On May 27, 2021, Dr. Janet Woodcock — then the Acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration — sent an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci's government account flagging a problem. By the end of that month, VAERS had logged 440,025 adverse event reports worldwide. Of the 8,650 reported deaths, 3,350 — roughly 39 percent — occurred within two days of injection.
Fauci's response to Woodcock? He forwarded her concerns to Dr. Francis Collins at NIH and wrote: "Janet asks what we think of this? We cannot ignore her. We should probably bring in CDC and see what Rochelle thinks."
These emails, revealed through Sen. Ron Johnson's ongoing investigation landed at the same time as a separate bombshell about ABC News censoring its own COVID reporting at Fauci's direction. The former NIAID director, who once told Congress he was "very happy to testify" and had "nothing to hide," has now refused to appear for a private transcribed interview with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Johnson's assessment was blunt: "Apparently, he has a lot to hide."
The FDA emails are damning on their own terms. Woodcock warned that the adverse events being reported "do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome" and that "these problems are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect." She even acknowledged the pharmaceutical industry wouldn't want to hear it — "I doubt the industry would support, for obvious reasons" — but cautioned that "if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later."
The volume alone should have triggered alarms. Back in December 2020, General Dynamics Information Technology projected a worst-case scenario of 1,000 VAERS reports per day. By May 2021, the actual volume was running at 2.6 times that projection. Dr. Ana Szarfman, an FDA analyst, had flagged concerns to Dr. Peter Marks — the director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research — as early as March 1, 2021. Text messages from Fauci's government-issued cellphone show Dr. John Mascola, then-director of the Vaccine Research Center at NIAID, was messaging Fauci about these issues as far back as January 25, 2021.
So the people inside the building knew. They were writing it down. They were texting about it on government phones.
Meanwhile, the public-facing message never changed. Get the shot. Stop asking questions. Trust the "experts."
Then there's the ABC News angle. Terry Moran, a former senior national correspondent at ABC, revealed on the Fifth Column podcast that an investigative segment he produced for Nightline — examining potential military funding connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and researcher Shi Zhengli — was pulled right before air. "The day it was supposed to air, it gets 'reviewed,'" Moran said. "It comes back to me... I was told: FAUCI." He described himself as "absolutely livid" and added: "I've never watched that story again and I never want to."
ABC killed a legitimate investigative story because one government bureaucrat didn't want it aired. That's state-managed media with American characteristics.
Sen. Johnson tied the threads together, "As our investigation continues, we have mounting evidence that, time and time again, those responsible for watching for safety signals failed to warn the public," Johnson said. Then the kicker: "They let people die and become permanently disabled because they didn't want to cause 'vaccine hesitancy.'"
Fauci's lawyer responded to the Senate committee's interview request by claiming it would "impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes."
The FDA knew the adverse event numbers were blowing past worst-case projections. Fauci's own inbox proves it. ABC News killed a story on his say-so. And when Congress finally came calling, the man who spent two years lecturing America from behind a podium suddenly couldn't find his way to a conference room on Capitol Hill.