CoV-2 lab leak, and a January report in the Wall Street Journal that a Chinese lab mapped the genome of SARS-CoV-2 two weeks before China publicly revealed it.
“We wonder why HHS has blocked witnesses from discussing EcoHealth’s current grant status,” Wenstrup said.” Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) claimed HHS is “covering for EcoHealth and for NIAID,” which Egorin denied.
Referring to the Journal’s report, in which Egorin was quoted and which was entered into the Congressional record at Wednesday’s hearing, Miller-Meeks asked Egorin why HHS did not share information about the genome, despite being aware of it in December 2019.
“Is it not important, if a genetic sequence was released on Dec. 28, that that would be important to developing vaccines, important to developing testing?” Miller-Meeks asked. “And why wasn’t that information shared? When did you know about the sequence? … Why wasn’t the committee informed or Congress informed?”
Egorin responded, “The documents related to this in the letter that you quote was when we informed Congress, when we came across a responsive document, I believe, and I need to double check that that was provided.”
“You’ve yet to say when you had access to the document, when HHS knew of this and why it was not reported,” Miller-Meeks said. “I would say this is extraordinarily important for preparing for the next pandemic.
Miller-Meeks added, “I find your response to be lacking and I think it, in fact, creates impediments to us going forward to prepare for the next pandemic.”
Democrats accuse Republicans of vaccine ‘skepticism’, promoting ‘unhinged conspiracies’
Other Republican members of the subcommittee also expressed frustration with HHS.
“It’s both unfortunate and unacceptable that you and HHS do not take your accountability to Congress and, by extension, to the American people seriously,” Miller-Meeks said. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) said Egorin’s “inability to provide the pertinent information is either deliberate or it is complete incompetence.”
“When agencies like HHS refuse to cooperate with requests from Congress, you are not only insulting this institution, you are insulting and disrespecting the American people,” Joyce said.
“I find it very hard to believe that somebody that is in charge of this, that knows that they’re coming in front of a committee that has, for a year, requested information, knows nothing and will just get back to us, even though you probably won’t get back to us because you haven’t for a year,” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said.
But Ruiz praised Egorin:
“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Assistant Secretary Egrin on numerous fronts and she’s been nothing but forthcoming and cooperative in all aspects of our work.
“To characterize the department’s behavior as intentional obstruction when it has time and time again been responsive to this committee’s request is a gross politically calculated mischaracterization.”
“Under the guise of determining COVID-19’s origins, the majority has pursued a politically motivated probe, vilifying our nation’s public health officials and politicizing the intelligence community in the process.”
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) said, “These investigations into the Biden administration and our public health officials are really quite shameful.” He characterized them as a “hatchet job on our nation’s health officials,” accusing Republicans of spreading “unhinged conspiracies” and “forcing their extreme ideology on the American people.”
Garcia said:
“This is the same majority that encourages skepticism … and attacks on our healthcare system … even [the] COVID vaccination process and vaccines in general.
“They’ve encouraged … followers on social media to ignore recommendations of doctors, to ignore vaccinations for children, comparing getting vaccines to essentially causing mass harm to the American public, which we all know is both shocking and incredibly irresponsible.”
Along similar lines, Ruiz said, “We have a debilitating distrust in our nation’s public health systems that was manufactured, and we have childhood vaccination rates at an all-time low.”
Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) also appeared to speak for HHS, saying it “has consistently worked to address the majority’s requests and expedite their stated priorities.”
HHS threatened with new subpoena
Unsatisfied with Egorin’s testimony, Republican members of the subcommittee threatened HHS and Egorin with new subpoenas and other potential sanctions.
“I just hope that we get ourselves in a situation pretty soon … where we can do something to make you take the oversight of Congress seriously,” Jackson said, promising to find ways to “fence off some money to your organization. We’re going to have to do something drastic.”
In his closing remarks, Wenstrup said, “If we don’t receive explicit answers for the record, unfortunately we’ll be forced to evaluate a subpoena to receive the outstanding documents and further testimony.”
A press release the subcommittee issued today stated that “further congressional action” is “on the horizon.”
Watch the hearing here.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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.
February 3, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, HHS, United States |
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Federal law requires HHS to send bi-annual reports to Congress detailing how it has made childhood vaccines safer. Yet, HHS has never filed a single report. ICAN’s attorneys have called HHS out on this multiple times, but it continues to shamelessly flout the law.
When Congress eliminated pharmaceutical companies’ liability for vaccines in 1986, it recognized that it eliminated the fear of losing money that drives companies to assure the safety of their products. Congress, therefore, made the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the parent department of the CDC and FDA, responsible for vaccine safety.
To assure HHS is actually performing this critical duty of assuring the safety of products injected into babies, the same 1986 law that eliminated pharmaceutical company liability also created a “task force” on safer childhood vaccines. This task force, made up of the heads of the NIH, FDA, and CDC, was supposed to make recommendations to the Secretary of HHS on how to make vaccines safer. And, as noted above, the law also required the Secretary of HHS to file a report with Congress every two years detailing its efforts to improve vaccine safety.
As many of you know, ICAN previously sued HHS for failing to file these reports with Congress and it admitted in 2018 that it never once filed a single required report with Congress. It also admitted that the task force had been disbanded in 1998!
After publicly shaming them for this misconduct, including in the Vaccine Safety Debate we had with HHS, you would think HHS would start filing bi-annual reports and the task force would start making recommendations. Sadly, our attorneys have confirmed neither has happened.
In response to ICAN checking in again in January 2023, HHS admitted that there are no still reports. Not one.
While HHS has a $2.95 trillion budget, it apparently doesn’t care about safer childhood vaccines—and never has. ICAN will continue to monitor the situation and share any important updates.
See below for more instances where ICAN has confronted health agencies over vaccine safety:
November 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular | HHS, 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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The recent push by the U.S. federal government to rapidly expand the use of school-based health centers (SBHCs) across the country has some critics concerned children will receive, or be pressured into receiving, unnecessary or unwanted medical interventions — including vaccines — without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
Georgia attorney Nicole Johnson, co-director of Georgia Coalition for Vaccine Choice and a consultant to the Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) legal team, told The Defender :
“It’s scary because these health centers sound really good. In some of the rural and poor communities especially, this is going to seem like a really good way for children to get this care.
