WHY would America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) want to hide covid vaccine safety data received from its ‘v-safe’ app? The self-reporting smartphone tool was launched in December 2020 because there was no long-term safety data for the vaccines, produced at ‘warp speed’, and because of the ‘rapid and extensive rollout of the vaccine’, a court heard. The app fed the CDC information from the public on real-time adverse events, information they initially said they would share then decided they wanted hidden for 75 years.
Data was gathered from v-safe in two ways: a check-box (tick-box) list with questions such as ‘did you experience nausea, sore arm, fever?’ – all vaccine reactions the CDC considers normal. The list did not include any serious adverse events that the CDC had been aware of since November 2020 through Pfizer’s drug trial safety data. These included myocarditis, miscarriage, seizures and Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Although unaware of these serious events, people suffered them and reported them in ‘free text’ or ‘other’ boxes, often saying they did not know whether it was because of the vaccine. Users filled in 7.8million free text fields, but the CDC refused to release details until forced to by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk for the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division, in a ruling described as a ‘huge win for transparency’.
One PhD lecturer, who took the vaccine to encourage her students to do the same, is now signed off work on full disability and can no longer drive or teach. She wrote on v-safe: ‘I’ve got nausea, vomiting, ER visits, + two times urgent care. Chest X-rays, EKG, referral to cardiologist and immunology. Continued symptoms & 100 bpm resting hr (heart rate) & more chest pain. No underlying health conditions. MRI 14/4/21. Help me!’
She received no help and heard nothing from the CDC, although v-safe automatically asked all reporters for regular updates. At her six months check-in she wrote: ‘100+ days of speech, physical therapy and vestibular therapy & more to come; still no help from CISA [Clinical Immunisation Safety Assessment, a government project run by vaccine safety experts] after 6 months of trying, still no response from CDC, no help from public health, no help from FDA (Food and Drug Administration), needs to be moved under [to] NVICP (the country’s National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program).’
Women who lost their babies reported that they miscarried between two days and three weeks post vaccination. Most were in the first trimester, between weeks one and 12, but some were in the second trimester between 13 and 26 weeks. One pregnant woman said: ‘I experienced a miscarriage a week after my vaccine. I started bleeding 3 days after the vaccine and needed a D&C [dilation and curettage, a procedure to remove dead tissue from inside the uterus] 7 days after the vaccine. I was 6-7 weeks along.’ Another woman said she miscarried at 18 weeks, six days after her first vaccine, while another miscarried on New Year’s Day having received the vaccine on Boxing Day at six weeks of pregnancy.
Arrythmia and fast heart rate were commonly reported in the free text fields. Heart attacks and myocarditis were also reported alongside severe chest pain, pains in arms and tingling. One said: ‘My physician suggested that I report yesterday’s symptoms. I experienced chest/back pressure (like a band tightening around me), total body flushing, tingling in hands, arms, and legs, I was rushed to ER for possible heart attack.’
Those with a diagnosis of epilepsy before taking the vaccine reported increased seizures. One said: ‘Tingling feeling in following areas. Tongue, lips, right arm right face. Early signs of seizure activity haven’t had one for 21 years.’
The CDC raised no red flags but told the public that the vaccine was ‘safe and effective’. They admit they used only the check-box information to draw this conclusion and said in court that more than 40 studies were published using the check-box data alone.
The CDC is a public service and should want everyone to know of any problems with the experimental jab. However, despite receiving 780,000 reports shortly after its December 2020 launch, made by people clearly keen to receive the vaccine, they failed to release the information.
The app has over 10 million users who share post-vaccine symptoms via text message. Current analysis was done by the non-profit organisation Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) and shows that 3.3million had their health impacted: 1.2million were unable to continue with normal activities, 1.3million missed work or school, and 800,000 required medical care.
The most received vaccines are mRNA with 1.6million reporting they had received the Moderna jab and 1.4million said they had the Pfizer, the first to market. Johnson & Johnson, which used traditional virus-based technology, was the minority with 200,000 reports.
The CDC fought for over a year to hide other data despite saying they would be transparent when the v-safe app was launched. They argued that it would take one person 150,000 working hours to review individual comments and at 2,000 hours per year, it would take 75 years but said nothing about engaging a whole team to analyse information.
They said they did not have to turn over the entries to the public because it was too problematic to redact them. Judge Kacsmaryk disagreed and said: ‘Predictably, the American public now seeks access to covid-related papers to ensure that relevant government policies were – and still are – supported and justified by the available data.’ He rejected the CDC’s claims that confidentiality was an issue and said that obscuring the data enabled potentially misleading safety conclusions by hindering the full understanding of the vaccines’ impacts.
A year ago, in response to an FOIA request from ICAN, the CDC released the tick-box data. Then a non-profit group, Freedom Coalition of Doctors for Choice (FCDC) formed specifically to obtain data for the public from the CDC, brought the final case.
In his 29-page ruling, Judge Kacsmaryk stated that all 7.8million reports should be released monthly by January 15, 2025. The above symptom analysis comes from the first two months of the release.
The judge added: ‘Because defendants structured v-safe to collect health and symptomatic responses for a full year after a vaccine or booster, reviewing that data is of great importance to the public. If “some scientists” – sponsored or platformed by defendants – “have chosen to use” only the first week or two of data to report the vaccine is safe and effective, then other scientists should be permitted to access the data to “pierce the veil of administrative secrecy,” “open agency action to the light of public scrutiny,” and “promote the disclosure of information”.
‘Many of the policies . . . were enacted because of guidance from defendants. With billions of taxpayer dollars expended to develop, distribute, administer, and fund messaging campaigns, plaintiff assumes a hefty and viable public interest in examining the raw clinical data.’
In plain English, this means that independent scientists have the absolute right to check the work of CDC-sponsored scientists and that taxpayers have the right to know whether their money was mis-spent.
‘This is a huge win for transparency,’ Aaron Siri, attorney for the plaintiff, told presenter Del Bigtree on the January 11 episode of The HighWire. ‘It’ll be an incredible opportunity to actually see what was being told to the CDC by the public. These are the last people who want to say bad things about the vaccines. These are folks who were the first to go out and get the vaccines.’
