Newly released emails show that a senior FDA official raised concerns with Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins in May 2021 about reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, prompting Fauci to suggest consulting other federal health officials and cautioning that they could not “ignore” the matter.
Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Rand Paul (R-KY), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the correspondence over the weekend. The email was written by Dr. Janet Woodcock, who was serving as acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration at the time, and sent to Fauci and Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health.
“I have been contacted by a number of people who have experienced adverse events post COVID-19 vaccination (from all three of the current vaccines). Many are healthcare professionals, some of whom I know. The symptoms do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing,” she wrote.
Woodcock acknowledged that a nationwide vaccination campaign would inevitably produce reports that could have different explanations, but she expressed concern that people reporting symptoms felt they were being dismissed.
“Clearly during mass vaccination you will get a lot of psychological reactions and it is hard to sort these things out. But the people’s main complaint is that no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this,” she said, encouraging them to do a study and evaluate a “cohort of these individuals.”
Woodcock suggested that properly investigating the reports would require both funding and a researcher willing to examine unusual medical cases.
“But of course $$ need to be made available, and you would need an investigator who is interested in ‘medical mysteries,’” she wrote, noting, “I doubt the industry would support, for obvious reasons.”
She also warned that failing to investigate a potential problem early could create greater difficulties later.
“But my experience is, that if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared,” she said, asking, “What do you think of this? Jw,” the email concluded with Janet Woodcock’s initials.
Rather than immediately answering Woodcock, Fauci forwarded her message to Collins the following day. According to Johnson’s office, Fauci wrote:
“Janet [Woodcock] asks what we think of this? We cannot ignore her. We should probably bring in CDC and see what Rochelle [Walensky] thinks.”
It remains unclear from the records released thus far whether Rochelle Walensky, who was then director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was subsequently consulted about Woodcock’s concerns.
Johnson’s office also pointed to contemporaneous reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. According to the senator’s office, when Woodcock sent the email, the database contained “440,025 worldwide adverse events and 8,650 deaths associated with the COVID injection reported to VAERS, with 3,350 (39 percent) of 0those deaths occurring within 2 days of injection.” VAERS reports by themselves do not establish that a vaccine caused a reported medical event or death.
“What they knew in private they never said to the public,” Sen. Paul remarked.
Fauci continued publicly urging Americans to receive COVID-19 vaccines throughout 2021, particularly as new variants emerged. He repeatedly warned that unvaccinated Americans faced substantially greater risks from the virus and at one point spoke of “almost two types of America” developing between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
“They’re going to be very vulnerable. That’s why I worry about the people who refuse to get vaccinated. When you’re dealing with any COVID virus, when you’re dealing with one that spreads so rapidly, and you’re unvaccinated, the virus is going to find you,” he warned in December 2021.
“And I know there will be a lot of people that will get seriously ill if you are unvaccinated. That’s the reason why despite the recalcitrance on the part of so many people to get vaccinated, we continue to encourage them, particularly in the context of this new variant, to please get vaccinated. If you have been vaccinated, make sure you get your booster in time,” he said.
COVID-19 vaccines were ultimately shown not to completely prevent infection or transmission, particularly as newer variants emerged, although studies found that vaccination reduced the risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death, with effectiveness varying over time, by variant and by vaccine dose.
The newly disclosed Woodcock correspondence comes after Johnson and Paul released another set of communications last week involving Fauci. That release included a text sent from Fauci’s government-issued cellphone in which he discussed whether a COVID-19 vaccination administered during the first trimester of pregnancy could “theoretically” be associated with miscarriage.
{Matzav.com}