“And while there may be some conveniences, there are so many concerns with allowing medical exams and treatments at school. Parents need to be involved in all medical decisions and I fear they are being left out of the equation.”
SBHCs are intended to provide high-quality healthcare to kids by offering “primary care, mental health care, and other health services in schools,” particularly in underserved communities.
This includes services “to prevent disease, disability, and other health conditions or their progression” such as “immunizations” and “well-child care.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Community Preventive Services Task Force, SBHCs can improve educational and health outcomes.
The CDC also considers SBHCs as integral to its Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model because they provide health services and mental health counseling.
But critics like Johnson worry that though there may be benefits to SBHCs, there are also downsides — including lack of regulation of the centers and the fact that parents may not be aware of the broad range of medical and behavioral services being provided in their children’s schools.
SBHCs have been linked to higher human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates, according to a 2022 report by Harvard University’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation and the University of California Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The report — written expressly to “address vaccine hesitancy” — concluded: “These results suggest SBHCs create a considerable opportunity … to implement successful school based HPV vaccination programs.”
Merck, the maker of the Gardasil HPV vaccine, is one of the funders of the School-Based Health Alliance, a large networking organization that “works on policy, standards, data, and training issues” regarding SBHCs.
Federal, state authorities pour taxpayer money into school-based health centers
The idea of running full-service health centers in public schools has been around for more than two decades, but events in 2022 caused SBHCs to catch on like wildfire.
Congress and President Joe Biden in June 2022 passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which allowed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to award $50 million in grants to states “for the purpose of implementing, enhancing, or expanding the provision” of healthcare assistance through SBHCs using Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
The legislation charged the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) with expanding access to Medicaid healthcare services — including behavioral health services — in schools, and reducing the administrative burden for states and schools.
A CMS spokesperson told The Defender that Medicaid and CHIP now can provide reimbursement for services given in SBHCs for children and youth who are covered by those programs.
Additionally, in May 2022 HHS awarded $25 million in grants to 125 SBHCs “to improve and strengthen access to school-based health services in communities across the country.”
State public officials also are dedicating funds to expand SBHCs. For instance, the governor of Georgia in fall 2022 announced an investment of $125 million to expand school-based health services to rural communities in Georgia.
Pediatricians can ‘partner’ with schools
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) supports SBHCs and said in a policy statement that pediatricians may act as “sponsors” by partnering with a school to establish the SBHC as an extension of their practice or by supervising the care given at a SBHC.
“Sponsors also include local hospitals that can provide prearranged after-hours and school vacation coverage and financial support for SBHCs,” the AAP said.
The Defender reached out to the AAP statement’s lead authors for comments on how parental consent is handled in SBHCs, but they did not respond by our publication deadline.
SBHCs also have the support of the School-Based Health Alliance. In addition to funding from Merck, the alliance receives financial support from HHS’ Health Resources & Services Administration.
Documents obtained in June by CHD revealed that the HHS gave $4.7 million to research headed by a Merck consultant that focused on developing “The Announcement Approach Training,” where providers simply “announce” a child will be receiving the HPV vaccine as part of a routine office visit, instead of discussing it with the family first.
The government-funded research also is testing whether financial incentives and peer pressure can “nudge” doctors to change how they talk to their patients in order to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents.
Meanwhile, a fierce battle is taking place in multiple states where some lawmakers are pushing legislation that would allow minors to receive treatments to prevent sexually transmitted diseases — including Merck’s HPV vaccine — without parental knowledge or consent.
‘So many pitfalls … so many ways for someone else to be making parental decisions’
Justine Tanguay, an attorney with nearly 20 years of experience advocating for children in various areas of the law, told The Defender :
“Don’t be fooled! This year many schools will be sending home blanket consent-to-treat forms for parents to sign.
“Parents need to be aware that these forms are not the traditional authorization requests for the school nurse to give first-aid or to treat minor illnesses.”
Tanguay, CHD’s director of campaign and research, explained that the forms may give those who run the SBHC the legal authorization to provide “comprehensive healthcare.”
This could include — but may not be limited to — “the ability to provide preventative treatment, behavioral and mental health services, reproductive counseling, lab and prescription services, various medical screenings, immunizations and disease management,” Tanguay said.
Moreover, SBHC staff will have “direct access” to a minor child, Tanguay said, “as well as the ability to encourage a minor child to make personal healthcare decisions without the need to consult with and seek approval from a parent.”
“The opportunity to circumvent both parental rights and informed consent is ripe for abuse,” Tanguay warned.
Johnson agreed, saying, “There are just so many pitfalls here, so many ways for someone else to be making parental decisions.”
Johnson shared with The Defender a consent form currently used in a school district north of Atlanta, Georgia.
The form says nothing about parents being notified before, during or after treatment. It reads:
“I hereby voluntarily give my consent for [my child] to receive health services with Georgia Highlands Medical Services at Cumming Elementary School.
“I further authorize any health care provider and professional staff working for the clinic to provide such medical tests, diagnoses, procedures, and treatments as are reasonably necessary or advisable for the medical evaluation and management of my child’s health care.”
The form does not clarify who determines what services are “reasonably necessary or advisable” and does not explain how parents will be involved in that process. It states:
“I understand that my signing this consent allows the health care provider and professional clinic staff of Georgia Highlands Medical Services at Cummings Elementary Schools to provide comprehensive health services which includes physical and behavioral health services.”
Again, the form does not clarify what specifically falls into the category of “physical and behavioral health services” or how parents will be involved in the determination for what services their child may need.
“I think about my own kids when they were in school,” Johnson said, “how easily they could have been swayed to get a vaccine or a medical treatment just because an adult told them that they should.”
“It’s really dangerous to have all of these things offered to them without the parents even being aware,” she said. “A lot of kids — most kids — are compliant. They want to do what the adults are telling them to do.”
According to the CDC, a key component of its Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model, which includes SBHCs, is “family engagement.”
