Author: Maryanne Demasi PH.D.

This week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced the establishment of a “Public Health Integrity Committee.”

The committee will be tasked with making critical assessments of the health policies issued by the CDC, the FDA and other public health agencies, as well as conducting surveillance into sudden deaths of individuals that received the covid-19 vaccine in Florida, based on autopsy results.

In part, it’s borne out of the escalating distrust of Federal health agencies and the collusion between the Federal government and Big Tech to censor the views of doctors who contradict the scientific narrative.

The committee, led by Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, will include eminent doctors and scientists such as Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kuldorff, Tracy Beth Høeg, Joseph Fraiman, Christine Stabell Benn, and more.

“People feel like they’re beholden to the CDC,” Ladapo said during a roundtable discussion this week. “We will be issuing recommendations that make sense and are scientifically valid.”

DeSantis also announced he would petition Florida’s Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate any “crimes and wrongs” regarding covid-19 vaccines.

“I think people want the truth … I think people want accountability,” said DeSantis. “You need to have a thorough investigation into what’s happened with the shots,” he added.

If the court agrees, the grand jury would be given 12 to 18 months to investigate criminal or wrongful activity in Florida relating to the development, promotion, and distribution of vaccines purported to prevent covid-19 infection, symptoms, and transmission.

The Petition in more detail

The 20-page grand jury petition, dated December 13, 2022, provides multiple citations of public health claims, where the accuracy of those claims is now being questioned.

For example, Dr Anthony Fauci unequivocally asserted in May 2021, that vaccinated people were “dead ends” to the virus because the vaccines prevented transmission.

And the White House issued a press briefing prior to Christmas last year, threatening “a winter of severe illness and death” for the unvaccinated.

The petition states that the CDC also promoted the belief that the covid-19 vaccines prevented transmission. In turn, President Joe Biden imposed vaccine mandates on the American people, including healthcare workers and members of the military.

President Biden said it was because “unvaccinated people spread the virus” and “the best way to slow the spread of covid-19 and to prevent infection by the Delta variant or other variants, is to be vaccinated.”

In addition, the Federal government, medical associations, and other experts suggested that it was “an ethical or civic duty” to be vaccinated and that failing to do so would be “selfish and harmful” to others.

The petition suggests that much of the understanding about the benefits and harms of covid-19 vaccines was driven by manufacturers issuing their own press releases.

The Chief Executive Officers of Moderna and Pfizer actively promoted impressive efficacy statistics via media statements and used their websites to promote the theory that vaccines could help end the pandemic by achieving “herd immunity.”

In January 2021, just as the rollout of the vaccines was underway, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel stated that his company’s vaccine could produce antibodies to provide “protection potentially for a couple of years.”

It only took 6 months before breakthrough infections became rampant and people were told they would need boosters to see them through.

In October, the Florida Department of Health issued guidance that healthy children may not benefit from the covid-19 vaccine and recognised that the harms of vaccine-induced myocarditis, particularly for adolescents 16 to 17 years of age, may outweigh the benefits.

The petition suggests that vaccine manufacturers exaggerated the risk of covid-19 in young people, citing the example of when Pfizer’s CEO Anthony Bourla claimed the delta variant posed a “substantial threat” to children. 

In addition, vaccine manufacturers downplayed the harms of myocarditis in young people, claiming it was an “extremely” or “very” rare adverse event that was “typically mild.”

This contradicted an analysis by Florida’s own Department of Health, which found an increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related deaths among males 18-39 years old within 28 days of receiving an mRNA vaccine.

The petition also states that countries like France, Canada and Switzerland have found a connection between covid-19 vaccines and increased rates of myocarditis or pericarditis and points to a German study of autopsies performed on people who died unexpectedly at home within 20 days of receiving an mRNA vaccine, indicating that myocarditis “can be a potentially lethal complication.”

One of the concerning aspects, is the excess mortality from heart attacks that rose significantly during the pandemic, especially among individuals ages 25 to 44.

Did the pharmaceutical industry make fair and accurate representations to the public about the benefits and harms of their covid-19 vaccines? Drug companies certainly have a history of deceptive and illegal practices.

DeSantis says Florida law prohibits fraudulent practices, “including the dissemination of false or misleading advertisements of a drug and the use of any representation or suggestion in any advertisement relating to a drug that an application of a drug is effective when it is not.”

In response to DeSantis’ petition for a grand jury, Dr Anthony Fauci appeared befuddled on CNN.

“I don’t have a clue of what he’s asking for,” said Fauci. “Vaccinations administered over the past two years have saved 3.2 million lives, 18 million hospitalizations and approximately $1 trillion in costs. So what’s the problem with vaccines?”

