As Questions About COVID Vaccine Safety Grew Louder, CDC Scrambled to Control Public Perception

Internal emails show CDC officials reacted to questions about COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy by crafting public messaging that downplayed concerns.

by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

When confronted with questions about the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, CDC officials responded by crafting public messaging that downplayed the concerns, according to newly released documents.

The Public Health Reform Alliance (PHRA) obtained the 588 pages of documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The New York Post first reported the story on Tuesday.

The documents contain internal CDC communications, mostly from 2023 and 2024, revealing that agency staff scheduled frequent meetings to discuss public messaging strategies — even as they were aware that the COVID-19 vaccines were not fully effective against illness and were causing severe injuries and deaths.

In a Sept. 22, 2023, email (pages 231-232 of the document), the CDC’s COVID-19 Coordination Unit discussed a “COVID Harm Reduction Visualization Tool” that would “help people more easily visualize their relative risk of getting very sick from COVID-19 and the potential impacts of protection.”

Members of the COVID-19 Coordination Unit didn’t want the tool to provide “too precise of a visualization such that people can infer an exact risk or protection score.”

The Post reported that the unit “ultimately produced a graphic indicating that cloth face masks, ventilation, outdoor air, and respirators offered at least some protection from infection.”

In an Aug. 21, 2023, email (pages 419-420), Rosemary Bretthauer-Mueller, at the time a digital content team lead for the CDC’s Immunization Services Division, identified “top social media questions” from the week of Aug. 18, 2023 — many of which concerned COVID-19 vaccine safety, particularly for pregnant women.

This included questions about whether COVID-19 vaccines are “safe for pregnant individuals,” “cause stillbirths,” pose a risk of side effects “on pregnant individuals and fetuses” or are connected to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

“Let’s determine for which of these we can develop or repurpose content immediately,” Bretthauer-Mueller wrote.

An email referencing a Jan. 9, 2024, “coordination meeting” on “priority ?s” (pages 478-479) acknowledged additional public concerns with the COVID-19 vaccines — particularly questions about DNA contamination, turbo cancer or sudden deaths — and sought to develop strategies to respond to these concerns.

“Suggested actions” included disseminating information to “partners,” including “national provider associations, local and state immunization managers, and front-line vaccination staff” to address such concerns “if a patient mentions it.”

The email also suggested developing a “social media asset” advising people to “stay informed, stay safe” and to avoid “misinformation,” which “can prey on our fears.”

The Post reported that the meeting “did not appear to result in the CDC initiating any further studies — despite an internal chart pointing out that the CDC hadn’t looked into any safety concerns.”

The CDC sought to develop messaging even while acknowledging that the vaccines may be ineffective and might be placing some people at risk.

In a March 9, 2023, email (pages 585-586), for instance, Erin Connelly, then-acting associate director for communication at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, asked colleagues how to discuss the “benefits of vaccination” in light of knowledge that the COVID-19 vaccine “isn’t 100% effective.”

CDC acting ‘as a PR arm of the vaccine manufacturers’

In a statement published by the Post, PHRA Director Martin Hoyt said the documents show, “The CDC wasn’t acting like a scientific body” but “as a PR arm of the vaccine manufacturers. … That’s not science. That’s propaganda.”

Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), agreed. She said the documents “show in black-and-white what we have long suspected: that the CDC was operating primarily as the marketing arm for the pharmaceutical industry during COVID.”

She said, “The conflicts of interest ran very deep and continue to do so.”

Kevin McKernan, founder of Medicinal Genomics, is the first scientist to identify the presence of DNA contamination in the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. He said the CDC’s insistence on focusing on social distancing and mask-wearing “while ignoring overt evidence of DNA contamination” is a “sad paradox.”

Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo, said the CDC “prioritized controlling public perception over telling the truth.”

Ji said:

“These emails aren’t from the chaotic early days of the pandemic, but from 2023 and 2024, long after the agency had ample data. Even then, the CDC was still minimizing concerns, manipulating language and resisting clarity around risks. This shows the pattern wasn’t a one-time misstep. It was — and still is — systemic.”

Documents reflect CDC’s ‘obsession’ with vaccine uptake ‘at all costs’

The documents show that the CDC put significant effort into downplaying COVID-19 vaccine harms — even in internal presentations within the agency.

For instance, an Oct. 20, 2023, email by Megan Wallace (pages 46-48), a CDC epidemiologist, refers to an internal presentation of a scientific study that found “no statistically significant risk of stroke following COVID mRNA bivalent vaccination.”

A Feb. 21, 2024, email from the CDC Communicators Network (pages 59-65) promoted a Feb. 22, 2024, presentation about “Improving the well-being of communities by innovating health communications” — including crafting public messaging to “overcome barriers to public acceptance” for COVID-19 vaccines.

Internal presentations and discussions focused on how to develop messaging that would shift public perceptions away from any possible shortcomings or risks.

For instance, an email about a Sept. 11, 2023, meeting on “Resolving COVID vaccine consumer language issues” (page 506) referred to efforts to shift away from referring to seasonal COVID-19 vaccines as “updated” or statements that they provide “fall and winter” protection,” as the public might believe the shots offer waning protection, described in the email as an “unintended consequence.”

An email referring to a separate Sept. 11, 2023, meeting on COVID-19 vaccine guidance for “pregnant people” (pages 457-458) discusses “communication support” for such messaging, including “Congressional outreach.”