However, the agency’s 37-page document about family engagement mentions parental permission only once and does not discuss parental consent for medical treatment beyond the application of sunscreen during recess.
According to a CMS spokesperson, SBHCs “follow the same practices as any other medical center or Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provider … including parental consent requirements.”
The spokesperson did not go into detail on whether consent would be requested generally or for each specific medical treatment.
Where’s the regulatory oversight?
Tanguay pointed out that SBHCs exist without proper regulatory oversight.
According to Stand for Health Freedom, a nonprofit “dedicated to protecting informed consent in medical care,” SBHCs are “completely unregulated.”
For instance, it is presently unclear how HIPAA law (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) and FERPA law (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) will be applied to SBHCs and students’ health information.
Stand for Health Freedom also pointed out that although in-school clinics may relieve busy parents of the burden of taking their children to the doctor, “medical ethics do not allow physicians to treat minors without a parent or guardian present, which is why parents cannot simply drop their child off at the doctor’s office and come back later to collect them.”
Stand for Health Freedom said:
“Parents must engage politically and work with state health freedom leaders to ask lawmakers to either ban SBHCs in favor of the existing limited school-nurse model, or place guardrails on SBHCs to protect parental consent and involvement in their minor children’s medical care.”
Meanwhile, proponents of SBHCs, such as the School-Based Health Alliance, argue that SBHCs are a “powerful tool for achieving health equity among children and adolescents who unjustly experience disparities in outcomes simply because of their race, ethnicity, or family income.”
Johnson said she disliked being “so skeptical of something that may potentially benefit some people” but added, “as a parent, it is your job and your right to be a part of the decisions that affect the health and well-being of your child.”
Johnson said parents who experienced or witnessed vaccine injury would be particularly skeptical of putting medical decisions in the hands of government agencies, including schools.
“And the COVID response created even more skeptics,” she said, adding:
“It’s unfortunate that we have to approach this [SBHCs] with the thought, ‘How could this be abused?’ But that’s where we are.”
The Defender on Aug. 3 reached out to the School-Based Health Alliance to ask how parental consent in SBHCs is handled and what they’d like parents who may feel distrustful of the U.S. medical system to know about SBHCs. The alliance did not respond by our publication deadline.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
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.
August 11, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception | HHS, HPV vaccine, Merck |
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Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors. This is how many analysts – including Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Scott Atlas, and popular Substack commentator eugyppius – explain how leading public health experts could prescribe so many terrible pandemic response policies.
And it’s true: the so-called experts certainly have made themselves look foolish over the last three years: Public health leaders like Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci make false claims, or contradict themselves repeatedly, on subjects related to the pandemic response, while leading scientists, like Peter Hotez in the US and Christian Drosten in Germany, are equally susceptible to such flip-flops and lies. Then there are the internationally renowned medical researchers, like Eric Topol, who repeatedly commit obvious errors in interpreting Covid-related research studies. [ref]
All of these figures publicly and aggressively promoted anti-public health policies, including universal masking, social distancing, mass testing and quarantining of healthy people, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
It seems like an open-and-shut case: Dumb policies, dumb people in charge of those policies.
This might be true in a few individual cases of public health or medical leaders who really are incapable of understanding even high school level science. However, if we look at leading pandemic public health and medical experts as a group – a group consisting of the most powerful, widely published, and well-paid researchers and scientists in the world – that simple explanation sounds much less convincing.
Even if you believe that most medical researchers are shills for pharmaceutical companies and that scientists rarely break new ground anymore, I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim that they lack basic analytical skills or a solid educational background in the areas they’ve studied. Most doctors and scientists with advanced degrees know how to analyze simple scientific documents and understand basic data.
Additionally, those doctors and public health professionals who were deemed experts during the pandemic were also clever enough to have climbed the academic, scientific, and/or government ladders to the highest levels.
They might be unscrupulous, sycophantic, greedy, or power-mongering. You might think they make bad moral or ethical decisions. But it defies logic to say that every single one of them understands simple scientific data less than, say, someone like me or you. In fact, I find that to be a facile, superficial judgment that does not get to the root cause of their seemingly stupid, incompetent behavior.
Returning to some specific examples, I would argue that it is irrational to conclude, as Dr. Prasad did, that someone like Dr. Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has published over 1,300 peer-reviewed articles and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine [ref] cannot read research papers “at a high level.” And it is equally unlikely that Anthony Fauci, who managed to ascend and remain atop the highest scientific perch in the federal government for many decades, controlling billions of dollars in research grants [ref], was too dumb to know that masks don’t stop viruses.
There must, therefore, be a different reason why all the top pro-lockdown scientists and public health experts – in perfect lockstep – suddenly started (and continue to this day) to misread studies and advocate policies that they had claimed in the past were unnecessary, making themselves look like fools.
Public health experts were messengers for the biodefense response
The most crucial single fact to know and remember when trying to understand the craziness of Covid times is this:
The public health experts were not responsible for pandemic response policy. The military-intelligence-biodefense leadership was in charge.
In previous articles, I examined in great detail the government documents that show how standard tenets of public health pandemic management were abruptly and secretly thrown out during Covid. The most startling switch was the replacement of the public health agencies by the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security at the helm of pandemic policy and planning.
As part of the secret switch, all communications – defined in every previous pandemic planning document as the responsibility of the CDC – were taken over by the National Security Council under the auspices of the White House Task Force. The CDC was not even allowed to hold its own press conferences!
As a Senate report from December 2022 notes:
From March through June 2020, CDC was not permitted to conduct public briefings, despite multiple requests by the agency and CDC media requests were “rarely cleared.” HHS stated that by early April 2020, “after several attempts to get approvals,” its Office of Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs “stopped asking” the White House “for a while.” (p. 8)
When public health and medical experts blanketed the airwaves and Internet with “recommendations” urging universal masking, mass testing and quarantining of asymptomatic people, vaccine mandates, and other anti-public health policies – or when they promoted obviously flawed studies that supported the quarantine-until-vaccine biodefense agenda – they were not doing so because they were dumb, incompetent, or misguided.
They were performing the role that the leaders of the national security/biodefense response gave them: to be the trusted public face that made people believe quarantine-until-vaccine was a legitimate public health response.
