The Biden era ACIP provided third rate pharmacovigilance
And I can prove it with just one slide from their own vaccine discussion meeting
Summary:
RFK Jr. fired the entire Biden-era ACIP committee yesterday, prompting criticism from vaccine pushers who called the committee a "model for transparent, fact-based guidance"
I challenge this characterization using just one slide from ACIP's own August 30, 2021 presentation that claimed "0 deaths" from myocarditis in 18-29 year olds who received Pfizer vaccines
ACIP cherry-picked data through multiple restrictive filters including age limits (18-29), single vaccine type (Pfizer only), US reports only, specific date cutoffs, and myocarditis-only symptoms
Extending the data cutoff by just one week revealed at least one death that was reported to VAERS by August 27, 2021 - four days before the ACIP meeting
Including foreign reports added another death that was received even earlier than the domestic case
Adding Moderna vaccines to the analysis revealed three additional death reports that ACIP excluded.
ACIP's Moderna presentation omitted death data entirely
Expanding the age range to 35 uncovered two more deaths, though it missed Victor Simoes' case because his VAERS report lacked myocarditis coding despite his documented diagnosis
Searching for broader cardiac symptoms (using "cardi" keyword) increased the death count to 68 cases in the same demographic
Foreign VAERS reports frequently contain missing age data in spreadsheet columns despite ages being mentioned in clinical narratives, causing these cases to be excluded from age-filtered searches
I want to clarify that I refer to it as the Biden era ACIP because I am specifically referring to the time period from Dec 2020 till yesterday (when the entire committee was fired by RFK Jr). I don’t exactly know when their tenures began or who appointed them, and I certainly don’t know if the Trump 2.0 era’s ACIP will be any better :-)
We got this news yesterday
And of course the vaccine pushers immediately jumped to Twitter to criticize this move.
I can prove that the Biden era ACIP was actually third rate and were definitely not a “model for transparent, fact-based guidance with rigorous reviews of vaccine safety”
In fact, I can prove it using exactly one slide from ACIP’s own presentation on 30 August 2021 (page 12)
This is what the slide says:
In particular, notice that it says “0 deaths” for the subset of VAERS reports that they considered.
What constitutes “rigorous review of vaccine safety”?
Before I go further into the article I want to step back a little and ask what would constitute rigorous review of vaccine safety (which is what Dr Tom Frieden claims)
We can answer this question more easily by asking what would NOT be considered rigorous review of vaccine safety?
I would argue that if the ACIP cherry picks data so as to make a vaccine look much safer than it is, that would be the opposite of rigorous.
And they did it in so many different ways in that one slide, that it probably deserves some kind of award1!
I have created a dataset2 on my local machine which helps me run queries over the entire VAERS data and I will use it to show what the ACIP panel missed.
First of all, the basic claim of 0 deaths is true.
Let us look at each filter
Age between 18 and 29
Vaccine = Pfizer
Location = US only
Date received = before 2021-08-18
Symptom = Myocarditis only
Add an extra week to the date received
Let us see if this holds if we extend it out till 2021-08-25
As you can see, we already have one death when we do this.
Let us look at the date it was received
We see that the report was received on 23rd August 2021 and it was even published to VAERS by 27th August 2021. The meeting was on 31st August 2021. Why wasn’t this information added to the slides?
Include foreign data
One of the most puzzling aspects of VAERS is how little is known about foreign reports.
In this case, by simply allowing foreign reports, we get one more death report.
Let us look at some more details for the foreign report
Notice that it was received even earlier, so there was even less reason not to include this report in the slides.
Also, if you scroll down that report, you will see that both the SPLTTYPE (which can be used to infer the country) and the writeup was removed from the VAERS CSV files for the EU region in November 2022. This means you cannot even search for a keyword like “heart attack” in the clinical narrative on CDC WONDER VAERS search tool to find similar reports from EU.
Include Moderna
Let us now include the Moderna vaccine, which recently got approval for a new concoction.
We see three more VAERS death reports have been added into this list because of Moderna
At this point, people would be asking - “where is the equivalent report/presentation for Moderna?”
I looked through the ACIP archives for 2021.
The only equivalent I found was the following
But the presentation does not mention deaths at all!
In addition, they combine myocarditis and pericarditis into a single group. I still don’t understand the significance of this addition of pericarditis into the discussion, especially if the goal is to produce an equivalent presentation/report to the Pfizer one.
Was this just unintentional? If anyone has any insight please let me know in the comments.
In any case, it seems like yet another US health agency chose some manipulative techniques to downplay vaccine injuries in order to sell more vaccines.
Increase the age to 35
The reason for the focus on ages 12 to 29 was that the risk for myocarditis was found to become much lower after 30 (compared to the 12 to 29 cohort).
While the focus on 12 to 29 is understandable, I am increasing the age to 35 to see if it includes Victor Simoes who died from myocarditis after his first Pfizer shot since his story proves a few more gaping holes in the pharmacovigilance process.
This is the query result
This has added two more reports
But neither of them is Victor’s VAERS report.
So why didn’t Victor’s VAERS report appear in the list?
It is because he died before they could get him to the hospital, and so (presumably) the hospital did not even file a VAERS report.
Also, notice that the list of symptoms in the VAERS report does not include myocarditis.
Even though the SMQ3 (which does not show up in the VAERS SYMPTOMS CSV file) does display this information
Given that Victor was also diagnosed with myocarditis, how many such reports slipped through the pharmacovigilance cracks?
Include other cardiac related symptoms
I can tweak the query and use a little trick - search for all words which include “cardi” but does not include the symptom myocarditis (which we have already seen before)
You will find that it will encompass nearly every possible heart related condition we might be interested in. And even if this crude keyword search misses some cardiac issue it only strengthens my case in this article.
Notice that this filter alone has increased the total to 68 deaths
Not all of these may be vaccine injuries, but that is still a lot of cardiac related deaths for a cohort which is not usually prone to such conditions.
What happens to foreign deaths reports with missing ages?
One of the most concerning findings in all this is the fact that a lot of foreign VAERS reports have an empty AGE_YRS column even though the report writeup clearly mentions the age.
As you can see below, this happens even for death reports. I found three more reports satisfying the conditions that the ACIP used (in other words the age is between 12 and 29 but the age value is empty in the CSV file while it is mentioned in the clinical narrative)
In other words, the ACIP folks would not have been able to find these reports no matter what other filters they used, because the age filter would not have been satisfied.
In a way though, I am glad they cherry picked the data in this way. There is nothing quite like seeing a big fat zero on a slide - because all you need is to find one counterexample, and you have already proven the presenter wrong!
Up to date only until the early May 2025 VAERS data. I haven’t yet incorporate the new data which was published late May/beginning June VAERS data, but it doesn’t change anything in terms of analysis
Note: the SMQ is only displayed in the original view and not the history view on medalerts website
Does anyone know why the "Life Threatening" box is always a "No" despite the patient dying? You'd have thought the age box would have to be completed before filling in remainder of form, wouldn't you? Breaks my heart reading these young people death reports.