Other documents also discussed targeting pregnant women, including a presentation connected to an April 24, 2024, “Editorial pitch call” (pages 159-163), on the need to overcome “inequities in vaccine coverage among Black pregnant people.”

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for CHD, said, “It appears that any vaccine safety concerns are always downplayed by CDC officials and treated as ‘uptake issues’ rather than valid medical concerns.”

Ji agreed, saying the documents “reflect an obsession with uptake at all costs.”

“The FOIA record shows that when legitimate concerns surfaced — DNA contamination, infant deaths, cancers — the CDC’s instinct was not to investigate thoroughly but to craft rebuttals. To dismiss such concerns as ‘misinformation’ without transparent study is itself a form of misinformation,” Ji said.

Documents highlight ‘a rigidity that is anti-scientific’

The documents also reflect frequent concerns among CDC staff that the agency’s public messaging efforts were failing.

An email chain from early 2024 (pages 332-346) regarding an “Omnibus survey about respiratory virus guidelines” addresses public confusion over CDC guidelines for people infected with COVID-19, including social distancing and staying home — and a significant percentage of the public rejecting such recommendations.

The discussion included suggestions on how to downplay or otherwise conceal such findings, such as including them in a “low-key” publication on the survey’s results, waiting to release them during a “COVID surge in the summer” or otherwise holding off from releasing the results.

That discussion also included mention of a previous CDC survey about COVID-19 vaccine concerns, without providing further details.

While the discussion focused on the response to public confusion about the CDC’s guidelines for those infected with COVID-19, CDC staff also expressed confusion over what the current guidelines stated.

“Are the new guidelines posted somewhere?” CDC Health Scientist Kayla A. Calhoun asked in a Feb. 29, 2024, email.

“The insistence on extending failed measures like masking and distancing into 2024 highlights a rigidity that is anti-scientific,” Ji said. “Instead, the CDC was more concerned about people ‘misinterpreting’ its guidance than about whether the guidance made sense.”

Did vaccine manufacturers sit in on CDC meetings?

The documents also showed that the CDC actively engaged in efforts to promote vaccines. This includes a September 2023 email chain (pages 466-467) discussing the need to “reenergize providers” — including pediatricians — to “recommend and provide influenza vaccinations,” due to “lagging” pediatric and adult coverage.

The same email thread discusses the need to “reset influenza messaging” and to invite “COVID and RSV manufacturing colleagues” to the discussion — in a possible reference to vaccine manufacturers.

A chart dated May 21, 2024, (page 57) refers to $24.2 million in “priority” funding for the “New Vaccine Surveillance Network,” though no further details were provided.

Ji said, “Seeing direct involvement of vaccine manufacturers in CDC communications planning should trouble every American. Regulatory agencies should be independent watchdogs, not partners in messaging campaigns. It confirms what many suspect: industry influence has deeply compromised regulatory integrity.”

RFK Jr.: CDC ‘dysfunction’ led to ‘irrational policy during Covid’

The documents were released during a turbulent period for the CDC, which culminated with the White House’s Aug. 27 firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, after she refused to resign.

On Monday, President Donald Trump suggested that the CDC and Big Pharma have not been fully forthcoming about COVID-19 vaccine safety data. Trump demanded they “clear up this mess.”

In an Aug. 30 op-ed in The New York Times, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) demanded the resignation of U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a call repeated by some members of Congress during a U.S. House of Representatives hearing today.

The FOIA documents contain several emails written by or addressed to recently resigned CDC officials and scientists, including former CDC vaccine chief Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, pediatric infectious disease expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos and Dr. Fiona Havers, a senior CDC scientist who helped shape vaccine policy.

Other emails involved Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, the director of the CDC Immunization Safety Office, who is under investigation by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for allegedly deleting vaccine injury records.

“It’s no surprise that the very officials whose names appear in these communications — who insisted we ‘follow the science’ — have since departed under clouds of controversy,” Ji said. “Their exits underscore the reality: this was never about science, it was about narrative control.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services referred The Defender to an op-ed by Kennedy, published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal.

Kennedy wrote that, “over the decades, bureaucratic inertia, politicized science and mission creep have corroded that purpose and squandered public trust” in the CDC, while the agency failed to address the chronic disease epidemic.

Kennedy said such “dysfunction” led to “irrational policy during Covid: cloth masks on toddlers, arbitrary 6-foot distancing, boosters for healthy children, prolonged school closings, economy-crushing lockdowns, and the suppression of low-cost therapeutics in favor of experimental and ineffective drugs.”

Kennedy said he aims to restore public trust in the CDC by reemphasizing infectious disease, investing in innovation, and rebuilding “trust through integrity and transparency,” including eliminating conflicts of interest and replacing leaders “who resisted reform.”

Holland welcomed Kennedy’s op-ed, which she said “suggests the path forward based on transparency and gold-standard science.”

“The country will not be able to move forward with confidence in our public health institutions or the federal government in general until a true reckoning for COVID-19 measures takes place,” she said.

The PHRA did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment by press time.

Related articles in The Defender

• ‘Clear Up This Mess’: Trump Demands Big Pharma ‘Justify the Success’ of COVID Shots

• Trump Fires CDC Director Who Clashed With RFK Jr. Over Vaccine Policy

• CDC Scientist Who Drove COVID, RSV Vaccine Policies Resigns in Protest

• ‘The Narrative is Cracking’: CDC Adviser Who Promoted COVID Vaccines for Pregnant Women Resigns

• Did Head of CDC Vaccine Safety Office Delete COVID Vaccine Injury Records?