America’s Trust in Science Will Not Come From the CDC
Updated
Injecting the failed agency with $22B will only deepen the divide & mistrust
By Jefferey Jaxen
The Biden administration is asking for $22.5B from Congress to “replenish key public health programs as a safeguard against future variants of the coronavirus” according to new reporting. The funds are part of the $32.5B total package which includes Ukraine aid.
For the common people on the receiving end of the CDC’s poor communication and antiquated data gathering systems, no amount of money will fix an agency that has weaponized science into a political tool. If there is a deep state, its most effective action arm during the COVID response has been wielded through CDC edicts and agenda-driven data manipulation.
“In all cases, the papers are uniquely timed to further political goals and objectives; as such, these papers appear more as propaganda than as science.” writes Vinay Prasad in his recent piece How the CDC Abandoned Science.
A recent report from The Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigating the COVID crisis was just published on Jan. 27. The GAO delivered a rare “high risk” rating to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), specifically citing the CDC’s poor data management and ineffective messaging.
The GAO designates programs and operations as ‘high risk’ due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or because they need transformation. According to their analysis, for more than a decade, they have reported on HHS’s execution of its lead role in preparing for, and responding to, public health emergencies and have found persistent deficiencies in its ability to perform this role.
These deficiencies have hindered the nation’s response to the current COVID-19 pandemic and a variety of past threats, including other infectious diseases according to the GAO.
A congressional proposal to set up a COVID commission to examine the CDC’s performance has attracted a broad, bipartisan group of senators coalescing around a plan for an independent panel to investigate the origins of the coronavirus and the U.S. response across both the Biden and Trump administrations.
Throwing more money at a failed agency captured by both industry and political interests will only serve to ensure the death of its impartiality and accelerate its current, unsavory trajectory.
COVID SHOTS ARE SAFE…TRUST US
In addition to its classical errors and bias throughout its scientific communication and COVID response, the agency cut off research and inquiry into COVID vaccine harms during a pivotal time during the EUA’s – and continues to do so today.
Promising robust safety monitoring, the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has been long admitted to be essentially a vestigial instrument restraining effective scientific investigation.
The agency’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force’s safety team regularly caveats that conclusions can’t be drawn from any data on potential vaccine harms gathered from VAERS because it is a passive surveillance system with inconsistent quality and completeness of information rife with reporting biases. Meanwhile, the shocking truths reported from hospital staff tells of an American medical community uneducated to the existence of VAERS or, worse yet, peer pressuring colleagues to not use it.
The CDC has known since at least 2006 that their VAERS system was flawed and purposely refused to do simple updates to automate the system in an effort to better capture adverse events.
A historical, explosive vaccine debate between HHS, the CDC and attorneys at The Informed Consent Action Network has been raging with little press since 2016. What official correspondences have uncovered should have made national headlines. Read them here and decide for yourself.
In 2007, An HHS-funded study by Harvard Medical School tracked reporting to VAERS over a three-year period at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care involving 715,000 patients and found that “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.”
HHS gave $1 million grant to automate VAERS reporting at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care rather than trust the vast inconsistencies of medical staff to manually enter in the data when and if they got around to it. The result was the successful automation of adverse event reports at Harvard Pilgrim in which they stated:
“Preliminary data were collected from June 2006 through October 2009 on 715,000 patients, and 1.4 million doses (of 45 different vaccines) were given to 376,452 individuals. Of these doses, 35,570 possible reactions … were identified.”
The CDC refused to take further steps to automate its VAERS system then and still does today.
Findings echoing those of Harvard Pilgrim recently appeared from German insurance company BKK to remind the world about this vaccine safety knowledge gap health agencies appear willing to tolerate.
Using the company’s nearly 11 million insured participants, they ran a query using International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes for vaccine side effects. Looking at just the first half of 2021 and “about half for the third quarter of 2021” they found that 216,695 people had already been treated for vaccine side effects from COVID vaccination.
BKK board member Andreas Schöfbeck sent a letter detailing this “alarm signal” to the Paul Ehrlich Institute – the agency of the German Federal Ministry of Health responsible for vaccines and medicines regulation. He was later
The letter continues, “…with regard to the number of vaccinated people in Germany, this means that about 4-5% of the vaccinated people were under medical treatment for side effects of vaccination.”
This event marks the first time that a private insurance company has audited its data to challenge a governmental heath agency on the widespread underreporting of vaccine side effects.
During the COVID pandemic, myocarditis has presented as one of the first line vaccine harms to garner worldwide attention as a repeated safety signal for young boys, especially after their second COVID shot. Despite the CDC’s consistent findings of myocarditis incidences many times over background rates after mRNA shots, its VAERS system is inadequate to thoroughly investigate the matter.
Other countries with superior safety monitoring like Denmark, Sweden and Finland have backed away from recommendations to vaccinate younger kids due to the unknown heart risks.
In another first, Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo has recommended that kids in his state of Florida don’t get the COVID-19 shot. His guidance makes Florida the first state in the U.S. to officially break from CDC recommendation.
Meanwhile, researchers continue to demand better, more granular data on vaccine risks as they continually raise red flags about the CDC’s purposely poor monitoring systems.
A recent study published in JAMA used VAERS to look at myocarditis cases after vaccination and found a several fold increase after the second dose in young boys. The authors concluded:
“…as a passive system, VAERS data are subject to reporting biases in that both underreporting and overreporting are possible. Given the high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination, underreporting is more likely. Therefore, the actual rates of myocarditis per million doses of vaccine are likely higher than estimated.”
Another study tracked rates of Myopericarditis after mRNA vaccination in the Kaiser Permanente health system and concluded:
We identified additional valid cases of myopericarditis following an mRNA vaccination that would be missed by the VSD’s search algorithm, which depends on select hospital discharge diagnosis codes. The true incidence of myopericarditis is markedly higher than the incidence reported to US advisory committees.
At least the CDC got COVID vaccine effectiveness correct…right? Here’s the CDC director in a recent interview admitting no one questioned Pfizer’s press release claims during the early days of the pandemic when the company promised their shot was 95% effective…nobody?!?!