by Debra Heine
In May 2021, Janet Woodcock, the Acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), sent an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director, expressing concern about the large number of adverse events she was hearing about following COVID vaccinations.
The correspondence, released by Senators Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday, expose how federal health officials ignored early safety signals.
Woodcock (pictured above) said she had personally received reports from people, including many healthcare professionals, experiencing hard to classify adverse events that were not being captured by existing surveillance systems like VAERS.
She said all three of the vaccines— Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson—were resulting in these injuries.
“The symptoms do not fit into a specific syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing,” she wrote, adding, “no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”
Woodcock also wrote that she thought health officials should conduct a study on these vaccine injuries, though she expressed doubt that the pharmaceutical industry would support it “for obvious reasons.”
She presciently warned that “if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you.”
Woodcock oversaw the emergency use authorization (EUA) and subsequent full approval of multiple COVID-19 vaccines, including the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which received full FDA approval on August 23, 2021 and Moderna, which received full approval on January 31, 2022.
Johnson & Johnson was allowed to continue under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) despite reports of rare blood clots (Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome).
“Oddly, Dr. Anthony Fauci seemed reluctant to respond to her but felt he couldn’t ignore her,” Sen. Johnson posted on X, Sunday. “Why wasn’t the public alerted to their concerns? Why did they continue to push and mandate the COVID shot? Why weren’t Americans allowed fully informed consent?”
Fauci forwarded Woodcock’s email to Collins the next day, writing that she “asks what we think of this? We cannot ignore her. We should probably bring in CDC and see what what [then CDC Director] Rochelle [Walensky] thinks.”
Johnson, chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Paul, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a press release Sunday it is unclear whether Walensky was ever consulted.
“That is an odd statement as it indicates they sure would like to ignore her and the reports of injection injuries,” the senators said.
By the end of May 2021, when Acting Commissioner Woodcock wrote this email, there were already 440,025 worldwide adverse events and 8,650 deaths associated with the COVID injection reported to VAERS, with 3,350 (39 percent) of those deaths occurring within 2 days of injection.
CDC used a contractor, General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), to input reports into VAERS. The 440,025 adverse events exceeded GDIT’s December 2020 worst-case scenario of 1,000 reports per day by a factor of approximately 2.6.
The two senators also released a text message Sunday providing additional context to Dr. Fauci’s message to former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy expressing concerns about mRNA COVID shots “theoretically” resulting in “miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
On January 25, 2021, Dr. John Mascola, the then-Director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, texted Dr. Fauci, saying: “I am corrected on pregnancy studies. Initial Studies avoid vaccination in first trimester due to possible fever and higher rates of miscarriage in first trimester[.]”
In the January 25-26 text chain, released last week, Fauci acknowledged after hearing from Dr. Mascola that “many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the second dose,” which could lead to miscarriage in the first trimester.
After this text was discovered, Chairman Johnson’s office emailed Dr. Mascola to understand what he was saying and what he meant in this specific text message.
“Unfortunately, the Subcommittee has not yet been able to speak with Dr. Mascola as he has retained an attorney,” the press release states.
Chairman Johnson hopes that Dr. Mascola will fully cooperate with the Subcommittee and expeditiously provide the transparency that federal health officials, like Dr. Fauci, have failed to provide for years.
According to Sens. Johnson and Paul, Fauci’s phone contains more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails, but only three contacts are listed. Most of the text messages were identified only with phone numbers rather than contact names, the chairmen said last week.
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Debra Heine reports for American Greatness.
