Ron Johnson Blasts 'Legacy Media' for Ignoring Team Biden Coverup of COVID-Vaccine Risks
The Republican senator calls it 'the biggest government scandal in my lifetime.'
Senator Ron Johnson said Thursday the Biden administration’s refusal to warn Americans about the COVID-19 vaccines’ risks — even covering up the data — is “the biggest government scandal in my lifetime, and one that is crying out for full media attention and coverage.”
The Wisconsin Republican noted on X that April 29, “as Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, I held a hearing and released a report titled ‘Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.’” Yet “even now that we have documented proof of corruption, most of the legacy media refuses to report on it,” he said.
“The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA TODAY, and Fox Digital have all declined or ignored requests to publish this op-ed,” he added. “NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, and MSNow have all refused to cover my report.”
He alleges President Joe Biden’s health officials failed to act on evidence from a Food and Drug Administration scientist who used an alternative data-analysis method that uncovered additional safety signals — possible adverse effects — associated with COVID-19 vaccines. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authorities also told her to stop sharing her findings.
Mr. Johnson’s 39-page report cites internal records showing Dr. Ana Szarfman, a senior medical officer and safety data mining developer at the Food and Drug Administration, worked with statistician William DuMouchel to create an updated model for analyzing data that reduced the phenomenon of “masking.” That can happen, she wrote in a 2022 Drug Safety article, when “signals for a vaccine of interest are hidden by the presence of other reported vaccines. This masking effect may in turn limit or delay our understanding of the risks associated with new and established vaccines.”
If vaccines under trial being compared to one another feature the same adverse effects, those effects are “masked,” or missed, in analyses because the baselines are essentially the same for all. That can lead regulators to overlook safety signals that indicate a vaccine has risks, especially for certain populations.
The updated model uncovered dozens of statistically significant safety signals the FDA’s existing system missed, including sudden cardiac death, heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary infarction, and Bell’s palsy.
Dr. Szarfman repeatedly shared her findings with officials beginning in March 2021. They instructed her to stop distributing data-mining analyses and expressed concerns her work could “create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric.”
The Johnson report also points to internal emails in which FDA officials admitted their current data-analysis system was a “one-size-fits-all” model that had limitations in detecting risks. They concluded the new method, the Regression-Adjusted Gamma Poisson Shrinker model, can detect more potential safety problems because it uses regression analysis to better account for those analysis distortions.
The report found the FDA failed to adopt the newer methodology and restricted distribution of weekly COVID-19 data-mining reports. It provides evidence officials sought to avoid additional scrutiny after congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act requests on the emergency-use authorization the federal government granted the vaccines.
“They were far more concerned about not causing vaccine hesitancy than they were about informing the public of adverse events,” Mr. Johnson concluded.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious-disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told The Washington Star Mr. Johnson is “blowing smoke” with these claims.
He said claims the COVID-19 shots could increase the incidence of Bell’s palsy, a facial paralysis, were ultimately disproven. “What you found when that vaccine rolled out was that you were no more likely to get Bell’s palsy if you got that vaccine or if you didn’t,” he said.
Dr. Offit added the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, “did pick up myocarditis early as a consequence of the mRNA vaccines, and then you could say you’re actually more likely to get myocarditis if you got the vaccine if you didn’t.”
The physician said, “VAERS is at best a warning system, but it doesn’t tell you it’s actually a problem.”
A spokesperson for Mr. Johnson did not respond to the Star’s request for comment on Dr. Offit’s statements.
Dr. David Wiseman, a veteran in medical-product development, testified at the April 29 hearing. He argues federal regulators failed to make full use of their own vaccine‑safety “early warning” tools.
He told the Star that despite being warned by the developer of the data‑mining system the FDA used to detect safety signals in VAERS and its own internal expert that masking was hiding numerous potential safety signals for COVID‑19 vaccines, agency officials chose not to adopt available methods to correct for masking, in part over concerns about fueling vaccine hesitancy.
That means, he said, the FDA could not properly weigh, according to law, “known and potential risks” against benefits when granting or updating emergency-use authorizations. EUA regulations require the identification of potential as well as known risks, so these potential risks needed to be considered, even without proof of causality. It raises both safety and transparency concerns that Dr. Wiseman described as “seriously scandalous.”
Dr. Wiseman said it is important, based on the EUA regulations, for those contemplating a specific vaccine to be aware of the potential risks as well as the promised rewards.
“The public have to be informed of potential risks, even though they may not turn out to be causal, and so if they were denied that opportunity, then they were denied informed consent,” he said.
And because the large number of reports of adverse events in VAERS associated with COVID-19 vaccines masks the detection of safety signals for any vaccine, Dr. Wiseman believes the nation’s “early-warning system for vaccine safety” is now likely compromised.
“VAERS shows 1,676,100 cumulative worldwide adverse events and 39,099 deaths associated with the COVID-19 injection, with 9,332 (24%) of the deaths occurring within 2 days of injection,” Mr. Johnson noted. “Most of these tragic adverse events occurred well after federal health officials should have informed the public about the risks they knew existed. Instead, they hid or downplayed those risks. As a result, millions were harmed after being denied their right to fully informed consent.”
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