Why did public health leaders go along with the biodefense agenda?
We have to imagine ourselves in the position of public health and medical experts at top government positions when the intelligence-military-biodefense network took over the pandemic response.
What would you do if you were a government employee, or a scientist dependent on government grants, and you were told that the quarantine-until-vaccine policy was actually the only way to deal with this particular engineered potential bioweapon?
How would you behave if an unprecedented event in human history happened on your watch: an engineered virus designed as a potential bioweapon was spreading around the world, and the people who designed it told you that terrifying the entire population into locking down and waiting for a vaccine was the only way to stop it from killing many millions?
More mundanely, if your position and power depended on going along with whatever the powers-that-be in the NSC and DHS told you to do – if your job and livelihood were on the line – would you go against the narrative and risk losing it all?
And, finally, in a more venal vane: what if you stood to gain a lot more money and/or power by advocating for policies that might not be the gold standard of public health, but that you told yourself could bring about major innovations (vaccines/countermeasures) that would save humanity from future pandemics?
We know how the most prominent Covid “experts” answered those questions. Not because they were dumb, but because they had a lot to lose and/or a lot to gain by going along with the biodefense narrative – and they were told millions would die if they failed to do so.
Why understanding the motives of public health leaders during Covid is so important
Paradoxically, deeming public health experts stupid and incompetent actually reinforces the consensus narrative: that lockdowns and vaccines were part of a public health plan. In this reading, the response may have been terrible, or it may have gone awry, but it was still just a stupid public health plan designed by incompetent public health leaders.
Such a conclusion leads to calls for misguided and necessarily ineffectual solutions: Even if we replaced every single HHS employee or defunded the HHS or even the WHO altogether, we would not solve the problem and would be poised to repeat the entire pandemic fiasco all over again.
The only way to avoid such repetition is to recognize the Covid catastrophe for what it was: an international counterterrorism effort focused myopically on lockdowns and vaccines, to the exclusion of all traditional and time-tested public health protocols.
We need to wake up to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (if not earlier), we have ceded control of the agencies that are supposed to be in charge of public health to an international military-intelligence-pharmaceutical cartel.
This “public-private partnership” of bioterrorism experts and vaccine developers is not interested in public health at all, except as a cover for their very secret and very lucrative biowarfare research and countermeasure development.
Public health was shunted aside during the Covid pandemic, and the public health leaders were used as trusted “experts” to convey biowarfare edicts to the population. Their cooperation does not reflect stupidity or incompetence. Making such claims contributes to the coverup of the much more sinister and dangerous transfer of power that their seemingly foolish behavior was meant to hide.
June 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, HHS |
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The human experimentation of Operation Warp Speed was not an anomaly; it is the new normal, and the FDA is just getting started. The agency is now allowing the COVID vaccine manufacturers to change the formulation of their shots to continue to chase variants, themselves created by antigenic drift of the shots. And they continue to do so based on nothing more than measuring antibody titer levels. No human clinical trials necessary! Except, studies now show, and reality confirms, the more they chase variants, the more they create negative efficacy against the existing variant, thereby engendering a “need” for another formulation.
What was the response of the FDA to the increasing news of cataclysmic injuries and negative efficacy of the COVID shots for variants that are no longer dangerous? Last Thursday, the FDA’s VRBPAC unanimously approved a fall booster, advising Pfizer, Moderna, and Novavax to update their formulations for the so-called XBB.1.5 Omicron variant. So, officials pre-emptively approved a shot that doesn’t exist based on antibody level testing without human trials – all for a variant that not only is not dangerous but will actually be extinct by the time this poison reaches the market, just as they did with the bivalent formulation for the BA.4 and BA.4 variants.
To this day, the bivalent shot is the only one available, and according to the CDC, that variant doesn’t even exist! It is true that very few people are dumb enough to get this shot, but what they are trying to do is create an endemic schedule of COVID shots to time perfectly with the flu shots in the fall. They have already groomed people over the generation to “get their flu shot” every fall. So now the pharmacies will be waiting with the COVID needle to complete their seasonal updates.
So, what happens when you keep tricking the body to respond to a virus for strains that no longer exist? As the FDA approved these shots, the agency already had the peer-reviewed Cleveland Clinic study showing negative efficacy of the original COVID shots. Just days before this meeting, the Cleveland Clinic came out with a preprint showing negative efficacy for the bivalent booster shots too.
The study contrasted 11,990 employees of this venerable institution who chose to be “up to date” with the bivalent boosters compared to 36,344 employees who were “not up to date” and tracked their outcomes. It turns out that after about three and a half months, you were about 25% more likely to get COVID after having gotten the boosters as compared to the control group.
After adjusting for confounding factors between the groups, the study authors actually found a 33% rate of negative efficacy!
“This study’s findings question the wisdom of promoting the idea that every person needs to be ‘up-to-date’ on COVID-19 vaccination, as currently defined, at this time,” conclude the Cleveland Clinic researchers. They also observe, “It should be pointed out that there is not a single study that has shown that the COVID-19 bivalent vaccine protects against severe disease or death caused by the XBB lineages of the Omicron variant.”
The push for boosters comes at a time when more evidence proves a strong correlation between excess deaths and the vaccine take-up. A letter published in a peer-reviewed journal of Medicine and Clinical Science shows that Japan and Germany, two highly vaccinated countries, experienced sharp excess deaths coinciding with the vaccine take-up. They found very little excess death during the pandemic months before the vaccine was rolled out.
“It should be investigated to what extent the about 5%-10% highly significantly increased mortalities in Germany and Japan in 2021 and 2022 might be due to the pandemic countermeasures, including the vaccinations with their possibly underestimated immediate or protracted side effects,” concluded the researchers from Japan and Germany.
“From this point of view, it seems possible that a high vaccination rate has contributed to an increased all-cause mortality in some countries.”
