Israel’s Ministry of Health by March 2021 identified a nearly 1,000% increase in the risk of myocarditis associated with the second dose of the COVID-19 mRNA shot, according to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The documents, which were shared with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) last week, also include emails between top officials at U.S. public health agencies showing that Israel’s Ministry of Health contacted them about myocarditis related to the shots as early as Feb. 28, 2021.
Ministry of Health Deputy Director Roee Singer informed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that the health ministry had concerns about “a large number of myocarditis and pericarditis cases in young individuals” following the Pfizer shot and sought to discuss those concerns with the CDC.
A source who obtained documents from the U.S. Department of State shared Israel’s data on myocarditis rates and U.S. public health agencies’ correspondence with CHD. The documents include a slide presentation by Israel’s Ministry of Health Division of Epidemiology dated March 31, 2021.
The slides showed that by the end of March 2021, 5.2 million Israelis received the first dose of the vaccine and 4.8 million received the second dose. The incidence of myocarditis following dose 1 was 1.1 per million, and 11.7 per million following dose 2 — a 964% increase in incidence between the two.
The CDC didn’t publicly admit the link between the COVID-19 shots and myocarditis until May 27, 2021, even though Israel’s Ministry of Health had reached out in February 2021, and the agency had the slide presentation soon after that.
The slide presentation was included in an April 5, 2021, email that Dr. Lauri Markowitz, co-lead of the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group, sent to her staff.
CHD Senior Scientist Karl Jablonowski, who along with CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker was among the first to detail the deception around myocarditis, told The Defender that the Israeli document amounts to a safety surveillance study of 5 million people — and it flags myocarditis as an “undeniably strong signal.”
Jablonowski added:
“It is unconscionable that the CDC, NIH [National Institutes of Health], and FDA-CBER [U.S. Food and Drug Administration-Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research] had possession of this study at a time when over a million U.S. citizens were being vaccinated every day, and yet those agencies took no observable action.
“The year 2021 was the year of ‘safe and effective,’ yet the safety studies were left undone. Had the gene therapy products repurposed as vaccines actually been safe, it would have been serendipitous.
“The U.S. citizens were among the last to know of vaccine-induced myocarditis, while the U.S. government was among the first to know.”
CHD received the documents just days after Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) demanded public health agencies provide complete and unredacted documents about the development and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, after learning of extensive redactions in documents released in response to multiple FOIA requests.
In a letter sent Nov. 19 to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the FDA and the CDC, Johnson said the redactions make the documents nearly impossible to comprehend. He also said they obscure the public’s understanding of issues like myocarditis and pericarditis linked to vaccines.
CDC’s ’embarrassing’ response
The CDC’s response to questions raised by Israel‘s Ministry of Health, written jointly with the FDA, consisted of a description of the results of a simple search of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database run on Feb. 23, 2021.
This is the same type of query that any member of the public can do in the database — search for the number of entries in VAERS for myocarditis and the COVID-19 shot and summarize the details of the case reports.
“It is an embarrassing response, as the Ministry of Health could have run its own query on the publicly available data source and found more detail and more up-to-date information,” Jablonowski said.
The response didn’t include any of the more sophisticated analyses of the VAERS database that each agency was obligated to do as part of their routine VAERS surveillance.
According to the co-sponsored VAERS Standard Operating Procedures for COVID-19, dated Jan. 29, 2021, the CDC and the FDA would coordinate monitoring for “potential new safety concerns for COVID-19 vaccines.”
As per the document, each agency would use a different standard approach to data mining to screen for potential safety signals. The CDC would run proportional reporting ratio data mining weekly or as needed.
The FDA would conduct a biweekly thorough manual review of serious adverse events using empirical Bayesian data mining.
Using these different statistical methods, the agencies are meant to then compare adverse events related to the COVID-19 vaccine with those related to non-COVID-19 vaccines to identify safety signals.
The agencies have not made this data publicly available.
In January 2023 CHD filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FDA requesting documents related to the agency’s safety monitoring of the COVID-19 vaccines through VAERS. In February 2023, CHD filed a similar FOIA lawsuit against the CDC.
A judge gave the FDA until August 2026 to begin processing CHD’s request. The CDC case is stayed until January 2025, when there will be a status conference among the parties to discuss whether the stay will be extended or lifted.
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FDA’s Peter Marks questions whether to even tell the public of myocarditis risk
Rather than providing the public with information about the risks of vaccine-associated myocarditis as they became aware of it, FOIA documents indicate the agencies did what they could to minimize public perception of the risk — and debated whether to even make the information public at all.
In May 2021, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and other CDC officials considered whether to issue a public warning about the risk of myocarditis from vaccination. They drafted a Health Alert Network announcement, which is how they communicate “urgent public health incidents” with public information officers, practitioners, clinicians and local public health officials.
The agency never issued the alert. Instead, the CDC posted information on its website on May 22, 2021, indicating that there were “increased cases of myocarditis and pericarditis” reported but the CDC continues to recommend the vaccine for everyone ages 12 and up.
In a May 27, 2021, email from CBER Director Peter Marks to Walensky, Marks appeared to question whether even the website post was necessary. He asked Walensky, “Can you help me understand why we are doing this when pediatricians and others in the community already seem to be aware?”
Jablonowski said:
“When we eventually had proof that federal agencies were asserting safety while knowing harm, I figured I would feel relief. Relief that doctors will not again so blindly follow CDC-branded dictates, that elected officials will not again so boldly strip individual freedoms, that vaccine-injured will find justice, and that those who spoke out during impossible times and paid a heavy price will be vindicated.
“Now that we have the proof I just feel sad. Had the CDC been honest we would have made different choices. Our loss of life and loss of quality of life would not have been so great, and the fractures between our families and our friendships would not have been so deep.
“Those who are vaccine risk-aware are often criticized for being anti-progress. It is an upside-down world where the citizens who ask the questions required to advance human health are labeled anti-progress while those who recklessly endanger human health are considered pro-progress.”
