EXCLUSIVE: CDC Says It Performed Vaccine Safety Data Mining After Saying It Didn’t

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is saying it has performed vaccine safety data mining and analyses since early 2021, a reversal from a recent letter.

The CDC said in an operating procedures document dated Jan. 29, 2021, that it “will perform” a type of data mining analysis of vaccine safety data called Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR).

The public health agency also said it would conduct routine surveillance of the data, which is being logged into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

The data mining and surveillance were aimed at detecting adverse events occurring at higher-than-expected rates.

But little of what the agency said it would perform has actually been performed, according to a June 16 letter to the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit.

The group had asked, in a Freedom of Information Act request, for all data generated in connection with the data mining, as well as copies of other data.

In response, CDC records officer Roger Andoh said that staff within the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office “inform me that no PRRS were conducted by CDC.”

“Furthermore, data mining is outside of th[e] agency’s purview; staff suggest you inquire with the FDA,” or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he wrote.

The FDA was tasked with conducting a different method of data mining, according to the procedures document.

The CDC also failed to produce other information it said it would be producing, such as weekly tables of all reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines.

Confusion

The reaction to the disclosure was swift. Joshua Guetzkow, a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has been applying his training in statistics to examine vaccine safety, said it showed the CDC “lied” about its efforts to monitor the safety database,

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