Study that detailed sudden deaths in two teenagers following COVID-19 vaccination left officials scrambling.
Two teenagers died shortly after COVID-19 vaccination, experts reported in a study published Feb. 14, 2022. Within hours, federal officials scrambled to respond, worried the paper would harm their efforts to promote COVID-19 vaccines, internal emails show.
“This is important because this report has significant implications for CDC and FDA’s vaccine safety and policy discussions,” Dr. Sarah Reagan-Steiner, a medical officer at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), wrote on Feb. 17, 2022.
The CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have repeatedly promoted widespread COVID-19 vaccination and downplayed confirmed and possible side effects of the vaccines.
Another CDC official claimed that not including CDC scientists as co-authors of the paper called into question the ethics of the experts who wrote it. The agency rapidly submitted a rebuttal to the journal that published the study.
The internal emails were obtained by The Epoch Times through Freedom of Information Act requests. Some are being reported in this article for the first time.
Combined with comments from two of the authors of the study, the emails shed fresh light on the paper—the first to detail examinations of American children who died with heart inflammation after COVID-19 vaccination—and its aftermath. The paper set off a firestorm within the CDC that led to attempts by agency officials to overrule the medical examiners who examined the boys.
The myocarditis manifested unusually in the teenage boys, Dr. James Gill, the chief medical examiner for the state of Connecticut, and two other experts wrote in the study. They said the injuries were similar to cardiomyopathy, which is often caused by extreme stressors.
“This postvaccine reaction may represent an overly exuberant immune response, with the myocardial injury mediated by similar immune mechanisms to those described with SARS-CoV-2 and multisystem inflammatory syndrome cytokine storms,” the experts said.
The boys were both found dead in their beds—one in Michigan and one in Connecticut—just days after receiving Pfizer-BioNTech shots. Each tested negative for COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
By Zachary Stieber
