The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is facing significant criticism regarding systemic failures and alleged corruption that have undermined its mission to safeguard public health and eroded public trust in vaccine safety.
Some of the key systemic failures and corruption allegations include:
Failure to Submit Mandated Biennial Vaccine Safety Reports
The CDC, as part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has failed to comply with a critical legal mandate for over three decades – specifically, the requirement under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) to submit biennial vaccine safety reports to Congress. NCVIA was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on November 14, 1986. The Act was a response to a crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, when lawsuits over severe adverse reactions to vaccines, particularly the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) vaccine, threatened the financial viability of vaccine manufacturers who in turn threatened to cease producing vaccines unless they no longer had to pay for the damages of their products. The NCVIA aimed to stabilize the vaccine supply by creating the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), removing manufacturer liability, and establishing the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Crucially though, it mandated that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), of which the CDC is a part, form a Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines and submit biennial reports to Congress detailing efforts to improve vaccine safety, including research advancements and reductions in adverse reactions. These reports were intended to ensure transparency and accountability, compelling the CDC to actively monitor and enhance vaccine safety while maintaining public trust.
A 2018 lawsuit by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), represented by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., exposed this 34-year lapse, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), forcing HHS to admit in court that no such reports existed. Despite this clear legal obligation, HHS, and by extension the CDC, have failed to produce a single biennial report since the law’s passage. This is considered not merely a bureaucratic oversight but a deliberate evasion of a congressional mandate designed to protect public health. The lack of these reports – and the notable lack of interest from Congress to ensure they were produced, possibly, goes hand in hand with, as Senator Bernie Sanders admitted “Every Republican got corporate PAC money from the pharmaceutical industry, Democrats as well”.
No true safety studies
Vaccines have historically been exempt from rigorous double-blinded, true placebo safety tests. This exemption is rooted in ethical, practical, and regulatory considerations, the reasoning being that is would be deemed unethical and therefore unacceptable to withhold potentially life-saving interventions from a control-group. The World Health Organization (WHO) and other bodies have discouraged true placebo use in trials where a vaccine is available, as it could expose participants to unnecessary risk. For instance, the 2013 WHO expert panel on placebo use in vaccine trials specified that placebo controls are acceptable only when the study question cannot be answered with an active-controlled design, risks are mitigated, and the research addresses local health needs.
Practically, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials for vaccines are complex and resource-intensive. Vaccines require large sample sizes and maintaining blinding with a true placebo (e.g., saline) is said to be challenging due to side effects like injection site reactions. The claim is that using adjuvants or other vaccines as controls helps maintain blinding while addressing these issues, as seen in trials for vaccines like Gardasil and hepatitis B, allowing researchers to assess comparative effectiveness and safety relative to existing standards. Or, it could be that it is an efficient way of masking adjuvant-related side effects and that comparing one vaccine to another or to an adjuvant efficiently hides damages from both products as their levels would be equivalent to each other, while compared to a truly unvaccinated control-group potentially would not show the same degrees of damages or diseases.
The pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies like the FDA, influenced by industry norms, have historically accepted these unscientific designs of non-placebo-controlled safety trials. For example, the emergency use authorization (EUA) of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020 was granted based on trials that incorporated active controls as the pandemic progressed. This regulatory approach, supported by the CDC and HHS, reflects a consensus that post-marketing surveillance systems like VAERS and VSD can compensate for the lack of pre-approval placebo trials.
The safety studies done are often very short. The absence of rigorous, long-term studies comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, or the outcome of all the vaccine doses in the childhood vaccine program together, further compounds this issue, leaving questions about cumulative effects unanswered.
Inadequate Vaccine Safety Assessment Practices
The CDC’s approach to vaccine safety assessments has been criticized for its reliance on systems like VAERS and the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which have very extensive limitations. A 2010 Harvard Pilgrim Health Care study, funded by the CDC, revealed that VAERS captures less than 1% of vaccine adverse events due to underreporting, a critical flaw that the biennial reports were meant to address.