Reposted from the Author’s Substack

On 24 Sept 2021, when CDC director Rochelle Walensky was asked if it was safe to receive a covid-19 vaccine while breastfeeding, her reply was unwavering:

“There is no bad time to get vaccinated,” said Walensky.

“Get vaccinated while you’re thinking about having a baby, before you’re thinking about having a baby, while you’re pregnant with your baby or after you’ve delivered your baby.”

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But Walensky’s advice was not based on science. The safety studies had not been done.

It has been over a year since her comment, and a study published in JAMA found trace amounts of mRNA in the breast milk of mother who’d received the Pfizer or Moderna covid-19 vaccine.

The researchers speculated that lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA, once injected into the arm, are transported via the lymphatic system to the mammary glands and expressed into breast milk.

Yes, it was a small study, and the mRNA was only detected in expressed breast milk for up to two days, but the authors stated:

“Caution is warranted about breastfeeding children younger than 6 months in the first 48 hours after maternal vaccination until more safety studies are conducted“

Aaron Kheriaty, psychiatrist and director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy, Washington DC, has been critical of the “jab first, ask questions later” approach.

He says Walensky’s insistence about the safety of mRNA vaccines in breastfeeding women was “completely reckless” in the absence of adequate safety data.

“We don’t have evidence that it’s harmful, but we also don’t have sufficient evidence that it is safe for your baby, so that’s the first thing that needs to be said when there’s an absence of evidence,” says Kheriaty.

There are still many unknowns. Oral ingestion of mRNA bound to lipid nanoparticles has no demonstrated safety, and the pegylated product (a design of the mRNA vaccines) when ingested, can be rapidly absorbed through the gut lining.

“The safety studies should’ve been done right out of the gate. Until you actually do the studies, you cannot, at the same time, come out and say, don’t worry, this is safe. We have to inform people of the state of the science, we should tell them that the evidence is not clear,” he adds.

Public health authorities argued that pregnant women and their babies would face a greater risk of harm from covid than from the vaccine, but Kheriaty says it was guesswork.

“We didn’t know any of that. It was a theoretical risk. Childbearing women were excluded from the clinical trials, so we did not have that data.”

Childbearing women were coerced 

Adam Urato, a maternal-foetal medicine specialist at MetroWest Medical Centre, Massachusetts, says vaccines have an important role to play in medicine, but admits that many of his patients have legitimate concerns about the unknown impact of covid-19 vaccines on pregnancy and breastfeeding.

“These women make good points. They should be listened to, and their judgement and decisions respected,” says Urato.

“After all, these vaccines are synthetic chemical structures. They are made in chemical manufacturing facilities. They aren’t ‘all natural’ substances. And, honestly, we just don’t know what all of the effects are going to be from using these vaccines during pregnancy and during breastfeeding,” he adds.

Urato rejects the media narrative that childbearing women are “victims of misinformation” if they have concerns about covid-19 vaccine safety.

“My patients are intelligent, they have good instincts and I think their concerns are valid. The idea that all of these women are misled, and uninformed ‘victims of misinformation’ is an insult to them,” he says.

When vaccine mandates were imposed across the globe, many pregnant and breastfeeding women were forced to get vaccinated under penalty of losing their jobs and those who declined, were accused of being anti-vaxxers.

“Pregnant women should be allowed to make personal health choices and decide what gets injected into their body, and the decision should be free from coercion,” says Urato.

Instead, doctors are being coached on ways to handle vaccine hesitancy. In Canada, for example, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario encouraged doctors to prescribe medication to manage anxieties about the vaccine or to recommend psychotherapy.

The precautionary principle

A recent article by British sociologist Robert Dingwall reminds us of the underlying principle of clinicians primum non nocere; the first duty of a doctor is to do no harm.

Dingwall writes that safety cannot be “assumed” but must be demonstrated.  He says, “doing stuff just in case” or because “it might help,” is not sufficient.

“Emergency conditions do not justify the abandonment of the precautionary principle. If action is urgent, but benefits and harms are uncertain, then the actions or innovations must be temporary, provisional, and closely monitored with a view to withdrawing or halting them if their benefits are not proportionate to their harms.

Pandemic policies would have looked very different if the precautionary principle had been applied correctly.”

Urato agrees. He says that we will look back with regret at how public health authorities treated pregnant women. 

“Vaccine mandates were a really cruel, uncompassionate, and inhumane way to treat pregnant women.  The community needs to really learn from this awful episode and make sure nothing like this happens again.”

Reposted from the author’s Substack.