Watchdog Alleges CDC Refused to Track Known Serious Side Effects of Covid Vaccines

Incident is just the latest in a series of apparent scientific integrity violations documented by PPT

Today, government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust announced a complaint alleging scientific integrity violations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The complaint is the latest of several PPT has filed documenting politicization of science and other possible violations of scientific integrity policies by federal public health agencies and their leadership. According to published reports based upon documents obtained from via Freedom of Information Act requests, the CDC apparently refused to track known serious side effects to COVID-19 vaccines.

Sadly, disregard of the scientific integrity principles the CDC claims to espouse seems to have been all too common at the agency since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The loss of trust in public health officials resulting from the neglect of these principles could lead to potentially tragic consequences. The consequences of this most recent alleged violation could be even more direct, more immediate, and more dire than the potential loss of trust in public health officials. The CDC engaged in seemingly intentional indifference to known severe potential side effects of a vaccine the federal government as well as various state and local government entities, private employers, and business establishments required people to take in order to preserve their livelihoods and participate in many aspects of normal daily life.

Prior to widespread public availability of the Covid-19 vaccines, the CDC launched its vaccine wellness tracking application, v-safe. The purpose of v-safe is to monitor the health of COVID-19 vaccine patients and collect data on the vaccines’ safety. 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 use v-safe 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.

“Based upon the public pronouncements of federal health officials one might believe the Covid-19 vaccines are unique among virtually all medications in that there are no significant or severe side effects possible from their use,” stated Michael Chamberlain, Director of Protect the Public’s Trust. “However, it’s easy to claim there are no side effects when you refuse to track them. This episode represents yet another example of how, during the pandemic, our public health officials have taken a jackhammer to the foundation of public trust it took them decades to build.”

###