Allegations of Pharmaceutical Industry Capture
Since 1986, despite no real double-blinded true placebo safety studies, the regulatory agencies have let the vaccine schedule increase to include 76 doses by age 18 (Senator Marshall). During that same period, chronic diseases has skyrocketed, 76,4% of Americans today suffer from a chronic disease, many related to immune disturbances and autism rates at a staggering level. Limited liability and expedited approvals seem to have benefitted the pharmaceutical industry more than public health.
The agencies consequently prioritize industry interests and one explanation of this, apart from the obvious inappropriate financial ties and that CDC holds vaccine patents, is the constant revolving doors between agency personal and the same pharmaceutical companies they are meant to oversee. A good example being Dr. Gerberding, a CDC Director between 2002–2009 and later a President of Merck Vaccines from 2009–2014. Another worth mentioning is Paul Offit, longtime influental advisor at the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), responsible for reviewing and evaluating scientific data on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and provide independent advice on these issues to the FDA Commissioner. Offit, an outspoken critic of vaccine skepticism – the man once declared an infant could safely endure 10,000 vaccines at one time – has seen no problem combining his advisory role at VRBPAC with a $1.5 million research chair funded by Merck or the fact that he is a longtime patent holder of several vaccines.
Allegations of Internal Obstruction
Allegations of internal obstruction and regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry have indeed been brought into focus again by people like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and newly appointed ACIP member Dr Robert Malone. They have pointed out systemic corruption within the CDC, the removal of all earlier ACIP members due to conflict of interests being one example. The turmoil at CDC originates from particularily leaders that have consequently obtructed policy changes and actions within the CDC. Dr. Marty Makary stated in a post-hearing interview that he had been consistently blocked from accessing vaccine safety data by CDC personnel, who offered various excuses but refused to provide the new leadership with the data. Dr Robert Malone, newly appointed ACIP member and one of the inventors of the mRNA vaccine technology, told in another interview how CDC bureaucrats obstructed the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from independently assessing COVID-19 vaccine safety data, using “terms of reference” as a bureaucratic tool to limit investigation scope. Kennedy himself asserted he was blocked from safety data for seven months. This obstruction occurred under the tenure of former CDC Director Susan Monarez, whom Trump subsequently fired, followed by the resignation of another four CDC health officials. Kennedy commented that those responsible for the catastrophic COVID failures, “The people at CDC… who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who WILL BE LEAVING.”
Allegations of data manipulation or withholding data
In 2014, whistleblower Dr. William Thompson told how he and other CDC scientists were ordered to destroy data from a study they had done in 2004 (Senator Bill Posey) that showed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism in children, particularily in African American boys.
Senator Johnson will in this week, together with ICAN lead counsel Aaron Siri, present a high quality study made “by a major institution that inconventiently found far higher rates of various chronic diseases among vaccinated children”. The study was completed in 2020 but despite promises it was never published.
CDC claimed the COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective and that their V-safe, a vaccine safety monitoring system, was part of “the most intensive safety monitoring effort in U.S. history.” But yet CDC refused to release the V-safe data to back this up. Not until after several lawsuits the data was obtained by ICAN. This data is now available at their page: V-safe Dashboard.
Conclusion
There is a need for, and a very strong public support for, the radical overhaul of the regulatory agencies and the vaccine safety testing paradigm. The “trust the science” approach of earlier CDC leadership, despite the lack of scientific backing for their policies like lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing, mandating untested new technology or their claim childhood vaccines are “safe and effective” despite no true safety test been done and vaccines proven in court they are neither, has failed miserably. These unscientific industry-curling practices are now to be replaced by gold-standard science by the new leadership at the HHS, CDC and FDA and with an overhaul of the vaccine approval process, demanding longer-term studies and independant oversight free from industry influence. That the industry and its defenders are not amused is understandable.
The best solution would be to repeal the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act. This would strip the vaccine producers from their liability shield, making them accountable for injuries caused by their products.
