Why RFK Jr supporters don't trust the CDC
CDC's pharmacovigilance for COVID19 vaccines was clearly third rate. Was it as bad for previous vaccines too?
Summary:
The CDC demonstrated a lack of transparency in pharmacovigilance for COVID-19 vaccines through several problematic practices.
The CDC stopped publishing VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) writeups for European reports in November 2022, removing critical narrative details about vaccine injuries.
Simultaneously, the CDC ceased publishing the SPLTTYPE field, which previously allowed identification of the country reporting an adverse event.
The agency retroactively deleted previously published writeups from the VAERS database, though copies of the original data remained available online.
For the v-safe monitoring system (with 10 million registrants), the CDC initially:
Used a limited set of pre-specified symptoms for reporting
Failed to mention death reports in their September 2021 paper
Refused to publish the collected data
The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) had to sue the CDC to release v-safe data, which the agency was obligated to publish as a taxpayer-funded initiative.
When eventually releasing data, the CDC:
Initially only published MedDRA codes instead of raw text entries
Only began coding free text entries nearly two years after the first vaccine dose
Continued to withhold some free text entries
As of the document's writing, the CDC had not completed publishing all free text entries and omitted critical date information associated with these entries.
These practices significantly undermined the quality of COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring
I recently told a family member that the CDC has refused to publish a lot of important information about vaccine injuries, and that was a big reason why RFK Jr became the Secretary of the HHS. I was asked for some “specific examples”, so I have written this article.
Note: Not everyone who is opposed to the COVID19 vaccines is a supporter of RFK Jr. Not every supporter of RFK Jr has a dim view of COVID19 vaccines. But the two groups have very high overlap.
Readers of this Substack know that my opinion is quite a bit stronger - I claim that the pharmacovigilance for the COVID19 vaccines was actually third rate.
We first need to understand the definition of pharmacovigilance.
Pharmacovigilance: the practice of monitoring the effects of medical drugs after they have been licensed for use, especially in order to identify and evaluate previously unreported adverse reactionsOne reason for my claim is the CDC’s complete lack of transparency around vaccine injuries, especially with respect to the COVID19 vaccines.
What is a VAERS writeup?
Every VAERS report has an associated text writeup.
Here is an example:
As you can see, the writeup is the clinical narrative which explains what happened after the patient took the vaccine. For European VAERS reports, the person who files the report is almost always a healthcare professional.
Quite often, the information in the writeup contains additional information which cannot be captured in the columns of the CSV file.
Next, I will provide some examples of how the CDC has been trying to suppress or downplay COVID19 vaccine injuries by manipulating the data they have published.
This is a non-exhaustive list, since I omitted some examples because they require extensive reading and plenty of background just to understand CDC’s lack of transparency.
CDC does not translate all fields which are ALREADY provided in the writeup
But what makes things worse, is that CDC does not even translate the fields which are already provided in the writeup. For example, in VAERS reports from Europe, you can see a lot of examples where the writeup mentions the age of the patient, but the AGE_YRS column is blank.
When this happens, the aggregate results in CDC VAERS search will not return accurate results.
CDC stopped publishing writeups for EU VAERS reports in November 2022
When people started doing large scale text analysis of VAERS writeups, the CDC stopped publishing them entirely in November 2022.
CDC also stopped publishing the SPLTTYPE field when they made this change
In addition to the VAERS writeup, the CDC also stopped publishing the SPLTTYPE field, which allowed people to infer the country which reported the adverse event.
For example, in the screenshot below, you can use the first two letters and infer that the report was from France, based on the first two characters in the SPLTTYPE field
This means the aggregate search results cannot be filtered by country code anymore.
CDC retroactively deleted old writeups from VAERS
As if this wasn’t bad enough, CDC also deleted writeups that had ALREADY been published until November 2022!
But remember, the data was just in a CSV file format, and a lot of people were downloading it as it was being published on a weekly basis, which means there are now many copies of the original information still floating around the web. In addition, I started using the pre-Novemeber 2022 copies for all my analysis without much loss of insight.
However, if anyone goes to CDC WONDER VAERS search tool, they cannot use any of the keywords in the writeups for EU reports anymore.
CDC did not disclose v-safe death reports in their publications
CDC created an additional vaccine safety monitoring system called v-safe just for the COVID19 vaccines.
v-safe was built as a smartphone app which used a “checkin” system and was intended to be a “modern” safety surveillance system. There were 10 million registrants in v-safe, which meant that there was a large enough sample size for achieving “statistical significance” when calculating the rates of vaccine injuries. It is perhaps the only vaccine safety monitoring system with over 10 million users which curiously lacks even a Wikipedia entry!
CDC wrote a paper about v-safe in September 2021 based on initial reports from v-safe and failed to mention that people had already reported deaths. I wrote an extensive article about it.
So here is what happened:
the v-safe app had only a set of pre-specified symptoms users could report using check-the-box options
if they had to report anything which wasn’t one of the check-the-box options, they would use the free form text box input
there were already some relatives of deceased who wrote in to those text boxes that the v-safe registrant had died
CDC did not even mention this in their September 2021 paper, and made it look like there were no deaths at all
CDC refused to publish any of the v-safe data initially
At the beginning, CDC did not even publish the v-safe data, even though in theory it was a taxpayer funded initiative, which means that the data had to be published as soon as possible.
The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), often branded as an “anti-vaccine” organization, had to sue the CDC before they even agreed to release the v-safe data.
In other words, it took a so-called “anti-vaccine” organization to get the CDC to even publish the information they were supposed to. What does that say about the state of pharmacovigilance for vaccines these days?
CDC then tried to hide the free text contents
Even when the CDC published the data, they initially did not release the raw free text information.
Instead they published the MedDRA codes corresponding to the free text information, and they published it around mid-2023.
Only after seeing this data did the public realize three things:
the CDC only started “coding” MedDRA codes for the free text entries after October 2022 (which was nearly two years after the first dose of the vaccine was administered)
there were some entries which were coded as “Death”
there were also plenty of severe injuries mentioned in the free text input. While I would not claim that all the severe injuries were caused by the vaccine, CDC had created an illusion of safety by completely avoiding all mentions of these vaccine injuries
CDC has not published all the free text entries as of this writing
ICAN then sued the CDC to publish the raw free text entries, and CDC eventually agreed to publish it entirely in 12 installments, completed by mid Jan 2025.
The 12th batch has not yet been published, and even the ones which were published were not done on a regular or predictable fashion.
In fact, the release cadence was quite suspicious.
Even the published free text is missing date information
While the CDC did publish the free text entries, a given registrant could submit multiple free text entries. If the date associated with a given free text entry is not published, it is not possible to map the free text entry to the corresponding MedDRA code without doing some additional work.
And the CDC did not publish the date corresponding to the free text entries, leaving the v-safe analysts to figure this out for themselves. This is now doable using LLMs, but obviously it will incur time and money cost.
Given that CDC went out of their way to obstruct rigorous v-safe analysis, it only increases the suspicion that they are trying to hide something.
My Grok conversation
Here is how Twitter’s Grok concluded our conversation when I asked if it would be justified to say that the COVID19 vaccine safety monitoring was “third rate”
No trust in the CDC? Easy! They are lying sacks of shit, need to be fired, and if appropriate prosecuted for fraud.
Autism All the heavy metals in them!!!