The twisted irony is that, according to the CDC’s variant tracker, XBB.1.5 has gone from 80% of cases to less than 40% of cases in just a few months. It will clearly be obsolete by the fall. None of this was discussed at the FDA hearing. Of course, nothing about Pfizer’s own document showing five million cumulative reports of adverse events affecting every organ system was ever discussed. Hence, we have record injuries, negative efficacy, long-term immune imprinting causing the body to constantly respond inappropriately to wrong strains of the virus – all for a virus that is no longer deadly and for a population that has already gotten the virus!
That’s not just a lousy cost-benefit analysis; that is premeditated murder against the American people. What is the GOP plan to stop this? Or do Republicans even care? How can they continue to fund more COVID shots in the HHS appropriations bill, much less the broader FDA/CDC scheme to create new dangerous shots at warp speed?
Just how callously does the FDA regard human life? After its own VAERS system exploded with every adverse event imaginable, an outcome we now know officials anticipated, to this day they have not followed up on those safety signals. For example, according to the Informed Consent Action Network, the Standard Operating Procedures and Policies document for the FDA’s Vaccine Safety Team requires that its staff members identify VAERS adverse event reports that “need a rapid response and complex coordination,” after which they are supposed to “immediately” inform certain FDA management, who then alert other sub-agencies. Did that occur?
Well, more than a year after the ICAN’s record request, the agency responded, “A search of our records did not locate any documents responsive to your request.”
Where is the action from the House GOP? Why are they still only investigating the shutdown of schools in the past, but not the ongoing, premediated unleashing of deadly products on the American people?
June 24, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, Germany, HHS, Japan, United States |
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… And why didn’t he know it? Were his advisors concealing key information from him? Here’s what SHOULD have happened ….
A fascinating “what-might-have been” article published by The Brownstone Institute presents evidence that one White House meeting – later cancelled – might have prevented the lockdowns and much of the Covid madness that later ensued.
According to author Eric Hartmann, Stanford scientist Dr. John Ioannidis and a team of other “elite” scientists were set to meet with President Trump. The goal: Let the President know that every scientist didn’t think like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.
(Ioannidis later became famous, or infamous, for showing that, for most citizens, the Infection Fatality Rate for this virus was roughly the same or lower than the death risk of the flu.)
The article’s salient points hinge on my favorite taboo subject – “early spread” – as Ioannidis is among the group who believed many Americans had probably already been infected by this virus by mid-March 2020.
This would mean any lockdowns to slow or stop the spread – or “flatten the curve” – were probably pointless and would cause far more harm than these draconian, unprecedented “mitigation” measures would prevent.
For me, the article also raises this intriguing question: What did certain officials know (about virus origins and spread) … and when did they know this?
Although my formal “science education” ended in 11th grade, my parents and God bestowed me with common sense, which I’m going to employ in today’s thought exercise, which shows what I would have done if I was Donald Trump or if I was the Science King of the World in the first 75 days of 2020.
Something like the events that follow SHOULD have happened in the pivotal, history-changing weeks of early 2020.
The fact something like this did NOT happen provides another giant tell about how corrupt and captured our science establishment has become.
I’m no scientist, but here’s what I would have done ….
The key “known knowable” in the “virus origins” saga is perhaps this nugget of information:
On the last day of December 2019, Chinese officials reported a pneumonia-like illness of “unknown origins” to the World Health Organization.
For the entire global “public health” establishment, this was a Super Bowl-type event.
“Okay, guys, this might be the Big One we’ve all been predicting. Let’s all get hot and prove our expert bonafides and save the world,” etc.
What would I have done when this news hit the Emergency Bat Wire?
First, I would have asked, “Okay, what are the symptoms of this alleged/possible new disease?”
Next, I would have asked: “Is it possible this possible new virus was already infecting people outside of Wuhan?”
Knowing the symptoms of this new disease are almost exactly like Influenza-Like Illnesses (ILI), I would have immediately started looking at all the weekly ILI “Surveillance Reports” produced by all 50 U.S. state health agencies and the CDC.
I would have asked: “Have we had a conspicuous spike of people going to the doctor with similar symptoms? For example, are people getting more flu tests than in previous flu seasons?”
As it turns out, as I showed in a recent article, the answer is/was, “Yes. No doubt.”
The next thing I would have done is told all my public health colleagues: “Guys, we need to develop an antibody assay to test for this new disease ASAP.”
After our crack scientists and medical labs had developed a suitable antibody test (China had one by late January 2020), I would have said: “We need to test ‘archived’ blood we already have in storage and see if any Americans had developed antibodies to this virus before, say, Dec. 30, 2019.”
My next Question: “Do we have any stored archived blood we can actually test for Covid antibodies?”
Answer: As it turns out, we do.
The Red Cross (and several other blood-bank organizations) actually collects tens of thousands of pints of blood every single day. One assumes at least some of this blood must be saved for weeks or months.
I would then order that we expedite the testing of every vial of “archived blood” in the country – Blood from California, Washington, New Jersey, Florida, Nebraska, Texas, Alabama – from all 50 states.
The whole purpose of this exercise would be to provide data and intelligence on how many people may have already been infected by this virus.
As Science King, I’d order that we use our invaluable new antibody-diagnostic tool to test samples collected from October 2019 through February 2020.
This way we could see if more blood donors in January had Covid antibodies than in November. If this was the case, we’d have what some might call “a virus-spread situation.”
Another point I would have made: Why do we have to depend on the Red Cross to provide us blood we can test for antibodies? We’re the U.S. Government; can’t we start collecting our own blood? Tell people it’s for a good cause – “Science.”
Apparently, the U.S. only had one batch of archived blood that could be tested ….
As readers of Bill Rice, Jr’s Substack Newsletter surely know by now, the CDC identified ONE tranche of saved Red Cross blood from three states, with that blood having been collected Dec. 13-16, 2019.
But surely this was not the only archived blood that had been saved and could have been tested (given that this was, after all, a “national emergency” – The Mother of All Live Exercises.)
But let’s say this was the only 1,900 vials of blood in the country available for antibody testing.
I would have said: “Okay, let’s at least go ahead and test that blood … but let’s test it as fast as we can …. Before we order the whole country to lock down.”
