‘If you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later,’ the official wrote.
A top Food and Drug Administration official told counterparts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that they should study health issues that arose in some people after receiving COVID-19 vaccines, according to newly released emails.
Dr. Janet Woodcock, at the time the acting commissioner of the FDA, wrote to Dr. Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in one of the emails, on May 27, 2021, about five months after COVID-19 vaccination started.
“I have been contacted by a number of people who have experienced adverse events post COVID-19 vaccination (from all three of the current vaccines),” Woodcock wrote.
“Many are healthcare professionals, some of whom I know. The symptoms do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing. Clearly during mass vaccination you will get a lot of psychological reactions and it is hard to sort these things out. But the peoples’ main complaint is that no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”
Woodcock said that “it would be worthwhile to do a study and evaluate a cohort of these individuals.” Such a study would need money, since the industry would likely not support it, and an investigator interested in “medical mysteries,” Woodcock added.
“My experience is, that if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared,” she said.
Fauci replied to Collins without including Woodcock.
“We cannot ignore her,” Fauci said.
He suggested looping in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its then-director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
The emails were released on Aug. 16 by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who have been obtaining Fauci’s emails and texts from the parent agency of the FDA, CDC, and NIH.
They said it was not clear whether Walensky was ever consulted.
