- Sen. Ron Johnson’s report alleges FDA and CDC officials knew as early as March 2021 that vaccine safety monitoring was failing but suppressed data and silenced the researcher who discovered the flaw.
- Dr. Ana Szarfman identified a critical flaw called masking in the VAERS system and proposed an improved method that uncovered 25 previously undetected safety signals, including sudden cardiac death.
- FDA officials ordered Szarfman to cease her data-mining work and gradually cut off weekly VAERS reports shared with CDC to protect the vaccine rollout and secure full licensure.
- VAERS now shows over 1.6 million adverse events and 39,099 deaths associated with COVID-19 injections, with 9,332 deaths occurring within two days of injection.
- Major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Fox Digital refused to publish Johnson’s op-ed on the findings, which he calls the biggest government scandal of his lifetime.
(Natural News)—Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, recently released a report titled “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.” The findings, drawn from 11 million pages of internal documents obtained through the subcommittee’s oversight efforts, allege that FDA and CDC officials knew as early as March 2021 that the government’s primary vaccine safety surveillance system was failing to detect serious adverse events. Instead of fixing it, they suppressed the data and silenced the researcher who found the problem.
The hidden signals that should have triggered alarms
In March 2021, Dr. Ana Szarfman, a senior medical officer and safety data-mining expert at the FDA, informed leadership that the agency’s standard algorithm for analyzing the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had a critical flaw called “masking.” This occurs when a flood of reports for one product artificially raises the statistical baseline, making it harder for real safety signals to break through.
Szarfman proposed using an improved method called the Regression-Adjusted Gamma Poisson Shrinker, or RGPS, which she described as a “state of the art” alternative designed to correct this exact problem. The new method worked. Within weeks, she uncovered 49 examples of “extreme masking” and identified roughly 25 previously undetected safety signals, including sudden cardiac death, pulmonary infarction, and Bell’s palsy.
According to Dr. David Wiseman, who testified at the hearing, “Masking occurs when statistical signals for one vaccine in a database are obscured by reports associated with other vaccines. For example, Moderna’s myocarditis signal becomes hidden if its comparison baseline is artificially inflated by including Pfizer’s myocarditis reports.”
The order to cease and desist
Rather than adopt the improved system, FDA officials shut it down. Internal communications obtained by the subcommittee show that Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, warned that Szarfman’s data-mining work could “create erroneous conflicts that feed into anti-vaccination rhetoric.” Within months, Szarfman was formally instructed to “cease and desist” her work using the RGPS method.
The FDA also began restricting its own internal reporting. Weekly VAERS data-mining reports that had been shared with the CDC were gradually reduced and then cut off entirely by July 2022. Internal emails show that FOIA concerns played a role in this decision, with one CDC official writing, “I think that because of the FOIAs we may have asked FDA to stop sending these weekly data mining outputs.”
Johnson’s documents show that officials prioritized protecting the vaccine rollout over informing the public. Securing full licensure was the priority as it would give President Biden the legal authority to mandate the shots for military personnel and millions of civilians.
The human cost of suppressed data
The consequences, Johnson argues, were catastrophic. VAERS now shows 1,676,100 cumulative worldwide adverse events and 39,099 deaths associated with the COVID-19 injection, with 9,332 of those deaths occurring within two days of injection — figures that accumulated long after officials had reason to sound the alarm.
Dr. Karl Jablonowski, who testified at the hearing, said: “Simply put, during the largest pharmaceutical roll out in history, pharmacovigilance did not exist. That is the betrayal of our time, so vast that we cannot even count casualties.”
The suppression extended beyond data analysis. In March 2021, Dr. Avindra Nath of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke began treating patients with serious COVID-19 injection injuries. Twenty-three study participants were diagnosed and treated, then told to “not talk about the study.” One participant later said the NIH scientists had “taken the data and left us hanging.” It was not until those participants went public in 2022 that the NIH quietly posted its findings to a preprint server that almost no one saw, leaving physicians without guidance and injured patients without answers.
Media blackout adds insult to injury
Johnson has called this the biggest government scandal of his lifetime, and the media’s response has largely confirmed his point. After major outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Fox Digital declined to publish his op-ed on the findings, Johnson posted it himself on X. NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, and MSNow have also refused to cover the report.
The technology to detect these dangers existed. The tools were tested, validated, and shown to work — and then deliberately set aside. As Jablonowski testified: “Had they actually turned out to be safe, it would have been serendipitous. A happy accident.” For the Americans left injured, disabled, or grieving, it was anything but.
Sources for this article include:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