At some point, these 1,900 pints of Red Cross blood were tested for Covid antibodies, but, to this day, nobody knows WHEN these preserved blood specimens were tested. For all we know, that blood might have been tested by the end of February 2020 (weeks before the lockdowns were ordered) … or in September 2020, nine months after the blood had originally been collected.
All we know is the CDC (itself) published a “study” in late November 2020 telling everyone that at least 39 of those blood donors (2.04 percent of the tested cohort) did test positive for IgG (and/or IgM) antibodies via an ELISA antibody test.
So, to be clear, the dad-blasted virus was here – in at least three U.S. states in November 2019. That’s what the CDC’s own antibody test showed.
And President Trump – and Bill Rice, Jr. – could have known this by March 2020 if the Science officials had just put a “rush job” on the testing project. I mean, how long does it really take to test 1,900 units of blood for antibodies? Probably a couple of days.
I also note that the “Red Cross Antibody Study” results were published AFTER the 2020 presidential election – when the vaccine had already begun to be rolled out.
We also know (I think) President Trump wasn’t told anything like this in the weeks between January and March 2020:
“Mr. President, we’ve got a lot of blood we are currently testing to see if any Americans might have had this virus in November or December 2019. It’s possible, sir, this virus was already spreading pretty widely in America a couple of months ago. If this is the case, lockdowns to slow or stop virus spread probably won’t do much good.”
For what it’s worth, my conjecture is that SOMEONE in our Science/Virus-Fighting Leadership didn’t want the President (and/or the public) to know this non-trivial information.
Certainly nobody ordered any Red Cross archived blood to be tested as soon as possible.
(Also, just as certainly, no Cracker Jack investigative journalist at The New York Times, Wall Street Journal or “Sixty Minutes” asked any questions like: “Is there any evidence this virus has already been spreading around the world?”)
My main point is that nobody at NIH, NIAID, the HHS, the CDC or any member of the White House’s Covid Leadership Team said, “Let’s hold on here. Let’s see what these blood donor antibody tests tell us.”
When it came to locking down a couple billion people on the planet, why check any antibody test results first?
So what does this basic information tell us?
It tells me “someone” wanted to conceal evidence of early spread in America … that these trusted public health officials didn’t want to “confirm” anything that might stop or “call-off” the lockdowns.
… and, if we didn’t have the lockdowns, we might not have had 250 million Americans lining up to get a rushed, experimental” mRNA “vaccine,” a shot that was mandatory for many Americans if they wanted to keep their jobs or keep attending college.
Eric Hartmann’s article is about a White House meeting that did NOT take place, a meeting that might have changed history for the better if it had taken place.
Regarding Hartmann’s article, I’d simply highlight the topics that could and should have been brought up at said non-meeting … but weren’t … for some reason.
So what might this reason have been?
My strong hunch is that “someone” (or several people) knew, or at least strongly suspected, that this virus had already spread around the world, including America.
This prompts one final question: How in the hell could this person or people have known this?
It seems to me they knew what they didn’t want anyone to investigate. They didn’t want anyone to find undeniable evidence of early spread and then publicize said evidence to the entire world. Again, how did these people know or suspect what those investigations would have revealed?
June 24, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, HHS, NIAID, NIH |
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U.S. health officials opposed a diplomatic letter requesting international scientists tour Wuhan’s coronavirus labs in the spring of 2020, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
On May 15, 2020, the Department of State requested the Department of Health and Human Services cosign a letter “requesting that the PRC authorize and facilitate a visit of international scientists and public health experts to Wuhan,” the emails show.
The purpose: “To exchange information with counterparts who have conducted research on coronaviruses (including the origin and characteristics of SARS-CoV-2), examine all relevant data, and visit laboratory facilities where such research has been conducted, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention labs,” the request reads.
Secretary of State Michael Pompeo addressed the letter to Han Zheng, vice premier of the People’s Republic of China, and Yang Jiechi, the director of the Office of Foreign Affairs of the Communist Party of China. The letter’s contents are fully redacted, but are described in the request from the State Department to HHS.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar declined to cosign the letter and even recommended that the State Department reconsider sending it.
“After careful consideration, HHS respectfully declines to join the letter,” reads the reply.
The HHS media office did not respond to a request for comment.
Eight agencies and offices within HHS authorized the negative reply, including the National Institutes of Health — which funded high risk virology in Wuhan — as well as two senior aides to Azar, according to interagency communications. The communications indicate that the “authoring agency” was the HHS Office of Global Affairs.
The new emails further illustrate how fledgling efforts to gain a window into the coronavirus virology at the pandemic’s center have been obstructed from within the U.S. government.
Health officials and the U.S. intelligence community opposed publishing information related to the Wuhan lab in early 2021 in part because it “called out actions that we ourselves are doing” and “demanded access that we ourselves would never provide,” U.S. Right to Know previously reported.
The NIH, which is a part of HHS, supported the discovery of new coronaviruses and experiments that enhanced their transmissibility and pathogenicity in the lab in Wuhan, according to federal records and grant reports.
Francis Collins, then the director of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci, director of its infectious diseases institute, helped conceive a 2020 scientific article that suppressed speculation about the possibility of a research related origin of the novel virus, according to other emails revealed through FOIA.
HHS outlined four reasons they opposed the diplomatic letter.
“We have sent our own letter to Mr. Azar’s counterpart at the National Health Commission, Minister Ma Xiaowei, regarding sample sharing,” the reply read. “We would like to ensure that line of inquiry remains open, and as such do not wish to confuse issues by joining this letter.”
Chinese authorities ordered labs to destroy early viral samples, other State Department records state. Officials in Beijing even overruled a data sharing agreement between a Texas lab and the Wuhan Institute of Virology preventing early access to viral samples, other emails demonstrate.
The HHS response continues: “We recently ended funding to the institute that this letter is requesting access to. … A request for a visit could be construed as opening the possibility for that funding to again be available, something we do not wish to be suggested.”
The NIH had temporarily suspended a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, the infectious diseases group that served as an intermediary between NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“HHS recommends that the State Department reconsider sending the letter as it could be used to curtail access to Chinese vaccine and therapeutic development — something that we also do not wish to do as it could impede other Presidential health initiatives, such as Operation Warp Speed,” the response also states.
