FDA + CDC cannot explain the Florida VAERS data (so they change the subject)

Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo asked them a simple question. They ignored it, responded with a "safe and effective sales pitch," and accused him of spreading misinformation.

Figure 1. Joe Ladapo. This is what an honest public health official looks like.

Executive summary

Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo has been a reliable truth-teller throughout the pandemic. After noticing that the VAERS reports in his state were off the charts, he wrote a letter to the CDC and FDA asking them to explain his observations.

Rather than directly answering Dr. Ladapo’s questions, the heads of both agencies sent him a “safe and effective” sales pitch. They also accused him of spreading COVID misinformation.

Ladapo correctly pointed out a huge issue with the narrative. If the vaccines are really as “safe and effective” as claimed, why are the VAERS reports off-the-charts?

Something is seriously wrong. Both agency heads should have acknowledged the discrepancy and investigated. If they had done so, they would have found other “discrepancies” such as the over 700 safety signals (including death and stroke) that were triggered in VAERS that were never explained or reported to the public.

They should both be fired. Both agencies are responsible for public safety, yet their heads cannot directly answer even the most basic safety questions about the vaccine. They must deflect instead.

Unfortunately, Congress is looking the other way on all issues related to vaccine safety. After all, it was Congress who pushed the vaccine on the public. So Congress is not likely to investigate the issues with the FDA/CDC anytime soon.

My fellow Substack writers also mocked the FDA/CDC response.

The source materials

Florida press release on COVID vaccine safety

Ladapo’s letter to the FDA/CDC

The FDA response

Introduction

On February 15, 2023, Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo wrote a letter to the CDC and FDA asking them to explain why in Florida, there was an 18X increase in VAERS reports overall and a 45X increase in reports of life-threatening conditions after the COVID vaccines were rolled out. Since there was only a 5X increase in vaccine administration, why was there a disproportionately high response in the adverse event rates in VAERS?

Three weeks later, on March 10, the FDA/CDC wrote back a response that sounded like a “sales pitch” for the vaccine. They also criticized him for spreading vaccine misinformation (i.e., they tried to gaslight him).

The FDA/CDC didn’t even attempt to directly address his concerns in their response. They avoided the numbers he cited like the plague. They changed the topic instead of addressing his very legitimate concerns.

This just shows you how corrupt the top officials of both organizations are. They can’t answer simple questions without changing the subject.

Here’s the response that they should have sent

Dear Joe,

Hey, thanks so much for writing and bringing this very important data anomaly to our attention.

To be honest, we both have always admired you from afar. We are huge fans of the work you are doing in Florida to expose the truth about the COVID vaccines!

In particular, you demonstrated great courage and initiative in designing and executing a study in your state that proved the vaccines are unsafe and should be stopped. We wish other public health officials were as responsible as you have been and took the initiative to double check our work instead of just believing everything we say at face value. After all, we’ve been pretty much wrong about everything COVID related, so it only makes sense to be very suspicious about anything we recommend. In fact, to be honest, we even joke to our friends privately that if Americans just listened carefully to everything we said and did the opposite, they’d be much better off. LOL!

In your particular case, you are absolutely right to point out that there is simply no possible way that there could be so many VAERS reports if the vaccines are safe and effective.

Let’s dive into how we arrived at that conclusion.

There are really only three possibilities here for your seeing a disproportionate number of VAERS reports:

1. Fraud and/or gaming

2. Higher propensity to report, but ONLY for the COVID vaccines (and not for any other vaccines during the same period)

3. The vaccines are unsafe

To be perfectly honest, there is no evidence for #1. Not even David Gorski is making that argument.

With respect to #2, we have to wonder: “Why would people overreport for the COVID vaccines and not for any other vaccines in the same time period?”

We have no evidence of a higher propensity to report for any other vaccine. We even had an independent market research firm survey healthcare workers and they found an unchanged propensity to report. Human behavior is simply very hard to change; no surprise! So that wasn’t it.

In addition, we checked directly with doctors we work with and told them we wouldn’t have their license to practice medicine revoked. Note that usually we don’t offer that, but this time we really wanted to know the truth.

They all told us that they’ve never seen anything like the side-effects from these COVID vaccines before. In fact, we talked to one neurologist in California and she had over 1,000 of her 20,000 patients who reported new serious neurological issues shortly after getting the vaccine. That isn’t overreporting because she only filed 2 VAERS reports, not 1,000. In 11 years, she’s never needed to make a single VAERS report; this year, she needed to make 1,000.

We are left with option #3: The COVID vaccines are super dangerous.

So yes, upon investigation, you were right. The reason for all those reports is because the vaccines are simply not as safe as we told people. In fact, they are downright dangerous. This was recently acknowledged in the scientific peer-reviewed literature: “An abundance of studies has shown that the mRNA vaccines are neither safe nor effective, but outright dangerous.”

