From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The grand jury commissioned by Gov. DeSantis has released its long-awaited final report on the manufacture and rollout of the COVID shots, finding no actionable crimes under current law but still identifying ‘profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States.’

A Florida grand jury has released its final report on the manufacture and rollout of the COVID-19 shots, finding no actionable crimes under current law but still identifying “profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States” for policymakers to resolve.

In December 2022, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to approve a grand jury to determine whether pharmaceutical companies and other medical organizations “engaged in criminal activity or wrongdoing” pertaining to the controversial and harmful shots.

In February 2024, it released its first interim report, which decided that before assessing the shots it first had to understand the risk posed by COVID itself, and so concluded that the 2020 lockdowns did more harm than good, masks were ineffective at stopping the virus, COVID was “statistically almost harmless” to children and most adults, and it was “highly likely” that COVID hospitalization numbers were inflated.

On Tuesday, the grand jury released its final 144-page report. It opens with the somewhat surprising declaration that two conflicting statements – “COVID-19 vaccines were a triumph of science, technology and public health that saved countless lives”; and “COVID-19 vaccines were heedlessly licensed, excessively recommended, and even mandated to broad swathes of people that did not need them, placing their health-and sometimes their lives-at unnecessary risk” – are “both true.”

READ: Peer-reviewed study finds over 1,000% rise in cardiac deaths after COVID-19 shots

The grand jury maintains that the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative “produced an effective vaccine in early 2021 that dramatically reduced many of the risks associated with SARS-CoV-2,” but “all the goodwill generated by that amazing achievement was squandered in the following years, as sponsors and federal regulators collaborated to push out booster after booster based on shallow, inaccurate safety and efficacy data, sidelining their own ombudsmen to get doses of these vaccines into the arms of every American, regardless of their underlying risk from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

“Our investigative efforts in both of those categories were directed in large part towards Pfizer and Modema, whose rnRNA-based vaccines were the primary focus of our investigation,” the report adds. “Suffice it to say that while we are certain we have not seen everything these companies created with respect to these products (Pfizer essentially admitted this fact), we did receive a lot of relevant information from them, more than we could ever hope to meaningfully review in our limited term. Many of our conclusions are informed by documents we received or on testimony given by their representatives.”

The report condemns Big Pharma’s reluctance to shed light on the full extent of the problem, and the lack of recourse when the worst does happen.

“It is frustrating to this Grand Jury, as it should be frustrating to everyone who reads this report, to know that these sponsors have taken in billions of taxpayer dollars for creating and selling their vaccines; they cannot be sued if something goes wrong with them; they have access to critical information about deaths related to a side effect of their products; and the public does not have access to that information,” it says. “Instead, we are left to speculate, and the research community is left to draw inferences as one-off or two-off histopathological reports detailing the events of this death or that death that trickle into scientific journals slowly, year after year. Somehow, withholding this valuable safety information is not a crime. It certainly should be.”

While its conclusions will be thoroughly dissected by many experts and activists in the days to come, the report’s most immediate takeaway is that current law is inadequate to cure the problems investigators uncovered.

“While we did not find criminal activity, we did find a pattern of deceptive and obfuscatory behavior on the part of sponsors and regulators that often straddled the line between ethical and unethical conduct,” the report says. “More importantly, however, not finding any indictable criminal activity does not mean we did not find any problems. On the contrary, there are profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States. Some of those are acute, COVID-19-era problems that are unlikely to occur outside the context of another once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic. Others, however, are systemic; they will occur over and over until someone fixes them.”

The report says “it was genuinely striking to us just how many of the problems we found occurred at either the direction or acquiescence of the FDA [U.S. Food & Drug Administration], CDC [Centers for Disease Control & Prevention] and other federal regulators. Nearly every time we found an issue with MRNA-1273 [the Moderna shot] or BNT162b2 [the Pfizer shot], the fingerprints of these agencies were all over the scene, advising that the flagship and surrogate clinical trials be performed in specific ways, authorizing dose after dose and formulation after formulation based on out-of-date immunogenicity comparisons and observational results, and even running interference for sponsors by misleading the American public about validated safety signals.”

To the federal government, the grand jury recommends new clinical trials of both mRNA-based COVID shots, reinstatement of the FDA’s old ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of therapeutics, new controls on the hiring of medical industry insiders and lobbyists for health regulatory positions, restructuring the Vaccines & Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) for greater accountability, mandatory disclosure of anonymized individual patient data as a condition of FDA licensure, and making safety data transparency a condition of liability protection. To the state of Florida, it recommends a series of changes to strengthen grand juries’ ability to obtain the information they seek, as well as more widespread monitoring of wastewater for pathogens.

DeSantis said Tuesday that while his office was still reviewing the report’s details, it was clear that “Big Pharma brought in billions of dollars in profit, and the federal government amplified bogus ‘studies,’ all while suppressing any opposition that went against their preferred narrative. Instead of federal agencies acting as a backstop to bad incentives, they worked closely with Big Pharma as they cut corners, even becoming unpaid advertisers on their behalf.”