The U.S. and China would ultimately undertake separate tracks in vaccine development.
Two top Food and Drug Administration officials — director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Peter Marks, who coined the term “Operation Warp Speed,” and longtime FDA official Janet Woodcock, who led COVID-19 therapeutic development — were not involved in drafting the reply, the emails suggest.
The HHS response concludes that the desire for an inspection of the Wuhan labs by international scientists had already been “overtaken” by a resolution at the World Health Assembly in May 2020.
“Finally, the letter is now overtaken by the resolution agreed to at the 73rd World Health Assembly … to undertake an investigation into the origins of COVID-19,” the reply reads.
In fact, the World Health Assembly resolution called for an investigation to “identify the zoonotic source of the virus.” In other words, the resolution implicitly omitted a possible laboratory source.
Chinese authorities had final approval of the experts tapped to participate in the investigation. They included EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak. The investigation concluded that a lab origin was “extremely unlikely,” a conclusion immediately rejected by World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Emails used in this story can be reviewed here. All of the documents obtained in the course of our investigation can be reviewed here.
April 21, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, EcoHealth Alliance, HHS, NIH, United States |
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The National Toxicology Program (NTP) on Wednesday released a draft report linking prenatal and childhood fluoride exposure to reduced IQ in children, after public health officials tried for almost a year to block its publication.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially blocked the NTP from releasing the report, according to emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
But a court order stemming from a lawsuit filed by Food and Water Watch against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) forced the report’s release this week.
The NTP, an interagency program run by HHS that researches and reports on environmental toxins, conducted a six-year systematic review to assess scientific studies on fluoride exposure and potential neurodevelopmental and cognitive health effects in humans.
The report, containing a monograph and a meta-analysis, went through two rounds of peer review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Comments from reviewers and HHS and NTP’s responses also were included in the report released Wednesday.
According to its website, the NTP “removed the hazardous classification of fluoride” in response to comments in the peer-review process. Yet, the report states:
“Our meta-analysis confirms results of previous meta-analyses and extends them by including newer, more precise studies with individual-level exposure measures.
“The data support a consistent inverse association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ …
“The results were robust to stratifications by risk of bias, gender, age group, outcome assessment, study location, exposure timing, and exposure type (including both drinking water and urinary fluoride).”
“These findings fly in the face of the empty, unscientific claims U.S. health officials have propagated for years, namely that water fluoridation is safe and beneficial,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Children’s Health Defense chairman and chief litigation counsel. “It’s past time to eliminate this neurotoxin from our water supply.”
The controversial report will play a key role in determining the outcome of a lawsuit brought in 2017 by several nonprofits against the EPA to end fluoridation of drinking water, plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Connett told The Defender.
“We had to fight hard to have this report even made public,” Connett said. “They [CDC and HHS] buried this. If they had gotten their way, this report would have never even seen the light of day,” Connett said.
Since the trial began in 2020, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen has been waiting for the NTP to complete a systematic review of fluoride’s neurotoxicity before ruling on the case.
Groups like the American Dental Association publicly pressured the NTP to “exclude any neurotoxin claims” from the reports.
Connett said during the trial, the EPA repeatedly claimed that the plaintiffs’ allegations about toxicity could not be verified because there was no “systematic review.”
The documents released Wednesday fill that gap.
Connett said:
“So now what do we have? We have a systematic review by one of the pioneering, leading, most authoritative research groups on toxicology in the world.
“They just completed a systematic review that took them six years to complete, so if that’s not enough to demonstrate a hazard under the toxic substances control act, then how would any citizen group ever be able to meet the standard?”
The findings: fluoride and lowered IQ in children
According to the NTP report:
“The current bodies of experimental animal studies and human mechanistic evidence do not provide clarity on the association between fluoride exposure and cognitive or neurodevelopmental human health effects.”
Yet, the report’s summary contradicts this statement by summarizing the evidence informing this conclusion, stating that nearly all studies examined for this literature review found evidence of cognitive or developmental issues associated with fluoride.
According to the report, 8 of the 9 “high-quality studies examining cognitive or neurodevelopmental outcomes reported associations with fluoride exposure.”
Of the 19 high-quality studies assessing the association between fluoride and IQ in children, 18 reported an association between higher fluoride exposure and lower IQ in children. Forty-six of the 53 low-quality studies also found evidence of that association.
The meta-analysis also states:
“The body of evidence from studies on adults is also limited and provides low confidence that fluoride exposure is associated with adverse effects on adult cognition. There is, however, a large body of evidence on IQ effects in children.”
The monograph and meta-analysis found that fluoride exposure at levels equivalent to 1.5 mg/L is associated with lower IQ in children. The abstract concludes:
“This review finds, with moderate confidence, that higher fluoride exposure (e.g., represented by populations whose total fluoride exposure approximates or exceeds the World Health Organization Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality of 1.5 mg/L of fluoride) is consistently associated with lower IQ in children.”
Levels of fluoride found in drinking water in the U.S. are typically 0.7 mg/L, which is lower than the 1.5 mg/L levels found to be neurotoxic by the reports.
On that basis, HHS’ review of the reports recommended the NTP revise its assessment such that, “all conclusory statements in this document should be explicit that any findings from the included studies only apply to water fluoride concentrations above 1.5 mg/L.”
The NTP responded:
“We do not agree with this comment. Our assessment considers fluoride exposures from all sources, not just water.
As discussed in the pre-publication 2022 NTP Monograph, because fluoride is also found in certain foods, dental products, some pharmaceuticals, and other sources, individual behaviors are likely an important determinant of actual exposures.”
Rick North, former CEO of the American Cancer Society’s Oregon division and Fluoride Action Network board member told The Defender that “people consume large amounts of fluoride through tea and other drinks and processed foods made with fluoridated water, not to mention pesticide ingestion and fluoride from air pollution.”
He also said that people’s fluoride exposure can depend on how much water they drink.
“Think about it,” North said. “Your level of risk depends upon, incredibly, how thirsty you are. That’s how absurd the entire premise of water fluoridation is,” he said.
