U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials had found evidence that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines had caused multiple deaths before claiming that there was no evidence linking the vaccines to any deaths, The Epoch Times has learned.
CDC employees had worked to track down information on reported post-vaccination deaths and learned that myocarditis—or heart inflammation, a confirmed side effect of the vaccines—was listed on death certificates and in autopsies for some of the deaths, according to an internal file obtained by The Epoch Times.
Myocarditis was also described as being caused by vaccination in a subset of the deaths.
In other cases, the CDC workers had found that deaths had met the agency’s definition for myocarditis, that the patients had started showing symptoms within 42 days of a vaccine dose, and that the deceased had displayed no virus-related symptoms. Officials say that after 42 days, a possible link between the vaccine and symptoms becomes tenuous, and they list post-vaccination deaths as unrelated if they can find any possible alternative causes.
In cases with those three features, it’s “absolutely” safe to say that the vaccines caused the deaths, Dr. Clare Craig, a British pathologist and co-chair of the Health Advisory and Recovery Team Group, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Despite the findings, most of which were made by the end of 2021, the CDC claimed that it had seen no signs linking the Moderna and Pfizer messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines to any deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
CDC officials in a letter to The Epoch Times dated June 13, 2023, said that there were no deaths reported to the VAERS for which the agency determined “the available evidence” indicated that Moderna or Pfizer vaccination had “caused or contributed to the deaths.”
The agency also said that evidence from seven deaths from thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome following the Johnson & Johnson vaccination suggested that the vaccine led to people dying.
“That’s a scandal, where you have information like this and you continue to put out this dishonest line that there’s only seven deaths and they’re all unrelated to the mRNA vaccines,” Dr. Andrew Bostom, a U.S.-based heart expert, told The Epoch Times.
The CDC is “concealing these deaths,” he said.
A CDC spokeswoman, presented with the file and dozens of questions about it, said that “determining a person’s cause of death is done by the certifying official, physician, medical examiner, or coroner, who completes the death certificate.”
The spokeswoman declined to explain why the CDC doesn’t consider autopsies or death certificates as evidence of causality, the criteria that would establish vaccine-caused deaths, or whether the numbers have been updated since 2023. She also declined to answer questions about specific deaths outlined in the file, citing “privacy and confidentiality.”
“They are taking the exact opposite approach to COVID deaths! Every death after a test was a COVID death. No death after a vaccine is a vaccine death!” Dr. Craig said. She questioned what it would take for the CDC to admit that the vaccines have caused some myocarditis-related deaths.
More People Died
The file, acquired by The Epoch Times through a Freedom of Information Act request, has never before been reported. The file was obtained after U.S. authorities rejected another Freedom of Information Act request for the autopsies themselves. The file outlines the agency’s investigation into reports submitted to VAERS of suspected cases of myocarditis or a related condition, pericarditis, following COVID-19 vaccination.CDC employees, starting in April 2021, contacted health care providers and other agencies to obtain medical records, death certificates, and autopsies as they sought to confirm whether each report was legitimate.
The file shows that the CDC had examined 3,780 reports through April 13, 2023; a small number of them were duplicates. Among the reported cases, 101 resulted in death.
In one instance, a 37-year-old man started suffering symptoms that can be caused by myocarditis, such as shortness of breath, shortly after receiving a Moderna COVID-19 shot. The man collapsed three days after vaccination and was soon pronounced dead.
Dr. Darinka Mileusnic, the medical examiner who examined the man, said in an autopsy report that the patient died of “post vaccination systemic inflammation response,” which caused, among other problems, acute myocarditis, according to the CDC file.
The CDC worker who was assigned to look into the death wrote that it was “evident of a sudden death post second dose of Moderna vaccine.”
“One of the factor[s] to death [sic] is acute myocarditis. There are other findings related to VAE [vaccine adverse event] and non vaccine related. Thus, it can’t be distinguished that only vaccine may have caused the death,” the CDC employee wrote.
Dr. Mileusnic declined a request for comment through her employer, the Knox County Regional Forensic Center in Tennessee. The center said it would provide an autopsy report only if the decedent’s name and date of death were provided. The CDC file did not include names.
After another man, 24, died on Oct. 27, 2021, about two months after receiving a second Pfizer injection, his health care provider diagnosed him with myocarditis. An autopsy listed “complications of COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis” as the cause of death, according to the file.
A postmortem test for COVID-19 returned negative, there were no viral organisms found in postmortem testing of the heart, and there were no other signs of viruses causing the myocarditis, the notes show.
Another vaccine recipient, a 77-year-old man, was found dead at home on Nov. 14, 2021. The autopsy confirmed that the man had pericarditis and listed the cause of death as “complications from the COV-19 booster,” according to the file.
The CDC worker who looked at that case said it met the CDC’s definition of pericarditis based on the autopsy and death certificate but noted that there were comorbidities such as coronary artery disease that were listed as contributing to the death. The patient had also received vaccines for influenza and shingles about two months before death, so “it is difficult to say that COV-19 vaccine alone caused pericarditis,” the worker wrote.
A voicemail left for the man’s doctor was not returned.
- A male, whose age was redacted, suffered sudden cardiac death in April 2021 following a Johnson & Johnson vaccination. He was diagnosed with myocarditis, which was confirmed by the medical examiner. A CDC worker stated that the case did not technically meet the agency’s case definition, but they would “consider probable subclinical myocarditis, given the histopathological findings.”
