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.

From the Brownstone Institute

Moderna’s European filing also revealed that the company withheld trial results demonstrating that children under 12 who received the vaccine were ten times more likely than those who received the placebo to suffer “serious side effects.”

Last week, independent journalist Alex Berenson reported that a preschool-aged child died of “cardio-respiratory arrest” after taking a dose of Moderna’s Covid mRNA vaccine during its clinical trials. Despite federal requirements to report all trial information, the company withheld the truth for years as it raked in billions from its Covid shots.

The extent of the cover-up remains unknown, but Moderna, headed by CEO Stéphane Bancel, disregarded federal law requiring companies to report “summary results information, including adverse event information, for specified clinical trials of drug products” to clinicaltrials.gov. The company, not the government, is responsible for posting all results, and failure to report the death of a child constitutes a clear breach of US law, which threatens civil action against any party that “falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact.”

To this point, pharmaceutical companies have remained largely immune for their role in perpetrating globally-scaled deception resulting in thousands of vaccine injuries and billions in profits. They have enjoyed a liability shield courtesy of the PREP Act, which offers protections for injuries resulting from vaccines; that indemnity, however, does not extend to non-compliance with federal regulations, material misstatements or omissions of fact, or other offenses.

The death of the child only became known because of an obscure European report released last year, which revealed that Moderna has known about the death for over two years while it continues to advertize Covid shots to children as young as six months old.

Moderna’s European filing also revealed that the company withheld trial results demonstrating that children under 12 who received the vaccine were ten times more likely than those who received the placebo to suffer “serious side effects.” Without any evidence, Moderna claimed that the side effects, including the death of a child, were unrelated to the shots. 

The incoming Trump administration offers a rare opportunity to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable and to investigate the depth of the cover-up.

The FDA is responsible for enforcing the reporting of vaccine trial results, but recent heads of the agency such as Scott Gottlieb and Robert Califf have been fanatical supporters of Big Pharma. Trump’s choice for FDA, Dr. Marty Makary, presents a stark contrast to his predecessors. Makary has criticized the US Government’s reluctance to acknowledge the role of natural immunity in preventing Covid infection, and he opposed the widespread vaccination of children. He testified to Congress, “In the U.S. we gave thousands of healthy kids myocarditis for no good reason, they were already immune. This was avoidable.”

President-elect Trump has tapped Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., perhaps the most well-known critic of the Covid vaccines, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA. He has named Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an author of the Great Barrington Declaration, as his choice to head the National Institutes of Health. Further, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Berenson that he plans to subpoena the FDA once Republicans become the majority party in the Senate this month.

President Trump’s first term was ultimately defined by his failure to fulfill his pledge to “drain the swamp.” A corrupt bureaucracy, personified in many ways by Dr. Anthony Fauci, aided and abetted by advisors like his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hijacked the president’s agenda. Now, the Trump administration has an unlikely yet monumental opportunity for health reform, which can start on January 20 with an investigation into Moderna’s cover-up.

The Covid response doomed Trump 1.0. Whether one regards this as a monumental error, the betrayal of a president by his advisors, an event beyond the president’s control, or a deeper and more complex plot involving everything and everyone associated with the government, both in the US and around the world, there is no question of the scale of the calamity for the public. The shots are part of that, the capstone failure of a long line of foreshadowing with lockdowns and all that was associated with pre-pharmaceutical interventions. The antidote came not as a cure but, for many, the disease itself.

There must be truth if not justice.