The NTP confirmed that people exposed to levels of fluoride lower than 1.5 mg/L in the water system could have high levels of fluoride in their systems. It stated:
“Even in the optimally fluoridated cities [fluoridated at 0.7 mg/L] in Canada studied by Green et al. (2019), individual exposure levels, as documented by repeated urinary measurements, suggest widely varying total exposures from water combined with fluoride from other sources.”
It added, “our moderate confidence conclusion is primarily based on studies with total fluoride exposure that approximates or exceeds what is generally associated with consumption of optimally fluoridated water [0.7 mg/L] in the United States.”
“We have stressed in our monograph that our conclusions apply to total fluoride exposures rather than to exposures exclusively through drinking water.”
“What the NTP is pointing to here is that in some communities, where the dose of fluoride in the water is 0.7 mg/L, the NTP has found levels of fluoride found to be associated with lower IQ,” Connett told The Defender.
Also, different people have different risk levels, he said. Pregnant women and bottle-fed babies, for example, are some of the populations at highest risk.
On this point, the NTP responded to a different HHS critique, writing, “We have no basis on which to state that our findings are not relevant to some children or pregnant people in the United States.”
“The margin of safety here just doesn’t exist — it is precariously small,” Connett said. He added that the lawsuit is “basically a risk assessment of fluoride.”
Under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which is the law at stake in the lawsuit, the EPA carries out risk assessments for potential toxins.
To do a risk assessment, the EPA first identifies a hazard and determines at what dose — what level of human exposure — that hazard harms human health.
Then the agency determines in a given case whether the margin between the existing hazard levels and the human exposure levels is unacceptably close, which would make a toxin pose a risk to human health.
Connett said that in EPA’s previous risk assessments for other chemicals, such as methylene chloride or bromopropane, evaluated according to the 2020 risk evaluation method that guides this case, the agency found the hazard level exceeds the human exposure level by much higher margins — “usually in a range of ten to 20 times higher,” yet it has deemed those chemicals to present an unreasonable risk to human health.
In other words, the substances were found to be toxic to humans at levels significantly higher than what people may be exposed to in regular use, yet the EPA determined them to be risks.
When it makes that determination, the EPA must then take steps to mitigate the risk.
That can also be the finding in this case. According to a pre-trial document, both sides in the case agreed to the “undisputed fact” that the “EPA does not require that human exposure levels exceed a known adverse effect level to make an unreasonable risk determination under TSCA.”
The NTP documents also raised flags about the implications of seemingly small neurotoxic effects:
“Research on other neurotoxicants has shown that subtle shifts in IQ at the population level can have a profound impact on the number of people who fall within the high and low ranges of the population’s IQ distribution.
“For example, a 5-point decrease in a population’s IQ would nearly double the number of people classified as intellectually disabled.”
Top HHS and CDC officials tried to ‘water down’ and block the report
In 2016, a group of six nonprofit organizations and several individuals petitioned the EPA to end fluoridation of drinking water in the U.S. based on evidence of health risks associated with fluoride, namely neurotoxicity.
The EPA rejected the petition.
In response, Food and Water Watch, Fluoride Action Network and others sued the EPA in 2017, seeking an end to water fluoridation.
The plaintiffs argued that water fluoridation violates the EPA’s Toxic Substances Control Act and that fluoride is neurotoxic and lowers children’s IQ.
They based their initial claims on dozens of studies and reviews demonstrating fluoride’s neurotoxicity. Studies have also linked fluoride to a variety of other health risks in both children and adults, and evidence shows it to be an endocrine disruptor.
The EPA denied water fluoridation causes harm.
A seven-day trial took place in federal court in San Francisco in June 2020, but Judge Chen put the proceedings on hold pending the release of NTP’s systematic review of research available on the neurotoxic effects of fluoride.
The report, slated for release in May 2022, was delayed several times and sent for several rounds of peer review.
“The people on the [NTP] committee were experts in their fields who put years into this study, going back and forth with one external review after another,” North said. “You couldn’t ask for more peer review than what it already had. There were constant attempts to delay it, to water it down.”
In late October 2022, Judge Chen ended the stay on the NTP review, ruling that the parties involved could view the NTP review in its unpublished form to better inform his final decision.
However, due to concerns from the EPA, he also ruled the report could not be made public unless the NTP released it.
In December 2022, the plaintiffs filed several exhibits with Judge Chen, including a redacted version of the NTP’s assessment of fluoride’s neurotoxicity and internal emails between the CDC and the NTP obtained through FOIA demonstrating that HHS blocked the release of the long-delayed review, the plaintiffs argued.
The documents showed that on May 11, NTP notified the agencies that it was going to release the report on May 18, but the CDC opposed the release.
Emails also indicated that HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine was going to “get involved,” and, “the May 18 release date for [the monograph] is almost certainly not going to happen,” the Defender reported.
Connett said:
“It was only because we were tipped off by someone with knowledge on the inside that something was amiss that we went and did extensive FOIA requests and we were able to get documents showing that the NTP scientists considered this report to be complete and ready for publication last May, May of 2022.”
North said it was clear the agencies were blocking the release of the report, which was ready for publication.
“This was a clear case of stonewalling,” North said. “The National Toxicology Program, after over six years of research and numerous outside peer reviews, had completed its state-of-the-science report.”
Connett added:
“We have emails showing that Levine is the one who put it on hold. Rachel Levine said not to publish this report at this time. Then we got the FOIA emails showing that and NTP said they may not publish this [the report] at all. They may not publish it in final form but we did get them to agree to at least post a draft report. They will consider it a draft report.”
On January 20, Judge Chen denied the EPA’s request to add another six-month period to the stay he lifted in his October ruling.
The monograph and meta-analysis released yesterday on the NTP’s website are both labeled “draft.”
“Unfortunately, fluoridation promoters and high-level government officials have continued to label it a draft,” North said. “It wasn’t.”
Experts associated with the lawsuit against the EPA will now analyze and interpret the report in future hearings and then Judge Chen will rule.
The next hearing date is scheduled for April 11, 2023. At that time, the judge will set a date for the next phase of the trial.
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.
March 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, War Crimes | CDC, HHS, Rachel Levine, United States |
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