Government officials found a signal for heart inflammation.
A federal agency detected early in the COVID-19 vaccination campaign a safety signal for a serious problem for Pfizer’s shot, a document obtained by The Epoch Times shows.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) detected a signal for myocarditis and pericarditis for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the document, an email from May 13, 2021.
Myocarditis is heart inflammation while pericarditis is inflammation of tissue around the heart.
Data from the VA Center For Medication Safety showed “a signal for myocarditis/pericarditis … with Pfizer vaccine following the 1st dose,” Fran Cunningham, a VA official, wrote in the email.
She was communicating with Dr. Tom Shimabukuro and Dr. Lauri Markowitz, two top vaccine safety employees with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Ms. Cunningham and the VA did not respond to requests for comment.
The discovery of the signal was never shared with the public by the VA or the CDC.
Inquiries sent to Drs. Shimabukuro and Markowitz were funneled to a CDC spokesperson, who said that the VA later determined the signal “was not a true signal.”
VA officials, according to a presentation obtained by The Epoch Times, told a private meeting that included CDC officials in June 2021 that no signal had been found in a surveillance system. No audio or transcript of the meeting has been made public.
The CDC also failed for months to convey a separate signal detected in its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, according to previous reporting by The Epoch Times.
“This is yet another agency that warned the CDC regarding the myocarditis signal and affirmed that it was a ’real’ signal using epidemiologic data,” Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer with the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, told The Epoch Times via email.
“The CDC and VA had a strong responsibility to let the public know about the signal but chose to bury it in order to avoid causing ‘vaccine hesitancy’ by showing the actual risks of the COVID-19 vaccine,” he added.
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