(LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is refusing to release to the press autopsies of COVID-19 vaccine recipients citing privacy concerns despite having the option to release copies with personal identifying information redacted.
The Epoch Times reported that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FDA for all autopsy reports relating to deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after the deceased received a COVID shot.
The agency refused, citing federal law against releasing “personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” and regulations against releasing “personnel, medical and similar files the disclosure of which constitutes a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
But Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate with the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, told Epoch that the personal details on the autopsies “could easily be redacted without losing the potential learnings from” their medical findings. “If someone submits their experience to VAERS they want and expect to have it investigated by the FDA,” she added. “This includes autopsy reports.”
Epoch says it has appealed the FDA’s denial.
Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, the federal health bureaucracy’s lack of transparency on all things COVID has been a persistent challenge to those hoping to make sense of the dueling statistics and anecdotes surrounding the vaccines, and either allay or vindicate fears about their potential risks.
Many Americans harbor moral reservations about the use of aborted fetal cells in the COVID vaccines’ development, as well as grave concerns about the necessity and safety of the shots given the superiority of natural immunity, COVID’s low risk to most otherwise-healthy individuals, the vaccines’ failure to prevent infection, their accelerated development under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative giving them only a fraction of the evaluation and development time vaccines normally take, the lack of transparency from their manufacturers, and mounting evidence of serious adverse effects.
In March, it was found that 11,289 cases of pericarditis/myocarditis after COVID vaccination were reported to the U.S. government’s federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) between January 1 and February 25, which was already 47% of the 24,177 reports for the same submitted in all of 2021. An April study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection alone cannot account for such cases, despite claims to the contrary.
COVID shot defenders claim that VAERS offers an exaggerated view of a vaccine’s potential risks, as anyone can submit a report without vetting it, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention researchers have acknowledged “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.
Further, VAERS is not the only data source indicating cause for concern. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) has been similarly alarming, showing 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 month, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland, which found that the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” and 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.”