EXCLUSIVE: Veterans Affairs Found Safety Signal for Pfizer COVID Vaccine, Never Disclosed It

Government officials found a signal for heart inflammation.

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EXCLUSIVE: Veterans Affairs Found Safety Signal for Pfizer COVID Vaccine, Never Disclosed It — A health care worker fills a syringe with Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine in a file image. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

By Zachary Stieber, Senior Reporter

1/12/2024

Updated:

1/14/2024

0:00

A federal agency detected early in the COVID-19 vaccination campaign a safety signal for a serious problem for Pfizer’s shot, a document obtained by The Epoch Times shows.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) detected a signal for myocarditis and pericarditis for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the document, an email from May 13, 2021.

Myocarditis is heart inflammation while pericarditis is inflammation of tissue around the heart.

Data from the VA Center For Medication Safety showed “a signal for myocarditis/pericarditis ... with Pfizer vaccine following the 1st dose,” Fran Cunningham, a VA official, wrote in the email.

She was communicating with Dr. Tom Shimabukuro and Dr. Lauri Markowitz, two top vaccine safety employees with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Ms. Cunningham and the VA did not respond to requests for comment.

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The discovery of the signal was never shared with the public by the VA or the CDC.

Inquiries sent to Drs. Shimabukuro and Markowitz were funneled to a CDC spokesperson, who said that the VA later determined the signal “was not a true signal.”

VA officials, according to a presentation obtained by The Epoch Times, told a private meeting that included CDC officials in June 2021 that no signal had been found in a surveillance system. No audio or transcript of the meeting has been made public.

The CDC also failed for months to convey a separate signal detected in its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, according to previous reporting by The Epoch Times.

“This is yet another agency that warned the CDC regarding the myocarditis signal and affirmed that it was a ’real' signal using epidemiologic data,” Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer with the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, told The Epoch Times via email.

“The CDC and VA had a strong responsibility to let the public know about the signal but chose to bury it in order to avoid causing ‘vaccine hesitancy’ by showing the actual risks of the COVID-19 vaccine,” he added.

The CDC throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has aggressively promoted COVID-19 vaccination. The VA was the first federal agency to require workers to receive the COVID-19 shots, and kept its vaccine mandate in place after many other agencies rescinded theirs.

The Epoch Times obtained the email through the Freedom of Information Act.

A safety signal is a sign a vaccine might cause a health problem.

The CDC and other agencies have since acknowledged that all four COVID-19 vaccines that have been or are available in the United States can cause myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly in young males. The Pfizer and Moderna shots, which both utilize modified messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, were the first to be linked to the inflammation.

The U.S. military, which is comprised of mostly young men, was among the first entities to start recording cases of the post-vaccination inflammation. The CDC started receiving reports shortly after the vaccines were rolled out in December 2020.

Dr. Shimabukuro, in an email to CDC colleagues after receiving word from the VA, said that there was an “increasing urgency” to deal with the post-vaccination myocarditis. He suggested having VA officials join a private call to “exchange information” and discuss the matter.

Two additional emails, sent by CDC officials, were fully redacted.

Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, said the new emails show “both the VA and CDC knew there was an alarming signal for heart inflammation.”

“Yet the public was not informed that this signal had been detected, an early warning sign that turned out to be a very real causal association between myocarditis/pericarditis and mRNA COVID shots,” Ms. Fisher told The Epoch Times via email.

Mr. Hooker, who has been researching vaccine safety for years, found by analyzing reported cases that a signal for myocarditis emerged from CDC data in February 2021. Emails obtained by The Epoch Times showed Israel warned the CDC of cases by the end of that month. But the agency did not raise the alarm publicly until May 2021—by which time millions of Americans had received COVID-19 vaccine doses—did not say there was a likely association until later in 2021, and did not definitively say the vaccines caused the condition until 2022.

Long-Term Studies

Early on, officials repeatedly described most cases of the heart inflammation as mild and said the patients healed quickly. As time has gone on, though, a number of studies have undercut that position.

A CDC study found that, based on survey data, 54 percent of post-vaccination myocarditis patients had an abnormal finding like swelling or scarring on followup cardiac MRIs. Many of the patients had residual late gadolinium enhancement, which indicates scarring.

Abnormal findings such as late gadolinium enhancement were also detected in imaging of 26 of 39 people who suffered heart inflammation at least five months after diagnoses of heart inflammation following a Pfizer or Moderna shot, another study, from Hong Kong, showed.

And Australian researchers reported recently that more than half of people who suffered myocarditis were still suffering from symptoms after six months.

Multiple patients told The Epoch Times that years after they suffered heart inflammation, they were still experiencing symptoms such as chest pain.

“I have continued chest pain on the right side, and then I have neuropathic type pains in my neck and shoulder areas,” said one of them, Dr. Adam Hirschfeld. “I have it when I wake up, and it’s there when I go to sleep.”

In an update in early 2023, the CDC said that, according to surveys, a third of patients still suffered from at least one symptom at least one year after diagnosis. The surveys are collected as part of the agency’s MOVING project.

Since that update, the CDC has collected additional information, an agency spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. The CDC is in the process of analyzing the data and plans to submit an article summarizing the findings for peer review and publication.

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