Sen. Ron Johnson said at a Wednesday hearing that roughly 600 pages of internal health agency emails show federal officials deliberately relied on a flawed system to monitor COVID-19 vaccine safety. He said regulators ignored warnings from an FDA researcher, while witnesses said critical signals were missed. “The U.S. lacked a fully functional early warning system at the time of its greatest need,” David Wiseman, Ph.D., testified.
April 30, 2026
Sen. Ron Johnson. Screengrab via Youtube
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
At a hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) drew a direct line from newly released internal government emails to what he described as a systemic failure to detect COVID-19 vaccine safety problems in real time.
The hearing — paired with roughly 600 pages of emails made public the same day — focused on the claim that federal health officials relied on a flawed method to monitor vaccine safety even after they knew a better option existed.
“For over four years, I have wondered how health o?cials could possibly ignore this overwhelming evidence of harm,” Johnson said. “Now I know.”
The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) hearing, “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals,” coincided with a report released earlier in the day.
According to that report, officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stuck with an inferior safety-signal detection method, and told an internal researcher to “cease and desist” from using an improved tool designed to better analyze reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
That researcher — longtime FDA medical officer Ana Szarfman, M.D., Ph.D. — repeatedly warned colleagues that the agency’s approach could miss serious safety signals due to a problem known as “masking.” Masking occurs when other vaccines obscure risks tied to a specific product.
Johnson said FDA officials brushed aside Szarfman’s warnings. He cited a recent interview with PSI staff, in which she said FDA colleagues treated her as a “pest” and “persona non grata” for raising concerns.
‘U.S. lacked a fully functional early warning system at the time of its greatest need’
The internal emails suggest senior officials were more concerned about public perception than about health risks.
In one exchange, then-Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Peter Marks cautioned that Szarfman’s work could “create erroneous conflicts that feed in to [sic] anti-vaccination rhetoric.”
But Szarfman wasn’t raising abstract concerns. According to the report, she flagged what she saw as “extreme masking,” including signals tied to death, heart attacks, stroke and dementia.
David Wiseman, Ph.D., who testified at the hearing, said those warnings should have set off alarms — but didn’t.
“The U.S. lacked a fully functional early warning system at the time of its greatest need,” Wiseman said.
He said Szarfman herself was “not astonished” that the FDA’s analysis was unable to detect the signals, citing what he called the agency’s “striking failure” to address known limitations.
‘COVID-19 vaccine rollout was a freight train going 100 miles per hour’
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski argued the vaccine rollout moved too fast for meaningful course correction.
“In all honesty, the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was a freight train going 100 miles per hour, and nothing was going to stop it,” he said.
He criticized what he described as gaps in pre-authorization testing. He listed categories he said were not studied, including drug-drug interactions, cardiovascular toxicity, central nervous system toxicity, other organ toxicity, blood toxicity, genotoxicity and carcinogenicity.
“The vaccines, by honest accounting, were pathetically tested,” Jablonowski testified. Even a favorable safety outcome would not have validated the process, he said.
“Had they actually turned out to be safe, it would have been serendipitous. A happy accident. Luck is not a pillar of public health,” he said. “Lapses can be, and were, catastrophic.”
‘They had the vaccine-injured in front of them’
For Johnson, the timing of Szarfman’s warning was key.
As she was raising safety concerns in early 2021, researchers at the National Institutes of Health were actively studying patients with vaccine-related injuries, he said.
NIH officials evaluated the 23 patients between January and September 2021. A resulting paper found that “a variety of neuropathic symptoms may manifest after SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations and in some patients might be an immune-mediated process.”
For Johnson, that overlap mattered. He argued that top officials were simultaneously aware of potential life-altering injuries and of weaknesses in the system meant to detect them.
“They had the vaccine-injured in front of them,” he said.
He also accused regulators of failing to disclose risks to the public even as internal questions persisted. Clips shown during the hearing featured Marks saying large databases had “not seen a signal” and that “you just couldn’t tell whether there was a signal or not.”
“They were abandoned,” Johnson said of patients. “They were abandoned by the officials of the FDA who treated them, acknowledged that they were vaccine-injured and then never told the public about it.”
Pharma ‘made billions … off of a vaccine that they did not adequately test’
The hearing also turned to the role of pharmaceutical companies.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) argued the pandemic response became, in part, a financial windfall.
He described “a profit machine for the Big Pharma companies that made billions and billions of dollars off of a vaccine that they did not adequately test.”
Drug manufacturers and the government were “systematically concealing from the public the true risks involved with this vaccine in a way that not only misled patients, that not only misled parents, that not only endanger the lives of children, but have the net effects of lining the pockets of the biggest pharma companies in the world,” Hawley said.
“That is a disgrace. That is an absolute disgrace,” he added.
Wiseman also raised concerns about transparency, pointing to “a very egregious nondisclosure” by Pfizer. He said the company’s refusal to share the COVID-19 vaccine data amounted to an “abuse of public trust, given that they had this sweetheart of a deal” with the government.
At the same time, he emphasized that manufacturers bear responsibility for monitoring the safety of their own products. Wiseman said:
“We’ve been discussing the [safety testing] … that the FDA conducted. We don’t know what systems that Pfizer and Moderna were using. They also have a responsibility for pharmacovigilance. So I think a valid question is to ask, what were they finding? What systems were they using? … And to what extent were they reporting them to the government?”
‘Nobody that pushed these things wants to admit they are wrong’
Johnson stressed that many of the safety issues can be tied to liability protections.
“All the effort goes into getting a drug or vaccine approved,” he said. After that, “there’s not a whole lot of effort on anybody’s part.”
Jablonowski echoed that point, saying the system discourages companies from looking too closely at potential problems. “There is no development. There’s no pressure to develop a better and safer [product],” he said.
“In fact, there is a disincentive for them to look,” he added. “It’s actually a violation of the fiduciary duty to their shareholders if they actually look at their own product and find a problem. And so we are left powerless over this system that cannot be corrected by capitalistic forces if there is a liability shield.”
Johnson argued that neither regulators nor manufacturers want to revisit earlier decisions.
“Nobody that pushed these things wants to admit they are wrong,” he said. “The advice they gave might have resulted in somebody’s death or permanent disability. That’s what we’re faced with.”
“And I can tell you from my standpoint, I’m not giving up,” he said.
Watch the full hearing here:
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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