We’ll also let you in on a secret that we haven’t told anyone. The vaccine doesn’t protect you from dying from COVID at all. We made that up because we had to say something. For example, in this paper published in JAMA, the death rates for vaxxed and unvaxxed patients who got COVID were similar and the differences were not statistically significant. Look for the sentence, “Death occurred in 9 of 142 (6.3%) vaccine breakthrough cases and 91 of 1055 (8.6%) unvaccinated patients with COVID-19.” You have to do your own Fisher exact test calculation yourself and you will find a p-value of .42 which as you know means the differences between the groups were not even close to being statistically significant. And that was the best study we had.

Also, check out this graph showing that it’s actually making things worse: the more you vaccinate, the more people die from COVID. So you were right!

However, if we admitted that you were right publicly, this would make the HHS agencies look silly and it would destroy trust in the agencies, the medical community, Congress, the mainstream media, and local health officials. So we simply can’t do that. It’s nothing personal. It’s just how the game is played. We hope you understand.

So that’s why we’re going to publish a sham letter where we ignore your question (because we can’t answer it), deny everything, and accuse you of spreading misinformation. After all, we want to keep our jobs.

Please keep this letter between us. If it gets out, we’ll deny we sent it. But we just wanted to let you know we appreciate you and that you were right. We just can’t admit that publicly right now. We have to make you look bad. I hope you understand and appreciate the position we are in.

I hope that we can still be friends.

Sincerely yours,

Rochelle and Bob

Reaction from other Substack writers

Meryl Nass wrote this article, Letter from LaLaLand to Dr. Ladapo, signed by FDA's Califf and CDC's Walensky. She summarized the FDA/CDC letter:

Everything is great, we are thrilled with our vaccines and the only problem is not enough people are up to date, so stop the misinformation already, got it?

Peter McCullough went into detail debunking 10 of the claims in the FDA/CDC letter. His summary:

The important message to Americans is that our agencies have no intention of carefully considering vaccine safety or changing course on their relentless pursuit of frequent, mass, indiscriminate COVID-19 vaccination down to 6-month old babies. It will be up to you to protect yourself and your family.

This tweet sums up a simple way to see who is telling you the truth:

Kyle Becker @kylenabecker

"If the Covid mRNA shots are as safe and effective as the FDA and CDC say they are, there is a simple way to prove it: Drop the liability shield." The FDA and CDC fired off a letter against Florida's Surgeon General for reporting a major spike in adverse open.substack.com/pub/thekylebec…… https://t.co/BkAWigAeak

Mainstream media response

They sided with the FDA/CDC taking everything they said at face value. Here is an example:

Fla. Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo gets scathing letter from CDC, FDA (CBS News)

The Tampa Bay Times had a more balanced story: ‘Misinformation’: Biden administration responds to Florida COVID vaccine letter

Attacks from two clueless Canadian cardiologists

Consider this “fact check” article from CTV News: Canadian cardiologists debunk Florida COVID-19 vaccine claims.

Dr. Peter Liu is the chief scientific officer and vice-president of research at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute.

Dr. Chris Overgaard, a cardiology fellow in the division of cardiology at the University of Toronto

I will try to reach out to both of these experts for comment.

However, these cardiologists are being disingenuous in their criticism.

They claimed:

1. that there were no absolute numbers cited just relative increased rates and

2. that most of the adverse events could be non-serious and thus irrelevant.

Why create the FUD when VAERS is in plain sight? Anyone can query it to validate what Ladapo claimed. They could have EASILY checked this themselves just like I did. It took only about 3 minutes.

Let’s debunk both of those right now (March 14, 2023 at 11:20pm PST).

The COVID vax adverse events in Florida: 48,278 cases (where a case can have multiple adverse events).

Now compare that to ALL VACCINES in Florida over the last 30 years: 33,897.

Compare that with all flu vaccines in 2019 in Florida: 481.

So it seems like the COVID vaccines are a wee bit more dangerous, don’t you think? Around 50X more adverse events per year, comparable to what Ladapo reported.

As for serious events, let’s take “death” as an example. The Flu vaccines in Florida had 4 deaths in 5 years from 2015-2019. The COVID vaccines had 573 deaths in Florida since they were rolled out. So that’s around a 250X higher death rate than the flu vaccine.

So these cardiologists think there is nothing going on here? They simply need to explain the data instead of ignoring it.

And perhaps, while they are at at, they can give us the name of a cardiologist in Florida who had fewer cardiac cases after the vaccines rolled out. I’m still looking for that cardiologist. Or can they name a nursing home in Florida where the all-cause mortality dropped after the vaccine rolled out? Or name a funeral home who had stable business which then dropped after the vaccines rolled out?

I’m still looking for these “success anecdotes” but none of the experts knows of any. If everything they are saying is true, these examples should be the norm and easy to find.

Summary

Joe Ladapo is pretty much the only trustable public health authority in America today.

Ladapo has expressed legitimate concerns about the safety of the COVID vaccines and the FDA/CDC are simply unable to explain this data. Instead, they deflect and distract the public from the important issues he raised and attempt to make him look like he is the bad guy.

The FDA/CDC leadership should be ashamed of themselves.