The Biden administration got away with a lot. But it’s all coming back to bite him.
And now Joe Biden is back in the hot seat after being caught in a shocking cover-up.
THE CAMPAIGN FOR UNIVERSAL UPTAKE — AND WHAT GOT LEFT OUT
To understand what the Biden administration did with COVID vaccine safety data, you first have to understand what it was trying to accomplish. From the moment the vaccines were authorized in late 2020 and throughout 2021, the driving goal was maximum uptake — every arm, every age group, every corner of the country. Promoting that mission required projecting confidence. It also, apparently, required suppressing doubt — even doubt raised by the government’s own scientists.
Anthony Fauci publicly downplayed the significant difference in risk profiles between older, high-risk individuals and healthy young people, insisting universal vaccination was appropriate regardless of age or pre-existing conditions. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky made the flat-out incorrect claim that vaccinated people “don’t carry the virus” and “don’t get sick” — a statement contradicted by available evidence at the time and embarrassingly disproven in the months that followed. Joe Biden himself warned that unvaccinated Americans should prepare for a “winter of severe illness and death” in 2021-2022, while simultaneously trying to impose vaccine mandates on private businesses with more than 100 employees. The campaign was total. The messaging was one-directional. And anyone asking inconvenient questions about side effects was not, it now appears, being heard — at least not officially.
SILENCED: THE FDA DOCTOR WHO FOUND THE SIGNALS
The Biden administration’s posture toward vaccine safety data wasn’t just inadequate. According to a bombshell new investigation by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, it was deliberate.
The report, released last week, centers on Dr. Ana Szarfman, described as a senior medical officer and safety data mining developer at the FDA. Szarfman used an updated analytical technique and identified dozens of statistically significant safety signals associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. She immediately shared her findings with FDA officials responsible for vaccine safety surveillance.
What happened next is, in retrospect, extraordinary. Those officials, the report says, “largely ignored her and eventually told her to stop her data analyses.” Not to slow down. Not to verify the methodology. To stop entirely.
The signals Szarfman identified were not minor. Working alongside Dr. William DuMouchel, then chief statistician at Oracle and the inventor of the data mining algorithm the FDA was using, she found that nearly 50 instances of “extreme masking” in the dataset had concealed roughly 20 to 25 previously undetected adverse effects. Those included sudden cardiac death, Bell’s palsy, and pulmonary infarction. The concealment wasn’t necessarily intentional on the part of the data — masking is a known statistical phenomenon in large datasets — but the response of FDA officials to the discovery raises serious questions that go well beyond methodology.
Internal communications obtained by the subcommittee reveal the FDA’s posture. One senior FDA official wrote to colleagues: “Before we potentially reach out to Ana, we should meet internally — many considerations not suited to email.” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, warned that Szarfman’s data mining would “create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric.” By June 2021, Szarfman had flagged elevated signals for acute myocardial infarction and other cardiac events to FDA colleagues — and received no substantive response.
WHAT THE FDA DID WITH THE DATA — AND WHY IT MATTERS NOW
The FDA’s justification for dismissing Szarfman’s work ultimately rested on concern about how it would look. Not on a genuine scientific refutation of her findings. Not on an alternative analysis that produced different results. On optics. On the fear that further investigation might give ammunition to people who were skeptical of the vaccines — a concern that was apparently more pressing than finding out whether Americans were experiencing cardiac events that nobody had detected.
VAERS — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System — has real limitations. It is a passive surveillance system, not a controlled clinical trial, and its data can be skewed by reporting bias. Those limitations are real, and any honest analysis must account for them. But the argument that VAERS data can’t be trusted is a two-edged sword: if the system is too noisy to detect real safety signals, it is also too noisy to certify that no signals exist. What Szarfman proposed was exactly what a responsible regulator should do — use newer, more sophisticated analytical tools to look more carefully. She was told not to look.
The pattern fits everything else that characterized federal health policy during the Biden years: downplayed myocarditis risks in young men; continued insistence on vaccine mandates long after it became clear the shots had little efficacy against transmission; a rhetorical environment in which any expression of doubt was treated not as scientific inquiry but as dangerous anti-vaccination sentiment. The agency entrusted with protecting public health chose its public relations mission over its scientific one. More reports like this will keep emerging. And each one will further erode the institutional trust that the Biden health bureaucracy spent four years squandering.
