Top FDA Official Urged Fauci, NIH Head to Study Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination

‘If you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later,’ the official wrote.

Acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Dr. Janet Woodcock testifies during the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on "the federal response to new Covid-19 variants" on Capitol Hill in Washington, on January 11, 2022. Shawn Thew / POOL / AFP via Getty Images

A top Food and Drug Administration official told counterparts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that they should study health issues that arose in some people after receiving COVID-19 vaccines, according to newly released emails.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, at the time the acting commissioner of the FDA, wrote to Dr. Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in one of the emails, on May 27, 2021, about five months after COVID-19 vaccination started.

“I have been contacted by a number of people who have experienced adverse events post COVID-19 vaccination (from all three of the current vaccines),” Woodcock wrote.

“Many are healthcare professionals, some of whom I know. The symptoms do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing. Clearly during mass vaccination you will get a lot of psychological reactions and it is hard to sort these things out. But the peoples’ main complaint is that no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”

Woodcock said that “it would be worthwhile to do a study and evaluate a cohort of these individuals.” Such a study would need money, since the industry would likely not support it, and an investigator interested in “medical mysteries,” Woodcock added.

“My experience is, that if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared,” she said.

Fauci replied to Collins without including Woodcock.

“We cannot ignore her,” Fauci said.

He suggested looping in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its then-director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

The emails were released on Aug. 16 by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who have been obtaining Fauci’s emails and texts from the parent agency of the FDA, CDC, and NIH.

They said it was not clear whether Walensky was ever consulted.

Fauci has not responded to requests for comment on his emails. Walensky, Collins, the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH did not return inquiries by the time of publication.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, testifies before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in Washington on July 29, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

Retsef Levi, former chairman of a working group of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, said in an Aug. 16 post on X that Woodcock’s email showed that adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination were “so vague & unspecific that they will not likely be detected by any of the existing pharmacovigilance systems!” He said that people injured by the vaccines “were abandoned and gaslighted!”

NIH scientists were in communication with, and studied some of, the people who suffered health issues after receiving COVID-19 vaccines, but a draft of a paper they assembled describing that work drew ire from Collins and another top NIH official, according to emails released earlier in the year. The paper was later released as a preprint.

A military specialist vaccinates a man in Londonderry, N.H., on Feb. 4, 2021. Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

“We are grateful that these records are finally coming into the light,” React19, a group that represents people who suffered issues following vaccination, including some of the people studied by the NIH researchers, said in a statement on Sunday.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases website says that researchers with the agency are currently studying people “whose immune systems have had a suboptimal response to COVID-19 vaccination,” as well as people who had allergic reactions to the shots.