The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has claimed that there was no known association between heart inflammation and COVID-19 vaccines as late as October 2021.
CDC officials made the claim in response to a Freedom of Information Act request for reports from a CDC team that is focused on analyzing the risk of post-vaccination myocarditis and pericarditis, two forms of heart inflammation. Both began detected at higher-than-expected rates after COVID-19 vaccination in the spring of 2021.
The team focuses on studying data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a passive surveillance system co-run by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The date range for the search was April 2, 2021, to Oct. 2, 2021.
“The National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases performed a search of our records that failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request,” Roger Andoh, a CDC records officer, told The Epoch Times. The center is part of the CDC.
No abstractions or reports were available because “an association between myocarditis and mRNA COVID-19 vaccination was not known at that time,” Andoh added.
Both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are built on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.
Reports of heart inflammation after COVID-19 vaccination were first made public in April 2021 by the U.S. military, which detected the issue along with Israeli authorities well before the CDC.
While Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, said that month that the agency had looked for a safety signal in its data and found none, by the end of June CDC researchers were saying that the available data “suggest an association with immunization,” and in August described (pdf) the issue as a “harm” from vaccination.
The claim that the link wasn’t known “is provably false,” Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, told The Epoch Times via email. “Either the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing at CDC, or federal health officials are disseminating misinformation about what they knew about myocarditis following mRNA COVID vaccines and when they knew it.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that the FOIA response “raises even more questions about the agency’s honesty, transparency, and use, or lack thereof, of its safety surveillance systems, such as VAERS, to detect COVID-19 vaccine adverse events.”
“I have sent two letters to the CDC about the agency’s inability to find records demonstrating its use of the vaccine surveillance systems. To date, the CDC has failed to respond to my letters,” he added.
“Apparently CDC needs to make a correction!” a spokeswoman for the agency told The Epoch Times in an email.
The agency is acknowledging that by June 2021, data began to indicate a link between the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and heart inflammation, outlined that month in two presentations made to government vaccine advisory panels.
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