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A senior scientist identified 25 hidden safety signals but was told to “cease and desist” and was labelled “a major distraction” by the agency’s own leadership.

A US Senate investigation has found that Biden administration health officials were warned of dozens of serious safety signals associated with COVID-19 injections — including acute heart attacks and sudden cardiac death — and chose to suppress the findings rather than act on them.

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released its interim report on Wednesday, titled Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals. It details how a senior scientist at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) identified 25 previously hidden adverse event signals — yet was directed to stop her analysis and told to “cease and desist”.

“They lied boldface,” Senator Ron Johnson, the subcommittee’s chairman, told Newsmax. “They knew better. It’s a massive cover-up, and people paid for that cover-up with their lives and permanent disabilities.”

.@SenRonJohnson tells @cabot_phillips how Biden administration health officials covered up safety signals for COVID-19 injection injuries:

“This is a complete cover-up. It’s obvious.” pic.twitter.com/AXigaZwb4M

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) April 29, 2026

Hidden Signals

The report centres on Dr Ana Szarfman, a senior medical officer and safety data mining developer at the FDA’s Centre for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Beginning in early 2021, Szarfman used an updated data analysis method — developed by Dr William DuMouchel, the inventor of the FDA’s existing algorithm — to re-examine adverse event reports filed for COVID-19 injections.

Her analysis identified what the report describes as “49 examples of extreme masking”.

Masking is a known statistical flaw in the FDA’s standard monitoring system: when multiple similar products flood the reporting database, serious signals for any single product can be drowned out.

Szarfman’s updated method corrected for this distortion, and uncovered approximately 25 previously undetected safety signals — including sudden cardiac death, Bell’s palsy, pulmonary infarction, acute myocardial infarction, dementia, embolism and thrombosis, and increased mortality.

She shared her findings with senior FDA officials in March 2021, and again in April, May, and July of that year. Each time, the signals grew more pronounced.

A ‘Major Distraction’

Rather than alert the public or pause distribution of the injections, the report details that senior officials moved to silence Dr Szarfman.

In May 2021, Dr Peter Marks — who led the FDA’s Centre for Biologics Evaluation and Research — warned a colleague that Szarfman’s data mining could “create erroneous conflicts that feed into anti-vaccination rhetoric”.

That same month, three senior officials drafted an email directing her to “hold off on creating and sending data mining reports and analyses”.

By September 2021, Marks told Szarfman’s supervisor that she “has been asked to cease and desist” and complained her work had “become a major distraction”. Her supervisor’s office replied that they had made clear she should “focus on her assigned work”.

FDA officials also took steps to limit how widely their data mining reports circulated. Internal records show officials cited “data security reasons” for limiting access. One CDC official later noted, “I think that because of the FOIAs we may have asked FDA to stop sending these weekly data mining outputs.”

The final weekly data mining report was distributed in July 2022 — shortly after multiple Freedom of Information requests were lodged for the same material.

Known and Ignored

The report documents that FDA officials privately acknowledged the limitations of their system — and that Biden health officials were “more concerned about Dr Szarfman’s efforts rather than her troubling findings”.

One senior official wrote in 2021 that the standard algorithm’s scores “can be muted by COVID-19 vaccine reports contributing substantially to the comparator group” — the precise problem Szarfman had unearthed. The same language was included in a draft paper shared with the CDC but removed before publication in The Lancet in March 2022.

As late as September 2024, two senior FDA officials discussed Szarfman’s updated method and found it yielded “significantly higher” safety signals than the standard algorithm. One wrote that the newer model “appears way more sensitive”. No methodological changes were implemented.

According to the report, officials had “largely ignored her and eventually told her to stop her data analyses” — and when the opportunity came to course-correct years later, chose to continue with their existing method “rather than take an experimental approach”.

“FDA officials had ample opportunity to involve Drs Szarfman and DuMouchel — both experts in data mining — in their safety surveillance efforts,” the report concludes, “but instead, cast them and their analyses aside”.

Australian Significance

The same COVID-19 injections were administered to millions of Australians under a rollout that silenced dissenting doctors and downplayed adverse event data.

Australia’s own COVID inquiry process saw nearly 500 public submissions censored by a Senate committee, including testimonies from Australians reporting injection injuries.

The US findings add weight to unresolved questions about Australia’s own regulatory response, including what Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) knew and when.

As previously reported by The Daily Declaration, the TGA hid reported deaths of children after COVID-19 injection from its public disclosure log, citing fears that release “could undermine public confidence”.

FOI releases later revealed the TGA failed to investigate 35 same-day injection deaths — not one of which was referred to its expert safety panel.

When a leaked FDA memo confirmed ten American child deaths linked to COVID-19 injections and outlined sweeping reform plans, Australian senators pressed the TGA on whether it had acted on comparable signals. The Senate PSI report now shows those US signals were themselves suppressed.

The Daily Declaration reached out to the TGA for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.

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