‘Expect Fireworks’: CDC Launches Group to Study COVID Vaccine Injuries, Efficacy

"A new CDC workgroup will review scientific data and studies on the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, including data related to side effects and deaths associated with the shots.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the workgroup will use the results of its review 'to help develop [the agency’s] COVID-19 immunization policy options.'

The 'COVID-19 Immunization Workgroup,' announced Wednesday, will be housed under the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and led by one of ACIP’s members, Retsef Levi, Ph.D., professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management...

The CDC said the workgroup members will analyze:

• Risk-benefit and cost-benefit analyses of current and new mRNA and non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and immunization schedules...
• 'Critical gaps' in the existing scientific and clinical literature on COVID-19 vaccines.
• Data — and clinical and scientific knowledge — relating to adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines.
• Areas where 'additional data and research are needed to inform COVID-19 immunization recommendations.'

The workgroup will address 'gaps in the existing knowledge about potential impurities,' including DNA contamination, in the COVID-19 vaccines, and gaps in scientific knowledge about the persistence and distribution of spike protein, mRNA and lipid nanoparticles in the body.

... [T]he group will review existing data and literature on the cumulative impact of receiving repeated booster doses, on 'cardiovascular, thrombotic, neurological, immunological and other serious adverse events potentially caused by COVID-19 immunization'; on the COVID-19 vaccines’ impact on pregnant women; and on 'all cause deaths, hospitalizations, and disability' related to the vaccines...

Establishment of workgroup 'long overdue'

... Drug safety advocate Kim Witczak, a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, called the news 'long overdue but absolutely necessary.'

'This is a positive step, but it also highlights a systemic problem: these questions should have been fully addressed before recommendations and mandates were made,' Witczak said.

Witczak said that, in 2023, she and others submitted a citizen petition to the FDA outlining safety concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines. She said the FDA 'ignored' the petition...

‘We need to be fully transparent about what we know, and what we don’t’

... 'We need to be fully transparent about what we know, and what we don’t, and unfortunately that was not always practised consistently in the past. My intention is to be part of changing that,' Levi said."