Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the new Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently announced that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will no longer recommend routine COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women and healthy children. Kennedy also said that COVID vaccine booster shots for those under 65 will undergo new clinical trials—an attempt to focus booster shots for older Americans and those with underlying medical conditions who are most at risk of severe illness and death from COVID.

This major revision comes on the heels of Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) issuance of an explosive report on the Biden administration’s multi-year failure to warn the American people about certain serious health risks of the COVID-19 vaccines. The new report is the product of an extensive probe by the majority staff of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.   

A Troubling Backstory.

As early as February 2021, officials at the CDC received vital information from Israel’s Ministry of Health about a disturbing increase (“large reports”) of myocarditis ( heart inflammation) among young people who had received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Over the next several months, Biden administration officials downplayed or ignored these and other reports—and in September 2021 Biden himself announced his intention to impose an unprecedented set of vaccine mandates on the American people. The mass mandate on private employers and employees was subsequently struck down by the Supreme Court.

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Beginning in 2021, Sen. Johnson wrote over 70 letters to HHS officials regarding COVID-19 policies, but his letters were either “ignored or inadequately addressed.” Worse, a number of Biden administration documents were redacted to the point of rendering them utterly meaningless—an executive branch response to legitimate Senate requests that was equal parts absurd and insulting.

Secretary Kennedy broke the logjam, releasing 2,473 pages of agency records following Johnson’s January 28, 2025 subpoena.

This massive document release proves that federal public health officials were well aware of the health risk of myocarditis following injection of the COVID-19 vaccines in early 2021; that they “downplayed” those risks; and that they delayed warning the public about the health risks particularly to young people, of the novel vaccines.

Internal documents and communications among CDC and other health officials between February and June 2021, disclosed in the Subcommittee report, reveal in detail how Biden officials responded to the mounting evidence of myocarditis.

Aside from evidence from Israel’s Ministry of Health and the Department of Defense, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) also showed disturbing monthly increases of myocarditis cases.

Draft notes of a May 24th meeting of the Vaccine Safety Technical Working Group (VasT), a “confidential” working group of public health officials, posed the question of whether the growing VAERS data base showed a safety “signal” for myocarditis. The answer? “For the age groups 16-17 years and 18-24 years, yes.”

That warning made no difference. In the May 25 “talking points” prepared for the Biden White House, public health officials nonetheless described reports of myocarditis as “rare,” saying that reported cases “appear to be mild and often go away without requiring treatment.” The White House “talking points” also repeated CDC’s vaccine recommendation for persons 12 years and older, reaffirming vaccination as the best way to protect people—including the young and healthy—from COVID-19.

Failure to Alert.

Curiously, following their May 2021 deliberations, public health officials did indeed ponder the issuance of a Health Alert Network (HAN), a CDC nationwide alert, on the dangers of myocarditis following vaccination. They decided against it, however, apparently not to appear “alarmist.”

Instead, the CDC posted a note on its website for “clinical considerations” for medical professionals concerning myocarditis. On May 28, 2021, the CDC weakened the language of its post and reiterated its position recommending COVID-vaccination for all persons 12 years and older.

On June 21, 2021, the VasT working group presented a “slideshow” to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which read, “Data available to date suggest likely association of myocarditis with mRNA vaccination in adolescents and young adults.”

In short, as the Senate report reveals, scientific data did not support the high level of safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, a fact that the Biden administration refused to publicly acknowledge through an issuance of a HAN.

In the report’s language: “By May 2021, the Biden administration was aware of increasing reports of myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccination. Rather than taking the necessary and transparent actions to warn the public about this risk, US public health officials decided against issuing a HAN on myocarditis and waited another month to update the labels on the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, formally warning the public about myocarditis and pericarditis.”

Sworn Testimony.

Concurrent with the release of its report, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations conducted a public hearing on the topic, swearing in medical professionals to present independent evidence on the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, especially in reference to myocarditis and other adverse events.

Sworn testimony broadly concurred on the weakness of the current vaccine injury reporting systems to effectively monitor and report on myocarditis, among other maladies.

Dr. Peter McCullough, a board-certified cardiologist who published widely on the topic, told the senators that he treated thousands of patients with myocarditis following vaccine rollout. Citing a comprehensive literature review on COVID-19 mortality, McCullough revealed that in the peer-reviewed study of 325 COVID-related autopsy cases, a total of 240 (73.9%) deaths were due to COVID-19 vaccination.  

