The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has acknowledged publicly for the first time that the agency gave false information about its COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, said in a letter made public on Sept. 12 that the CDC did not analyze certain types of adverse event reports at all in 2021, despite the agency previously saying it started in February 2021.
“CDC performed PRR analysis between March 25, 2022, through July 31, 2022,” Walensky said. “CDC also recently addressed a previous statement made to the Epoch Times to clarify PRR were not run between February 26, 2021, to September 30, 2021.”
Walensky’s agency had promised in several documents, starting in early 2021, to perform a type of analysis called Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) on reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which it helps manage.
But the agency said in June that it did not perform PRRs. It also said that performing them was “outside th[e] agency’s purview.”
Confronted with the contradiction, Dr. John Su, a CDC official, told The Epoch Times in July that the agency started performing PRRs in February 2021 and “continues to do so to date.”
But just weeks later, the CDC said Su was wrong.
“CDC performed PRRs from March 25, 2022 through July 31, 2022,” a spokeswoman told The Epoch Times in August.
Walensky’s new letter, dated Sept. 2 and sent on Sept. 6 to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), shows that Walensky is aware that her agency gave false information.
Walensky’s Letter to Sen. Ron Johnson
‘Lacked Any Justification’
Walensky’s letter included no explanation of why that happened.
The letter “lacked any justification for why CDC performed PRRS during certain periods and not others,” Johnson, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations, told Walensky in a response.
“You also provided no explanation as to why Dr. Su’s assertion … completely contradicts the CDC’s [initial] response … as well as your September 6, 2022, response to me,” he added.
