Amid FDA Child Vaccine Revelations, Watchdog Refiles Complaints

The scientific integrity complaints demand to know whether politics came before children’s lives.

Watchdog organization Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) announced today that it has resubmitted three COVID-era scientific integrity complaints to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), calling for an immediate investigation into alleged violations of scientific integrity in the development and implementation of federal COVID-19 vaccine policies for children.

The resubmissions follow recent media reports describing an internal FDA memo linking at least 10 childhood deaths to COVID-19 vaccines and raising concerns that political considerations may have influenced regulatory decisions. Previous reporting also highlighted HHS’s failure to clearly warn the public about known vaccine risks, underscoring the need for a transparent, thorough review.

On August 9, 2022, PPT filed a scientific integrity complaint against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FDA. The complaint alleges officials at these agencies allowed policy and political considerations to trump data and science when recommending COVID-19 vaccines for children under the age of five. The CDC’s own data suggested that the agency based its decision to recommend that children receive the COVID-19 vaccine on policy and political, rather than scientific, considerations.

Documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) emboldened PPT to file another scientific integrity complaint against the CDC on November 16, 2022. The documents revealed doctors within the CDC used a presentation to declare that COVID-19 is among the top five causes of death for children <1 year through ages 15-19 years. The source for this claim was a non-peer-reviewed preprint study, which also overstated the number of deaths from COVID-19 in children by 32 percent. It appears that the study’s misstated claim regarding the threat COVID-19 poses to children justified the recommendation for children to be comprehensively vaccinated.

The third complaint, filed on December 16, 2022, revealed another instance of the politicization of science and other possible violations of scientific integrity policies by federal public health agencies. A number of studies clearly established that COVID-19 vaccines presented a special risk of certain severe negative reactions to the vaccines, categorized as adverse events of special interest (AESIs), including myocarditis, pericarditis, and allergic/immune system reactions like anaphylaxis or Guillain-Barré syndrome. Despite the CDC’s explicit knowledge of these serious potential side effects from the vaccines, the agency conspicuously failed to explicitly track them, burying them instead in text reports that are difficult to track and aggregate, making it almost impossible to get a full picture of their prevalence.

“During COVID, federal health agencies allowed politics to outweigh science and left parents in the dark about serious risks to children,” said PPT Director Michael Chamberlain. “These complaints document failures at every level, including overstated benefits, understated risks, and a lack of transparency that denied families the information they needed to make informed decisions. The re-filing of these complaints provides the new leadership at HHS with an opportunity to atone for the mistakes and misconduct of their predecessors by investigating these missteps, restoring accountability, and ensuring that gold standard science, not politics, guides policy.”

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