As previously noted, safety monitoring was substandard. Aaron Siri, an attorney representing vaccine injured patients, testified that under V-Safe, a CDC-administered vaccine safety monitoring system, patients were monitored for just 7 days following COVID-19 vaccination, and their check-the-box options for reporting symptoms included only those that were most expected, like redness and pain at injection site.

Dr. Jordan Vaughn, president of the Microvascular Research Foundation, who treated over 4,000 vaccine-injured patients, testified that COVID-19 vaccines include the “spike protein” of the deadly coronavirus, which reproduces and permeates the body’s organs, including the brain and the cardiovascular system.

This spike protein is toxic: “It triggers inflammation, disrupts endothelial barriers, induces fibrin resistant to breakdown, and promotes amyloid-like aggregates. These effects impair oxygen delivery, damage blood vessels, and contribute to clotting pathologies that manifest as persistent symptoms of heart racing, brain fog, shortness of breath, and post-exertional malaise.”

Research, Vaughn noted, also connects the spike protein to myocarditis.  

Concerning the vulnerability of pregnant young women, Dr. James Thorp, a board-certified OB/GYN and maternal-fetal medicine specialist, claimed that injecting these women was “an egregious breach of medical ethics.” Pregnant women, Thorp declared, were being told to get the vaccine without being informed that the toxic spike protein would migrate to their preborn children through a “transplacental transfer.” This damage remains largely unknown to the general public.

Said Thorp: “This deception was institutionalized in the now infamous Shimabukuro study published on April 21, 2021, in the digital version of the New England Journal of Medicine. The authors claimed a miscarriage rate of 12.6%, but the raw data revealed an 82% miscarriage rate in women vaccinated during the first trimester. This is consistent with the 81% miscarriage rate noted in the Pfizer 5.3.6 post market data …. These figures mirror the effect of chemical abortion drugs such as RU-486.”

In his testimony, Thorp also referenced the remarks of Dr. Eric Rubin, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine on October 26, 2021: “We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.” (Author’s italics).

Dr. Joel Wallskog—an orthopedic surgeon and co-chairman of React19, an organization representing vaccine injured patients—stressed that, based on clinical data, one out of every 800 vaccinated persons suffers an adverse event. Wallskog himself enthusiastically took the first dose pf the Moderna vaccine but then developed transverse myelitis, forcing him to retire on medical disability.

Wallskog told the senators that the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, V-safe, Vaccine Adverse Event Report Monitoring System (VAERS), and the CDC itself all failed him—and many thousands of others.

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Questioned by Senator Johnson, Wallskog emphasized that the information then available to patients was clearly insufficient to secure informed consent. Worse, he noted, Biden’s White House “directed” social media companies to censor legitimate stories of vaccine injured patients.

Dr. Josh Green, a physician and governor of Hawaii, told senators how Hawaii cooperated with President Trump and responded to the pandemic, reporting that Hawaii had one of the country’s highest vaccination rates and one of the lowest per capita mortality rates in the nation. He emphasized that this was not a coincidence, reaffirming the proposition that the “COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective and have saved millions of lives in the United States and around the world.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CN) echoed Dr. Green’s point, pointing to a study indicating that the COVID-19 vaccines averted an estimated 3 million American deaths within the first two years of their distribution. While Senators Johnson and Blumenthal debated the validity of research studies, Dr. McCullough reminded the subcommittee that millions of Americans who had been vaccinated nonetheless contracted the rapidly mutating coronavirus.

All told, Secretary Kennedy’s revision of the COVID-19 vaccine schedule comports with the fact that the risks of COVID-19 and the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines are highly dependent on age and medical condition.

Over the period from January 1, 2020 to June 14, 2023, mortality data show that 1,134,641 Americans died from COVID-19. Of that number, 858,323 were over the age of 65, while just 1,642 were ages 0-17. Of those, CDC data shows that children with underlying medical conditions were— and are—at greatest risk.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Dr. Vinay Prasad have outlined the rationale for the new COVID vaccination schedule, recommendations more aligned with European public health authorities. That rationale shows that Secretary Kennedy is a champion of both science and common sense.