GOP Senator Questions Biden Officials’ Handling Of COVID Vaccine Safety Tracking
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson held a hearing to investigate Biden officials’ handling of COVID-19 vaccine safety signals.
Johnson, chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, held a hearing Wednesday titled “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Deliberately Turned a Blind Eye to COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.” Witnesses included Dr. David Wiseman, PhD, president and founder of Synechion, Inc., a consulting and development company specializing in products to prevent the accumulation of post-surgical scar tissue between organs; Dr. Karl Jablonowski, PhD, senior research scientist at Children’s Health Defense; and Maria Young, a COVID-19 survivor.
Unmasked: How Biden health officials deliberately turned a blind eye to COVID-19 vaccine safety signals, PSI hearing 4.29.26 https://t.co/eKJf9LoPeQ
– Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) April 29, 2026
The hearing was based on the findings of the President’s majority interim report, as well as approximately 600 pages of documents detailing how, in early 2021, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials became aware of a new “cutting edge” data mining method that could better detect statistically significant safety signals for adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccines. (RELATED: DOJ indicts Fauci’s former top adviser for plotting against the United States)
Rather than adopting this method, the report claims, Biden health officials continued to use their old method of data mining with known limitations that prevented the FDA from detecting adverse events.
One of the key findings of Johnson’s report highlights Dr. Ana Szarfman, former chief medical officer and safety data mining developer at the FDA. In 2021, Szarfman contributed to work on the agency’s surveillance system and reportedly briefed senior officials on a “superior” method designed to improve detection capabilities. The report states that this alternative approach addresses “masking,” a limitation of the FDA’s current system that can conceal or weaken signals of possible adverse events.
“Masking occurs when a vaccine’s statistical signals in a database are masked by reports associated with other vaccines. For example, Moderna’s myocarditis signal becomes masked if its comparison benchmark is artificially inflated by including Pfizer’s myocarditis reports,” Dr. Wiseman explained during Wednesday’s hearing. “As President Johnson recently pointed out, regulators were well aware of the masking problem. Nonetheless, officials claimed ignorance about how to solve the masking problem and that developing solutions was beyond the FDA’s capabilities. They considered it ‘problematic to use a brand new, perhaps unvalidated, tool in the context of an EUA.’
Among those briefed during the Biden-era pandemic response was Dr. Pierre Marqueswho directed the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. However, the report said the agency did not adopt this method, even after presenting it to executives.
🚨TODAY AT 2:30 PM ET: I will hold a hearing at which I will present additional evidence of individuals within the FDA making similar corrupt statements.
The hearing is titled “Unmasked: How Biden health officials deliberately turned a blind eye to the safety of COVID-19 vaccines… https://t.co/fgQN5Qwu2g
– Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) April 29, 2026
Between March and July 2021, Szarfman also conducted analyzes of COVID-19 vaccine adverse event data using the improved approach, the report reveals. These analyzes reportedly identified a greater number of statistically significant safety signals than the FDA’s standard system.
A study cited in the report found evidence of what it described as “49 examples of extreme masking,” including about 25 previously undetected security signals. These included diseases such as sudden cardiac death, Bell’s palsy and pulmonary infarction. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Trump admin puts nail in coffin of Biden-era vaccine discrimination)
Another set of analyzes would have identified stronger statistical signals for a range of serious outcomes, including acute myocardial infarction associated with Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, embolism and thrombosis associated with Pfizer and Janssen vaccines, and reports of death and sudden death associated with Moderna and Pfizer products.
Johnson further alleged that administration officials seemed more focused on Szarfman’s methodology than the findings themselves. According to the report, Dr. Peter Marks warned Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, then director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, that Szarfman’s data mining work could “create false conflicts that would fuel anti-vaccination rhetoric.”
The report said FDA officials ultimately asked Szarfman “not to create and send data mining reports and analyses.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: How Fauci and a Deep State Cabal Took Down Intel in a Historic Deception)
The following year, officials from the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also discussed limiting the distribution of the FDA’s weekly COVID-19 vaccine data mining reports. In internal communications, a CDC official wrote: “I believe that due to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act requests] we may have asked the FDA to stop sending these weekly data mining results.
Today I released a report showing that Biden health officials knew that safety signals about COVID-19 injection injuries were masked by their VAERS analysis algorithm.
They were shown an updated algorithm that reported serious adverse events, but they refused to use it.… pic.twitter.com/R5L99g8DiO
– Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) April 29, 2026
“Our knowledge of the safety of the mRNA vaccine prior to the issuance of the emergency use authorization was poor,” Dr. Karl Jablonowski, PhD, testified Wednesday. “Pharmacovigilance behind closed doors should give everyone pause. It is simply too important not to do it properly and in a timely manner. Failures can be, and have been, catastrophic.”
In a Dec. 15 letter obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said he would continue to push for records on COVID-19 vaccine deaths after a “blockbuster” revelation in November that the Trump administration had verified child deaths. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Ron Johnson requests documents after ‘blockbuster’ FDA memo links child deaths to COVID vaccine)
The letter requests additional details about those deaths, as well as information about the U.S. vaccine safety monitoring system and what it described as a “complacent” FDA bureaucracy under the Biden administration that delayed reporting for years.