“The Grand Jury has made a number of recommendations that should be followed,” the governor declared. “The status quo cannot continue. The American people deserve transparency on how Big Pharma is using their federal tax dollars, and they deserve regulating entities that operate as watchdogs, not cheerleaders.”

The report follows a large body of evidence that identifies significant risks to the COVID shots, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.

The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 38,190 deaths, 219,170 hospitalizations, 22,082 heart attacks, and 28,769 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of November 29, among other ailments. CDC researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.

An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published February in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID injections, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 shots and offered several theories for a causal link.

All eyes are currently on returning President Donald Trump and his health team, which will be helmed by prominent vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his nominee for Secretary of Health & Human Services. Trump has given mixed signals as to the prospects of reconsidering the shots for which he has long taken credit and has nominated both critics and defenders of establishment COVID measures for a number of administration roles.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

If you thought responsible science drove the bus on the pandemic response, think again. A December 2024 report by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee, Coronavirus Pandemic shows that political agendas made regulatory bodies rush vaccine approvals, mandates, and boosters, causing public distrust.

“After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward” praised the Trump administration’s efforts to speed up vaccine development. By contrast, the report said presidential candidate Joe Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris undermined public confidence.

“[W]hy do we think the public is gonna line up to be willing to take the injection?” Joe Biden asked on September 5, 2020. This quote appeared in a Politico article titled “Harris says she wouldn’t trust Trump on any vaccine released before [the] election.”

The House report noted, “These irresponsible statements eventually proved to be outright hypocrisy less than a year later when the Biden-Harris Administration began to boldly decry all individuals who decided to forgo COVID-19 vaccinations for personal, religious, or medical reasons.”

Millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered beginning in December 2020 under an Emergency Use Authorization. This mechanism allows unapproved medical products to be used in emergency situations under certain criteria, including that there are no alternatives. The only previous EUA was for the 2004 anthrax vaccine, which was only administered to a narrow group of people.

By the time vaccines rolled out, SARS-CoV-2 had already infected 91 million Americans. The original SARS virus some 15 years prior showed that people who recovered had lasting immunity. Later, a January 2021 study of 200 participants by the La Jolla Institute of Immunology found 95 per cent of people who had contracted SARS-CoV-2 (the virus behind COVID-19) had lasting immune responses. A February 16, 2023 article by Caroline Stein in The Lancet (updated March 11, 2023) showed that contracting COVID-19 provided an immune response that was as good or better than two COVID-19 shots.

Correspondence suggests that part of the motivation for full (and not just emergency) vaccine approval was to facilitate vaccine mandates. A July 21, 2021, email from Dr. Marion Gruber, then director of vaccine reviews for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), recalled that Dr. Janet Woodcock had stated that “absent a license, states cannot require mandatory vaccination.” Woodcock was the FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner at the time.

Sure enough, the FDA granted full vaccine approval on August 23, 2021, more than four months sooner than a normal priority process would take. Yet, five days prior, Biden made an announcement that put pressure on regulators.

On August 18, 2021, Biden announced that all Americans would have booster shots available starting the week of September 20, pending final evaluation from the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Some decision-makers objected. Dr. Marion Gruber and fellow FDA deputy director of vaccine research Dr. Philip Krause had concerns regarding the hasty timelines for approving Pfizer’s primary shots and boosters. On August 31, 2021, they announced their retirements.

According to a contemporary New York Times article, Krause and Gruber were upset about Biden’s booster announcement. The article said that “neither believed there was enough data to justify offering booster shots yet,” and that they “viewed the announcement, amplified by President Biden, as pressure on the F.D.A. to quickly authorize them.”

In The Lancet on September 13, 2021, Gruber, Krause, and 16 other scientists warned that mass boosting risked triggering myocarditis (heart inflammation) for little benefit.

“[W]idespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate,” the authors wrote. “Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high.”

Regardless, approval for the boosters arrived on schedule on September 24, 2021. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky granted this approval, but for a wider population than recommended by her advisory panel. This was only the second time in CDC history that a director had defied panel advice.

“[T]his process may have been tainted with political pressure,” the House report found.

Amidst all this, the vaccines were fully licensed. The FDA licensed the Comirnaty (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine on August 23, 2021. The very next day, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memo announcing a vaccine mandate for the military. Four other federal mandates followed.

“[T]he public’s perception [is] that these vaccines were approved in a hurry to satisfy a political agenda,” the House report found.

The House report condemned the dubious process and basis for these mandates. It said the mandates “ignored natural immunity, … risk of adverse events from the vaccine, as well as the fact that the vaccines don’t prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

The mandates robbed people of their livelihoods, “hollowed out our healthcare and education workforces, reduced our military readiness and recruitment, caused vaccine hesitancy, reduced trust in public health, trampled individual freedoms, deepened political divisions, and interfered in the patient-physician relationship,” the report continued.

The same could be said of Canadian vaccine mandates, as shown by the National Citizen’s Inquiry hearings on COVID-19. Unfortunately, an official federal investigation and a resulting acknowledgement do not seem forthcoming. Politicized mandates led to profits for vaccine manufacturers but left “science” with a sullied reputation.

Lee Harding is a Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.