US health officials allegedly knew the algorithm they relied on to detect harm from Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines was flawed and silenced efforts to fix it, according to a BMJ investigation.
The two shots made up over 90% of reports to the VAERS side-effect database, so the FDA’s method was comparing them against each other and never flagged myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s palsy or tinnitus.
FDA medical officer Dr Ana Szarfman issued warnings in early 2021 and was asked to “cease and desist”. When the CDC ran its second method in 2022, it claimed results showed “no additional unexpected safety signals”. However, the BMJ showed hundreds of adverse events that met the agency’s alert criteria.
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