“They lied through their teeth” says US Senator

They claimed the US had the world’s best vaccine safety surveillance. But behind closed doors, the Acting FDA Commissioner warned Fauci it could miss the very injuries patients were reporting.

Newly recovered communications from Anthony Fauci’s government phone have exposed what senior U.S. health officials knew about Covid-19 vaccine injuries in the earliest months of the rollout.

They also reveal how calculated they were in concealing the systemic flaws in their own safety monitoring.

The documents, part of a cache released by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul following an investigation into Fauci’s pandemic-era communications, directly contradict years of official assurances.

Following the release, Senator Johnson did not mince words.

“They kept saying no red flags, no safety signals,” he told Fox News. “They lied through their teeth to the American public.”

Senator Ron Johnson on Fox News Aug 16, 2026

The surveillance myth

In March 2021, FDA vaccine chief Dr Peter Marks told Congress that the agency had implemented a surveillance system using “state-of-the-art technologies,” capable of detecting safety findings “in a relatively rapid manner.”

The CDC echoed that confidence, assuring the public that Covid-19 vaccine monitoring was the “most intense and comprehensive” safety program the country had ever built.

But behind closed doors, leadership knew those very systems had major blind spots.

On May 27, 2021, Dr. Janet Woodcock—then Acting Commissioner of the FDA—sent a confidential email sounding the alarm to Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins.

Woodcock was being contacted directly by people suffering unexplained health problems after receiving one of the three authorised vaccines. Many were healthcare workers. Some she knew personally.

Dr Janet Woodcock, Acting FDA commissioner 2021

Their symptoms were complex, debilitating, and often difficult to evaluate with standard laboratory testing. Crucially, Woodcock warned that the very surveillance systems officials were relying on to reassure the public might fail to detect what was happening.

“These problems are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect, or even a more sophisticated population-based active follow-up such as CDC has, or a medical record-based system such as BEST,” she wrote.

In other words, Woodcock was warning that the federal safety net had a gaping hole. She doubted vaccine manufacturers would investigate “for obvious reasons” and urged Fauci and Collins to launch a dedicated cohort study.

People were suffering, she wrote, and their primary complaint was that “no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”

“If you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared,” warned Woodcock.

Fauci’s response made clear the warning had registered.

“Janet asks what we think of this?” he wrote to Collins the next day. “We cannot ignore her. We should probably bring in CDC and see what Rochelle [Walensky] thinks.”

But publicly, officials continued to reassure Americans about the strength of vaccine safety surveillance. Privately, patients were still struggling to have their injuries recognised.

Dressen calls out officials

Six months after Woodcock’s internal warning, trial participant Brianne Dressen appeared at a roundtable in Washington DC, her life shattered by a severe neurological condition she developed after receiving AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine.

She did not merely accuse agencies of neglect—she said they already knew.

“The NIH, FDA, and CDC have known firsthand about my case and thousands of others,” Dressen testified, revealing that injured patients had engaged in direct video conferences and repeated email exchanges with Woodcock and FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks.

“We have literally asked and we have begged repeatedly for them to acknowledge these reactions. They declined,” said Dressen.

As she fought through tears, Dressen read a message from a friend whose post-vaccine suffering had driven her to end her life:

“Please tell our stories,” was her final plea.

Brianne Dressen, roundtable November 2021

Between sobs, Dressen called out the officials she believed had failed them.

“Rochelle Walensky, Janet Woodcock, Peter Marks, Anthony Fauci, you erased her and the many others like her,” said Dressen.

LISTEN to the vaccine-injured

Researchers eventually began documenting what patients had been reporting.

In 2022, Yale University launched the LISTEN study, led by immunologist Akiko Iwasaki and cardiologist Harlan Krumholz, to investigate people reporting Post-Vaccination Syndrome (PVS).

Studying participants with severe reactions, Yale identified measurable immune-cell abnormalities, evidence of viral reactivation and circulating spike protein—noting that the lack of official recognition of PVS had “significantly limited patient care and support.”

Eventually, questions about the surveillance system reached the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP).

When the reconstituted ACIP met for the first time in June 2025, MIT Professor Retsef Levi challenged CDC staff directly.

He questioned whether traditional safety monitoring—which largely looks for acute harms occurring within a narrow window after vaccination—was equipped to detect problems that might emerge much later.

“Most of our traditional approaches have some implicit assumption that most of the harm is going to happen immediately after the vaccine is being taken and is going to be reduced over time,” Levi told the CDC at the meeting.

Given evidence that mRNA and spike protein could persist in some people, he asked whether that could “challenge the sensitivity” of the current surveillance system and require “a broader set of approaches.”

CDC official Dr Sarah Meyer swiftly brushed aside his concerns.

“We feel very confident in our safety systems in the US,” she replied, looking directly at Levi. “We have one of the best safety systems in the world.”

ACIP meeting June 2025 - Levi turns to Meyer

ACIP tries to shine a light

Behind the scenes, Levi’s Covid-19 vaccine workgroup refused to drop the issue.

By early 2026, it was preparing to bring its findings to ACIP’s public meeting in March.

But just days before the meeting, a federal court order stayed the appointments of 13 ACIP members, paralysing the committee and preventing the presentation.

A confidential copy of the policy document obtained by MD Reports revealed just how far the workgroup had gone.

click for story

The findings echoed Woodcock’s warning from five years earlier.

The workgroup concluded that traditional surveillance was designed primarily to detect short-term, acute events, leaving it poorly equipped to identify persistent, multi-system illnesses.

It described how patients were bounced endlessly between specialists while their cases disappeared into aggregated data—potentially creating the impression that chronic injuries were rare when the system was not designed to reliably detect them.

The parallel was hard to miss. Woodcock had identified the same blind spot in May 2021. Nearly five years later, a federal workgroup was proposing ways to fix it.

Levi’s team called for dedicated diagnostic codes, specialised care networks, and clinical guidelines for the injured.

Shortly thereafter, the CDC proposed the first dedicated ICD-10 code for Covid-19 vaccine injuries, creating a formal pathway for patients to be identified, tracked, and treated.

The warning came true

By May 2021, some of the most senior officials in the U.S. health bureaucracy had been explicitly warned that existing surveillance systems could miss the kinds of chronic, complex illnesses patients were reporting.

In the months and years that followed, they watched patients beg for help, saw researchers document vaccine harms, and looked on as ACIP tried to fix the broken system.

All the while, they maintained a polished public façade that everything was fine.

Senator Ron Johnson was right. They lied through their teeth.

---