Highlights from last week’s congressional hearing on lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic included criticism of government-mandated lockdowns and masks, and public health agencies’ lack of oversight and proper safety testing of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The hearing also revealed that Dr. David M. Morens, a former aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci accused of using his personal email account to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for communications related to COVID-19’s origins, is still employed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
One Congress member used the hearing to attack Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), calling the idea of Kennedy in that role “shameful.”
Testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Response on Nov. 14 were:
- Dr. Hilary Marston, chief medical officer of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
- Lawrence Tabak, DDS, Ph.D., principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
- Dr. Henry Walke, director of the Office of Readiness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense (CHD) senior research scientist who listened to the hearings said, “One of the lessons learned from this subcommittee — not that we didn’t already know it — is that HHS has systemic flaws. [A] systemic flaw goes way beyond the suggested punitive action against the few most visible bad actors … Correcting systemic flaws requires system-wide changes.”
HHS oversees the FDA, CDC and NIH.
Fauci ‘lied and many, many people died’
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) launched an attack against Kennedy during the hearing. Citing the 1.3 million Americans who died due to the pandemic, the “single largest loss of life event that we’ve had in the modern era,” Garcia said he’s “very, very concerned” about Kennedy’s nomination. He said:
“We’re considering to bring somebody on with no scientific or medical credentials, who’s falsely claimed for decades that vaccines cause autism, who has quite frankly said just outrageous comments about science and medicine. That this person would come in to gut the NIH, I think is shameful.
“We should be very concerned as a country that RFK Jr. could be put in charge of health when he’s a vaccine denier and has caused great harm to the American public.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) responded to Garcia by accusing the Biden administration and public health agencies of waging “a war on the American people’s health, the world’s health, but also a war on our children’s health.”
In her five-minute statement, Greene said the U.S. government was responsible for creating COVID-19 and a subsequent lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where federally funded gain-of-function research was performed. She said:
“The government and its powerful agencies should never use the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars to create viruses that can be unleashed on the world like COVID-19 was.
“COVID-19 was funded using the gain-of-function in a biolab in China, and then it was lied about. Dr. Fauci lied to the American people, abusing his power and position and role … paid for by the American taxpayer. He lied and many, many people died.”
Greene also criticized COVID-19 restrictions such as lockdowns, school shutdowns and the masking of children.
“Children were not at risk of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19, yet children became one of the worst victims of the malpractice and abuse of power by your agencies and by people in charge in many cities, states and the government. It was absolutely horrendous,” Greene said.
Greene said these policies contributed to a growing public health crisis in the U.S.
“Suicides hit record highs, and the saddest thing is there were record suicide rates seen among children and a mental health crisis released on Americans like never before,” Greene said.
People who criticized these policies were censored, according to Greene. She said:
“Schools were shut down, people’s jobs were shut down, employment was ended, small businesses were shut down. Life as everyone knew it was shut down. This caused violations of people’s First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion.
“There were doctors that came out with treatments using ivermectin, zinc vitamin D, and it was labeled ‘horse paste,’ and those doctors were attacked and criticized and called conspiracy theorists.”
‘What were they hiding and lying about to the American people?’
Greene also criticized the COVID-19 vaccines — and oversight of the vaccines by public health agencies. She said:
“The FDA approved an experimental vaccine through a rushed approval process that suppressed trials and data that showed that vaccines didn’t work and had side effects that even caused death — 15 pages of known side effects. The FDA wanted them sealed for 75 years.
“What were they hiding and lying about to the American people? Well, we know now. … People who reported vaccine injuries and deaths on VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] were ignored. They were mocked. They were called conspiracy theorists and they were canceled on social media when they tried to tell about the horrifying things that were happening to them or their family members.”
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) questioned Walke about COVID-19 vaccine-related safety signals concerning myocarditis in young men. She asked Walke if the CDC “downplayed” this risk through a “lack of detailed information on possible adverse outcomes.”
“COVID vaccines have really undergone the most rigorous safety monitoring of any vaccine in history,” Walke said — though he subsequently conceded that vaccine mandates interfered with the doctor-patient relationship.
“Vaccines are incredibly effective and the best defense,” Walke said. “We also believe that CDC makes recommendations for the general public, but that the relationship between the provider and the patient is incredibly important to interpret that recommendation from a public health agency.”
Walke also conceded that public health agencies could have better communicated vaccine risks to the public. He said:
“Once we have that type of information, we try to push that out in various ways, including the scientific publications, but also through, again, various state and local leaders to try to engage with those communities.
“But again, I think there’s a number of different communities in our country and we need to do better, I believe, at trying to reach those communities to talk to them about what are some of the issues they have with vaccines.”
Marston said the FDA doesn’t solely rely on pharmaceutical companies’ critical data when evaluating vaccine safety. “We do our own analysis. We don’t just take things that are given to us. Our professionals look into the data themselves,” Marston said.
“‘We do our own analysis’ is such a bald-faced lie,” CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker said. “FDA never does its own analysis. Not only is the agency bought off by the FastTrack program, where Pharma contributes up to 50% of the FDA’s overall budget, but it relies solely on Big Pharma data that are rarely questioned for quality and veracity.”
Jablonowski said it is “irreconcilable that the FDA does its ‘own analysis,’ yet let Pfizer-BioNTech sneak the very dangerous SV40 promoter into the plasmid that produced its vaccine. This was discovered not by the FDA or any other agency of HHS, but by an independent researcher, Kevin McKernan, as a side project.”
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Fauci aide ‘lied to Congress’ but remains employed
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) questioned Tabak regarding HHS’ investigation of Morens, a senior scientific adviser in NIAID’s office of the director and a 25-year veteran of the agency.
Last year, a congressional investigation revealed that Morens sought to evade FOIA requests and media scrutiny by using his personal email address and deleting messages from his government email account. These messages concerned the origins of COVID-19 and the lab-leak theory.
Responding to Comer’s questions, Tabak said Morens is “still an employee” of NIAID but that HHS is “taking the actions necessary in all cases.”
When presented with evidence that Morens sought to evade transparency laws, Tabak said “those types of actions would be completely inappropriate” and that HHS is following “procedures to the letter” in investigating Morens.
“It looks to me like he lied to Congress and that’s a felony,” Comer said.
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