(LifeSiteNews) – Officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) privately decry the “potential threats to vaccine confidence” posed by publishing credible material on potential problems with the COVID-19 shots, according to emails obtained by The Epoch Times.
Epoch reported that among various emails and other documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act request was an email by CDC Immunization Services Division analyst Colin Bernatzky, complaining about a study published in May 2023 in the journal Vaccine that suggested “abnormally high levels of IgG4 [antibodies] in people who were administered two or more injections of the mRNA vaccines” may cause “autoimmune diseases, and promote cancer growth and autoimmune myocarditis in susceptible individuals.”
Epoch previously covered the study, which Bernatzky saw as “editorial recklessness,” especially because “the net result is that this research is being viewed as legitimate and is circulating widely.” At the same time, he conceded that “if the research is in fact legitimate, it should be on CDC’s radar,” a tacit admission he did not in fact know if the information he did not want news outlets covering was wrong.
In a follow-up email, he lamented to his colleagues that the study “has been accumulating a massive amount of attention,” making it a chief example of “potential threats to vaccine confidence posed by select scientific journals and publishers.”
“Unfortunately, the Uversky paper is part of a wider pattern of academic journals conferring legitimacy to anti-vaccine claims through their willingness to publish low-quality work (e.g., reviews with lots of conjecture rather than original research) as well as their apparant [sic] reluctance to issue retractions or disclaimers when these issues are called to their attention.”
The email went “viral” within the CDC, said another employee of the agency, Sarah Meyer, who forwarded it to the center’s Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division. Another employee, Karen Broder, forwarded it to CDC vaccine safety officials Drs. Tom Shimabukuro and John Su.
One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Alberto Rubio-Casillas of Mexico’s Autlan Regional Hospital, told Epoch that he and his colleagues posited a hypothesis without ever claiming it was a conclusive fact. “Each of our proposals is based on previous research,” he said. “They must be evaluated experimentally to be confirmed or refuted. It is the only way science can advance to obtain safer vaccines. We are aware that we may be wrong, but we do not accept that our work is criticized based solely on opinions.”
Stephanie Seneff, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who cited the paper, added that it was “seminal, and it is not surprising that it has gone viral due to its deep analysis of the significance of elevated IgG4 after mRNA booster shots. I doubt that the mainstream position that these vaccines are safe and effective can survive much longer, even as they continue with aggressive efforts to retract the comprehensive review papers that reveal the true colors of these experimental therapies.”
The federal health bureaucracy has been overwhelmingly averse to investigating problems with the COVID vaccines, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative, yet concerns persist thanks to a large body of evidence affirming they carry significant health risks.
The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reported 36,324 deaths, 210,347 hospitalizations, 20,872 heart attacks, and 27,564 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of September 29, among other ailments. An April 2022 study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection itself cannot fully account for the myocarditis numbers, despite common insistence to the contrary.
Jab defenders are quick to stress that reports submitted to VAERS are unconfirmed, as anyone can submit one, but CDC researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
A 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS’s) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” On the problem of under-reporting, the VAERS website offers only that “more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones” (emphasis added).
In 2021, Project Veritas shed light on some of the reasons for such under-reporting with undercover video from inside Phoenix Indian Medical Center, a facility run under HHS’s Indian Health Service program, in which emergency room physician Dr. Maria Gonzales laments that myocarditis cases go unreported “because they want to shove it under the mat,” and nurse Deanna Paris attests to seeing “a lot” of people who “got sick from the side effects” of the COVID shots, but “nobody” is reporting them to VAERS “because it takes over a half hour to write the damn thing.”
Further, VAERS is not the only data source containing red flags. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
Last September, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland that found the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” while the “Moderna trial exhibited a 6% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” for a combined “16% higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients.”
In December 2022, Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin hosted a roundtable discussion during which civil rights attorney Aaron Siri detailed data from the CDC’s V-Safe reporting system revealing that 800,000 of the system’s 10 million participants, or approximately 7.7%, reported needing medical care after COVID injection. “Twenty-five percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48 percent sought urgent care,” Siri added. “Also, another 25 percent on top of the 7.7 percent reported being unable to work or go to school.”
Another study by a team of American, British, and Canadian researchers, published last December in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found that COVID booster mandates for university students – a relatively healthy group at relatively low risk from the virus – do far more harm than good: “per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5-4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation).”
In recent months, some schools, hospitals, and businesses have resumed mask mandates, citing rising cases from new COVID variants against which the government admits current vaccines may be ineffective. The news has prompted speculation as to whether a return to broader lockdowns is forthcoming.
President Joe Biden has announced he is seeking funding from Congress to develop new COVID vaccines for these variants, prompting fears of new mandates, similarly rushed development, and whether they would have similar problems as the shots developed under his predecessor.