The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic reopened debate last week over what constitutes “misinformation” regarding the Covid-19 virus and vaccines. The hearings were titled, “Assessing America’s Vaccine Safety Systems, Part 1.”
Chairman Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, detailed shortcomings in vaccine safety reporting and vaccine injury compensation systems, which have led to confusion about the efficacy of vaccinations. Wenstrup, who is a doctor, noted the dismissive answers from the federal government, and claims from the government that anyone not satisfied with official answers was pedaling “misinformation.”
The complex and convoluted system of overlapping injury reporting systems, such as VAERS — the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System — was not structured to handle the massive influx of injury claims caused by the Covid-19 vaccine, he said. Only 11 injury claims out of the more than 12,000 claims that have been filed in the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program have been compensated.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican member of the committee, said, “I’m not a doctor, but I have a PhD in recognizing bullshit. There have been over 1 million VAERS reports for vaccine injuries and deaths caused by the experimental COVID vaccines. As of Jan 1, 2024, only 11 victims have been compensated.”
She said that it was known early on that children were of almost no risk, and neither were healthy young people. Covid mainly was a danger to obese, elderly and health compromised, she said. And yet even Dr. Peter Marks, the lead witness in the hearing, had been recommending the vaccine for babies as young as six months, something she called “shameful.”
“Some people are trying to belittle these reports, but these reports come from people — people that died, people that got injured,” said Greene. “In 2021, there were 706,767 reports on VAERS for vaccine injuries and deaths. In 2022 it was 206,676 … it was going down because the [vaccine] mandates stopped.”
Dr. Marks, the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, tried to defend the federal government’s response.
When asked by the committee if the Food and Drug Administration is able to process the number of VAERS reports that have been submitted on the Covid vaccines, Marks said, “the avalanche of reports was tremendous, and required re-tasking people on the fly. We had to usually staff up and had many meetings working to increase our ability to go through these reports. What the public sees on the VAERS page is a small fraction of the information we sift through.”
Wenstrup noted that “VAERS has been the source of attention and controversy since the beginning of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout. However, concerns about these data are usually met with dismissive replies. They often point to the fact that VAERS is ‘unable to prove causality’ and contains reports of ‘people being hit by a car after vaccination.’ They say that VAERS is being misused by anti-vaccine advocates and that it is ‘misinformation.'”
He said that many legitimate questions have been raised by Americans and the federal government’s answers were contradictory.
“During her testimony before this committee last June, Director [Rochelle] Walensky assured us that CDC had ‘a responsibility to comb through every single [report to VAERS].’ People who have submitted reports to VAERS have told my staff they were never contacted by CDC or FDA officials. A recent British Medical Journal investigation found this too,” Wenstrup said.
Rep. Deborah Ross, a Democrat from North Carolina, disputed the criticisms of VAERS: “In listening to today’s hearing, one might be led to believe that reports submitted to VAERS are the most meaningful measure of adverse health events and should be the sole basis for evaluating whether the Covid vaccines are safe. However, my understanding is that VAERS is just one surveillance program within a multilayered vaccine system that CDC operates, and that submissions to VAERS, which are unverified, can be submitted by anyone, regardless of how likely a vaccine is to have created an adverse event, and can act as early warnings to prompt deeper investigations through these other surveillance programs.”
Recent analysis of the VAERS database on mortality from Covid-19 vaccines shows a spike in adverse effects and deaths, but the government appears to now be dismissing the accuracy of the entire VAERS database.
A pie chart showing what is purported to be all reported vaccine deaths in the VAERS database since 1988 has been making its way through social media. Its source and accuracy are unknown, but similar information is found at the nonprofit OpenVAERS.com, which reports on the lack of transparency at the FDA and CDC regarding adverse effects.
Other takeaways from the hearing:
The Biden Administration mandated the Covid-19 vaccine without a sufficient system in place to compensate individuals injured by the vaccine mandate policy.
HRSA Director at the Division of Injury Compensation Programs George Reed Grimes said, “At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we had not had a direct appropriation with the CICP. We also had only four staff.”
The FDA accelerated the Covid-19 vaccine approval process to seemingly meet arbitrary mandate timelines set by the Biden Administration.
Executive branch officials from the CDC and FDA agreed in the committee that the federal government can never guarantee a vaccine is 100% safe.
Dr. Marks said, “No pharmaceutical is 100% safe.”
Shortcomings in vaccine injury reporting and vaccine compensation systems, as well as ineffective government messaging during the pandemic, deteriorated public trust in vaccine safety.
“We probably have not done a good enough job of communicating sometimes the actual numbers of deaths versus what’s in VAERS,” Dr. Marks said.
