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CDC Director Admits Agency Gave False Information
on COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Monitoring



Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
speaks in Washington on June 16, 2022.
(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)


By Zachary Stieber
September 13, 2022
Updated: September 13, 2022



The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has acknowledged publicly
for the first time that the agency gave false information about its COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, said in a letter made public on Sept. 12 that the CDC
did not analyze certain types of adverse event reports at all in 2021, despite the agency previously
saying it started in February 2021.

“CDC performed PRR analysis between March 25, 2022, through July 31, 2022,” Walensky said.
“CDC also recently addressed a previous statement made to the Epoch Times to clarify PRR were
not run between February 26, 2021, to September 30, 2021.”

Walensky’s agency had promised in several documents, starting in early 2021, to perform a type of
analysis called Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) on reports submitted to the
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which it helps manage.

But the agency said in June that it did not perform PRRs. It also said that performing them
was “outside th[e] agency’s purview.”

Confronted with the contradiction, Dr. John Su, a CDC official, told The Epoch Times in July that the
agency started performing PRRs in February 2021 and “continues to do so to date.”

But just weeks later, the CDC said Su was wrong.

“CDC performed PRRs from March 25, 2022 through July 31, 2022,” a spokeswoman told
The Epoch Times in August.

Walensky’s new letter, dated Sept. 2 and sent on Sept. 6 to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), shows that
Walensky is aware that her agency gave false information.







‘Lacked Any Justification’


Walensky’s letter included no explanation of why that happened.

The letter “lacked any justification for why CDC performed PRRS during certain periods
and not others,”  Johnson, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations, told Walensky in a response.

“You also provided no explanation as to why Dr. Su’s assertion … completely contradicts
the CDC’s [initial] response … as well as your September 6, 2022, response to me,” he added.

He demanded answers from the CDC on the situation, including why the CDC did not perform
PRRs until March and why the agency misinformed the public when it said no PRRs were conducted.

The CDC and Walensky did not respond to requests for comment.

“At no time have any CDC employees intentionally provided false information,”
a CDC spokesperson, when correcting the agency’s previous responses,
told The Epoch Times via email in August.

The spokesperson claimed that the false information was given because the CDC thought The Epoch Times
and Children’s Health Defense, which received the first response, were asking about a different type of
analysis called Empirical Bayesian data mining. But both The Epoch Times and Children’s Health Defense
specifically listed PRRs in their queries.



Stonewalling


The CDC has still not provided the results of the PRRs that were performed to The Epoch Times. It also
did not provide them to Johnson. The Food and Drug Administration, which has conducted Empirical Bayesian
data mining on Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System reports, recently refused to provide any of the
results to the Epoch Times.

Walensky alleged in the new letter that Empirical Bayesian data mining is more reliable, and that the
PRR results “were generally consistent with EB data mining, revealing no additional unexpected safety signals.”

“However, because of your failure to provide these analyses to Congress and to the American people,
the public cannot verify your assertion,” Johnson said.

He added that the CDC’s “overall lack of transparency is unacceptable particularly in light of CDC’s
inconsistent statements on this matter.”