As I write this piece, we are almost 80 days into the second term of President Donald Trump, and the news cycle is an F5 of the Fugita Tornado Scale.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall my post about the recent shake-up at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), resigned, citing significant disagreements with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policies.
Marks claimed it was because of Kennedy, and the new HHS Secretary’s viewpoints on the worthiness of vaccines.
However, there is more to the story.
Marks left after refusing to grant Kennedy team unrestricted access to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database. Marks asserted that such access could lead to manipulation or deletion of sensitive data, which includes unverified reports of vaccine-related adverse events submitted by the public.
In an interview with The Associated Press, former Food and Drug Administration vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks discussed his efforts to “make nice” with Kennedy and address his longstanding concerns about vaccine safety, including by developing a “vaccine transparency action plan.”Marks agreed to give Kennedy’s associates the ability to read thousands of reports of potential vaccine-related issues sent to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. But he would not allow them to directly edit the data.“Why wouldn’t we? Because frankly we don’t trust (them),” he said, using a profanity. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”
I believe Marks’ assertion about what Kennedy and his team is not founded in fact. Kennedy has explicitly said he wants to rely on real scientific data, and his long history in the legal profession would lead one to believe he understands the consequences of changing the database records or allowing someone on his team to do so.
Marks also continues to smear Kennedy as being completely anti-vaccine. As I noted with the measles outbreak in Texas, the HHS under Kennedy helped launch a vaccination program in addition to offering other recommendations for those opting not to get vaccinated.
HHS staffers also stressed this fact, and underscored the fact they want to look under-the-hood for the vaccine injury data themselves.
An HHS spokesperson said Kennedy has advocated for vaccination multiple times since becoming health secretary and pointed to a social media post Sunday in which he called the vaccine “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”The spokesperson added that it would make “perfect sense” for staffers working for Kennedy to seek access to the VAERS database to do their own analysis.
There are a number of reasons that this issue is troubling, especially given Marks’ profanity-infused response to the new HHS team seeking the usual level of access to government databases that the Secretary normally has. To begin with, as I have previously noted, studies have identified a rare but notable link between myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, such as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
As a reminder, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released 148 blank pages of data in response to a FOIA request for information connecting covid vaccinations to heart inflammation.
I reported that a large, multinational study of COVID-19 vaccines from companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca has been linked to rare occurrences of heart, brain, and blood disorders. At this point, most rational health professionals would allow an individual to decide if the risk of heart, brain, and blood disorders outweigh the risk of experiencing COVID without the vaccine in any of its mutations and variations.However, that study was only one of many that have been done to assess the COVID-19 vaccine side effects. Another project was proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Myocarditis Outcomes after mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination Investigation (MOVING) in October 2021.As a reminder, myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis is inflammation of the lining around the heart. The agency has already released some reports, such as this one in The Lancet, which asserted that virus-caused myocarditis was worse than the one that arose post-vaccination.
Covid is only one of many vaccines being offered. In total, children may receive over a dozen different vaccines across multiple doses throughout their development. Adults typically require fewer vaccines but may need boosters or additional shots based on health risks and travel needs.
How much data related to vaccine injuries for other products resides on that database?
Finally, a recent study conducted by the Cleveland Clinic has raised concerns about the effectiveness of this season’s flu vaccine. Published as a preprint on MedRxiv, the research analyzed data from 53,402 healthcare workers during the 2024-2025 flu season and found that vaccinated individuals had a 27% higher risk of contracting influenza compared to their unvaccinated counterparts.
The calculated vaccine effectiveness was reported as -26.9%, indicating that the vaccine may have increased the risk of infection rather than reducing it.
“This study found that influenza vaccination of working-aged adults was associated with a higher risk of influenza during the 2024-2025 respiratory viral season, suggesting that the vaccine has not been effective in preventing influenza this season,” the researchers wrote in the study.
In conclusion, Marks’ expletive-filled explanations for leaving his agency indicate there are many good reasons for qualified database experts to dig into the VAERS system and circumspect medical professionals to assess the information they find.
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