CDC admits goof on COVID vax link to heart inflammation in feds’ second recent FOIA botch
“…Federal public health bureaucracies are having a bad stretch in response to Freedom of Information Act requests related to COVID-19, first accidentally unmasking a National Institutes of Health official who deleted Chinese-submitted coronavirus data and now providing false information about the CDC’s knowledge of heart inflammation following vaccination.
The CDC admitted its goof after The Epoch Times reported that its FOIA response denied the agency had any reports from the “Myopericarditis abstraction team” in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System between April 2 and Oct. 2, 2021.
During that period, “no abstractions were performed for myocarditis: an association between myocarditis and mRNA COVID-19 vaccination was not known at that time,” FOIA Officer Roger Andoh told reporter Zachary Stieber July 29. “Likewise, we have no reports during that period.”
CDC researchers highlighted the vaccine-heart inflammation link in a June 2021 “editorial” in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology, citing the journal’s new published studies from Duke University Medical Center and the U.S. Military Health System and an earlier Pediatrics study led by Oregon Health and Science University researchers.
“During the clinical evaluations of these patients, alternative etiologies [causes] for myocarditis were not detected,” including COVID infection itself, the CDC researchers wrote. The typical presentation was “[a]cute onset of chest pain 3 to 5 days after vaccine administration, usually after a second dose,” a rare occurrence with other vaccines and “causally linked only with smallpox immunization.”
The editorial noted the CDC advisory committee met days earlier to discuss the observed post-vaccination myocarditis and discuss “a benefit-risk assessment of COVID-19 mRNA vaccination programs in adolescents and young adults.” The American Medical Association came out against mandates earlier that month, saying COVID vaccines should first receive “full approval.”
An agency spokeswoman conceded it needed to correct the FOIA response. “Additional data accumulated in subsequent months, ultimately leading to the conclusion that a causative association did indeed exist,” she told the Times. “However, such a conclusion required time to accumulate and analyze data.”
The agency didn’t respond to Just the News queries asking how common such errors are and whether they illustrate overworked FOIA officers or an understaffed operation…”
