I became your enemy because I tell you the truth
“You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time,
but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” A. Lincoln
What a FOIA slip-up reveals about the CDC’s cavalier attitude to VAERS
This is going to be a short one. My indefatigable but anonymous source for FOIA documents shared a short one with me a few days ago. It was a request for e-mails between CDC officials John Su, Tom Shimabukuro and Kevin Malone.
As the above response letter notes, many of the e-mails released via the FOIA were substantially redacted. FOIA exemption (b)(5) is mainly for intra- or inter-agency deliberations. Basically, if the communication or document can be categorized as being part of a deliberative process, it can be redacted. As a result, most FOIA requests for correspondence come back mostly empty, with large chunks covered by opaque white squares marked (b)(5) or (b)(6), indicating which exemption justified the redaction.
It appears that one of the e-mails in this recent release was supposed to be redacted, but for some reason the square was not opaque. You can see the (b)(5) in gray stamped over it and a rectangular border around the text intended for redaction. It’s dated Dec. 7, 2021 from the head of the CDC’s VAERS team, John Su, and it’s quite revealing:
It’s his early morning “offhand musings” on the weekly COVID-19 VAERS data mining report on COVID-19, where he notes a lot of reports for “exposure by breast milk,” “off label use” and other indications of errors among children and teens, which they say in reviewing reports among kids 5-11 years, and “vaccine failure” which, yes, obviously represents “breakthrough” infection, which as head of the VAERS team you’d think John Su would know.
Two things to note: this e-mail proves that Su had seen VAERS reports for COVID-19 vaccine “exposure by breast milk” on Dec. 7, 2021.
Of course it had been established that COVID antibodies were present in breast milk in vaccinated mothers, but officials claimed — and still do — that it poses no risk to breastfeeding infants. Here is a link to in in-depth investigation into 648 VAERS reports related to breastfeeding infants whose moms were vaccinated, revealing devastating harm caused
to many breastfeeding infants, including deaths.
That report is from September 2022, but Jessica Rose wrote a blog entry on this in August, 2021:
And in a recent tweet she updated her analysis:
“There are 1,836 reports in VAERS (D+FR) as of May 15, 2023 involving exposure via breast milk. Of those, 122 are 0-4. The top reported AEs for babies 0-4: fever, diarrhea, vomiting and rash. At least 4 dead. 3 from breast-feeding association and 1 from direct injection.”
Such reports were not new in Dec. 2021, but apparently there happened to be enough reports that week to catch John Su’s attention, if not his concern. His attitude seems rather blasé, and he writes that his observations are “offhand musings.” He doesn’t seem the least bit concerned to see reports of exposure by breastmilk. He does ask if the number represents a true increase. We don’t know what answer he got back. But what he should be asking is: why were they seeing any such reports at all? At the time, the official position was that the mRNA COVID vaccines couldn’t be transmitted by breastmilk, or if it could then only in miniscule, insignificant quantities. (A paper in JAMA in Sept. 2022 later proved that isn’t exactly true.) So there shouldn’t be any such reports.
His “offhand musings” attitude is indicative of the casual disregard with which CDC officials treat adverse events from vaccines. He shouldn’t have had to wait for the coffee to kick in — if he truly cared about vaccine safety and took his job seriously, seeing reports of vaccine exposure through breastmilk should have been enough to jolt him awake and spur him to actually read through the reports and launch a thorough inquiry. Of course this comes as no surprise since we know they ignored and hid from the public 770 highly concerning safety signals in adults and 162 in children and teens.
CDC Finally Released Its VAERS Safety Monitoring Analyses for COVID Vaccines via FOIA
SUMMARY CDC’s VAERS safety signal analysis based on reports from Dec. 14, 2020 – July 29, 2022 for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines shows clear safety signals for death and a range of highly concerning thrombo-embolic, cardiac, neurological, hemorrhagic, hematological, immune-system and menstrual adverse events (AEs) among U.S. adults.
But hey, I guess I should give him some credit. At least he actually bothered to glance through the weekly VAERS reports, which is far more than I would have expected. Though of course the reports were basically worthless at that point, since they hadn’t yet started actually doing the safety signal analysis they were supposed to. Eyeballing raw counts of adverse event reports is NOT how any serious public health agency should looking for safety signals. But there you have it, your tax dollars at work. Somebody, please buy John Su another cup of coffee — it might work wonders.
Here is a PDF of all the e-mails from the FOIA request. The one from John Su is on page 45:
We know it was for COVID-19 vaccines because those were the only vaccines at that time for which they were producing and reviewing weekly reports.
Yes, I know that VAERS is not intended to be used to establish causality. The CDC’s approach is that VAERS reports and safety signals should not be treated as causal until other data systems support causation. I believe, however, that one should adopt an approach based on the precautionary principle: VAERS reports and especially safety signals should be treated as causal until other data systems can rule out causation. As a historical example, when they saw a safety signal for the rotavirus vaccine in 1999, they suspended it’s use. Only a few months later after more careful scrutiny did they take it off the market completely. They also suspended the J&J COVID jab after a few cases of VITT had been reported, though resumed selling it shortly afterwards.
All it takes for Evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing
VIDEO: ISRAEL. REPORT ON THE HAZARDS OF VACCINES BY INDEPENDENT SCIENTISTS TO THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. June 6, 2022
https://jackanapes.substack.com/p/wake-up-and-smell-the-glitch-in-the?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Michael Loyman