In an alarming escalation of his administration’s vaccine crackdown, President Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration is planning a presentation linking COVID-19 shots to children’s deaths, sources told multiple outlets Friday.
The Washington Post was the first to report the plans, citing four people who say next week’s presentation will focus on reports of 25 child deaths. Those accounts appear to be gathered from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which includes unverified reports from various sources, including ones pulled from social media, the Post reported.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explicitly notes that a report in the system “does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event” and that “anyone” can make a report.
NBC News and The New York Times also reported on the FDA’s plans.
Department of Health and Human Services communications director Andrew Nixon told HuffPost the reports “should be considered pure speculation” until anything is shared publicly, but confirmed that the FDA and CDC comb through VAERS reports.
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary told CNN last week that the agency was looking into VAERS reports about children dying from the COVID vaccine, saying a report would soon be released following an “intense investigation.”
The reported presentation follows Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the FDA, directing the CDC to stop recommending that healthy children and pregnant women receive regular COVID-19 boosters, defying recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist whose views on the shots conflict with those of every major health organization, also fired all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel in June and handpicked their replacements, who include some vocal vaccine skeptics and medical conspiracy theorists.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Canada’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, was among the experts sounding the alarm on the FDA’s reported use of the VAERS database.
“Manipulating VAERS is one of the oldest tricks in the anti-vax book,” she wrote on social media following the news. “There was no meaningful analysis here. This decision was already made and VAERS is being used to manufacture justification. That’s not scientific and it will kill people.”
The FDA presentation will also focus on reports linking birth defects to administering the COVID-19 shot to pregnant women, the Times reported.