- A 21-year-old woman who died in 2021 after seizures and cardiac arrhythmias following Pfizer vaccination was found on autopsy to have lymphocytic myocarditis. The CDC listed her case as confirmed myocarditis with no evidence of viral causes.
- A 45-year-old man was found dead in his bed in 2021 after Moderna vaccination, but testing for myocarditis and pericarditis was not performed.
- A 55-year-old woman who was “found unresponsive in [a] field” in 2021 after Johnson & Johnson vaccination was confirmed on autopsy to have myocarditis and to have suffered a cardiac arrest. The death met the CDC’s case definition, but concurrent upper respiratory infection “makes viral myocarditis a potential alternative cause,” a CDC worker stated. The medical examiner declined to comment.
Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson did not return requests for comment.
Overruling
The file and a tranche of emails also obtained by The Epoch Times show that the agency started intervening shortly after the vaccines were introduced in post-vaccination cases that led to death and sometimes overruled the certifier.Take the case of a 23-year-old man who left home on April 13, 2021, to go for a jog and was found dead on the side of the road. His death occurred four days after receiving Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine.
An autopsy found myocarditis, and the case met the CDC’s case definition for myocarditis. But the CDC’s Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch (IDPB) then weighed in. “Per IDPB evaluation, not myocarditis,” the notes for the case say.
The evaluation is one of the documents that the CDC has refused to disclose. It has also refused to answer questions about the man’s death or other specific cases, referring vaguely to privacy.
Dr. Bostom, after reviewing the notes on the case, said it was a “clear-cut” example of vaccine-caused myocarditis.
The CDC doesn’t conduct autopsies itself but gathers the files as part of the investigation. Autopsies aren’t perfect but are considered the gold standard in figuring out the cause of death, Dr. Bostom said.
“It’s about the strongest evidence we can get,” he said.
“These omissions could lead incorrectly to the assumption that COVID-19 vaccines were directly responsible for the deaths of these 2 patients. We believe that providing these important pathologic findings will allow readers a fuller perspective of the causes of death in these cases,” the CDC stated at the time.
Dr. Christopher Paddock, one of the officials, said in an email obtained by The Epoch Times that the CDC response detailed “the work we did to identify the actual cause of death in this young man.”
The death certificate for the boy who died in Connecticut mentioned vaccination, Dr. Gill has told The Epoch Times. The autopsy report of the other boy notes that he died of “myocarditis of uncertain etiology.”
Another death of a minor was examined by CDC workers after being reported to VAERS. A 7-year-old in Washington state died on Feb. 26, 2022, about two weeks after receiving a Pfizer shot. The medical examiner identified myocarditis as a cause of death, but, “per IDPB, infectious causes [were] identified,” according to the file.
“CDC followed-up to assist in [the] investigation of the case. From the investigation, the cause of the myocarditis could not be clearly determined,” a spokesperson for Public Health – Seattle & King County told The Epoch Times via email.
Other emails obtained by The Epoch Times show that in addition to Washington state officials, authorities in multiple states asked the CDC to test tissue samples from people who died after vaccination. They also reveal that the CDC knew of several additional post-vaccination deaths in which myocarditis was found on autopsy—and at least some other possible causes were ruled out—before issuing its 2023 statement on zero deaths.
Details From Emails
A man on active duty in the U.S. Army, for example, “collapsed after a short run” and was unable to be resuscitated, Dr. John Su, lead official for vaccine safety for the CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine task force, wrote on March 30, 2022. “On autopsy, the pathologist observed evidence of myocarditis,” he wrote.Testing for COVID-19 came back negative, and “toxicology and other analyses were unremarkable,” according to the email, although there were indications that an “anatomic variant in the vasculature of the heart” could have caused the sudden cardiac arrest.
The case was not reported to VAERS, according to military officials.
The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for the department told The Epoch Times in an email that its Office of the Chief Medical Examiner “will not release cause and manner of death or any other information because autopsy reports, investigative reports and supporting documentation are confidential medical records.”
It’s not clear why the CDC doesn’t count the death certificates or autopsies as evidence that vaccines contributed to or caused the deaths.
“Now everyone knows they’ve unequivocally been shown to kill,” he said.
A CDC official said in one missive in early 2022 that the CDC’s IDPB had recently become “heavily involved in coordination, consultation, and laboratory evaluation of autopsy tissues from deaths occurring after COVID-19 vaccination, including cases of suspected myocarditis.”
The effort involved closely coordinating with the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, state health officials, and CDC officials working on policy and communications, she said.
“When requested, CDC can provide consultation for analysis of tissue specimens,” a CDC spokeswoman told The Epoch Times.
The CDC’s 2023 statement of zero deaths being linked to the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines was attributed to the Immunization Safety Office.
More than 676 million doses of the vaccines have been administered to date, the CDC noted. While the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been pulled from the market, the agency maintains that shots from Pfizer, Moderna, and Novavax are “safe and effective.”
“The authorized and approved COVID-19 vaccines are being administered under the most comprehensive and intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history,” the CDC spokeswoman told The Epoch Times.
The spokesperson said the agency “has not detected any unusual or unexpected patterns for deaths following COVID-19 vaccination that have not already been thoroughly described and made public in the published biomedical literature or public presentations.”
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