Health Agencies Display ‘Arrogance’ by Ignoring Pandemic Questions, Says Sen. Ron Johnson

Biden administration officials’ answers to questions regarding COVID-19 data show their disdain for U.S. citizens, says Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).

“The grossly inadequate response to my legitimate oversight demonstrates a level of arrogance toward the American public that is unacceptable,” wrote Johnson, in a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier and other health agency heads on March 23.

“[T]he lack of transparency from federal health agencies has eroded public confidence in the agencies you represent—which will take years, and probably a complete restructuring of them, to repair,” wrote Johnson.

Johnson asked federal agencies to explain the 1,183,495 incidents reported on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following a COVID-19 shot, which include 25,641 deaths. More than a quarter (28 percent) of the deaths occurred within two days of receiving a shot.

Johnson has spotlighted the plight of patients who have been ignored, says Jane Orient, M.D., executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

“I commend Sen. Johnson for his heroism giving a hearing to patients who have suffered devastating injuries when virtually all of Congress is in deep denial that these otherwise unexplained events could be vaccine-related,” said Orient.

Adverse Events Understated

Reports of rising private insurance health and death claims prompted his latest letter, says Johnson.

BKK ProVita, a German insurer that covers 11 million people, received 216,000 claims by policyholders who experienced adverse events following COVID-19 shots, according to Andreas Schofbeck, a board member.

Using 2021 billing data, Schofbeck estimated three million of the 83 million people in Germany had negative reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines, whereas the Paul Ehrlich Institute, Germany’s public health agency, reported only 244,576 adverse events in 2021.

Schofbeck was fired by his company shortly before he was to meet with representatives from the institute to discuss his analysis.

One America, an Indiana-based insurer, reported a 40 percent increase in death rates of working-age people ages 18 to 64 in the third quarter of 2021, CEO Scott Davison reported, says Johnson.

Johnson’s letter also mentions an unusual pattern of disease reported by whistleblowers at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Johnson wrote several letters to DoD Secretary Lloyd Austin asking for an explanation but has not received a detailed response. The DoD dismissed the whistleblowers’ claims in a response to a media “fact-checking” organization.

Adverse Reactions: No Action

Any new medical technology needs to be scrutinized, says David Gortler, Pharm.D., a health policy fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, which co-publishes Health Care News.

Officials had evidence vaccines could cause heart inflammation in healthy individuals, Gortler, an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner during the Trump administration, told LifeSiteNews.

“As a drug safety expert, I’ve written about how the FDA had clear indications from Day 1 that mRNA vaccines do cause myocarditis and pericarditis and about how that pattern has been born out both epidemiologically in athletes, [and] in VAERS and other drug safety databases,” said Gortler.

“Unfortunately, despite the fact that today there are hundreds of thousands of a wide variety of adverse events collected over a two-year period, and that these documented cases are known to only represent a small fraction of the actual number of events that occur, officials at the FDA, CDC, and Pfizer and Moderna have yet to make even a single change to mRNA vaccine safety wording to notify Americans,” said Gortler.

“When brand new mRNA technology is administered to a large number of people, adverse events are bound to occur,” said Gortler. “That’s why FDA and CDC officials have told all Americans how critical it is to report those adverse events. … In turn, the CDC, FDA, and manufacturers must respond to what is shown, and warn the public about what it perceives as a pattern.”

AnneMarie Schieber (amschieber@heartland.org) is the managing editor of Health Care News.