Reading The New York Times and The Washington Post’s coverage of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the last few days, you’d be forgiven for concluding that the agency is engaged in a cover-up. Its scientists, so these reports relate, are trying their hardest to get the word out to doctors and the American public that the Covid vaccine is perfectly safe, and that getting the jab is in everyone’s best interest. They keep running studies that come to that conclusion. But those darned administration bureaucrats who run the FDA, from Commissioner Marty Makary on down, won’t allow those studies to be published, thus creating uncertainty about vaccines in the mind of the public.
“FDA Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe,” read the headline of a May 5 Times article. It quoted a Harvard University medical professor who said that what Makary et al. were doing amounted to “an act of censorship.” He described it as a “major scandal” that should lead to “congressional hearings and resignations of leadership.” The possibility that there might be another explanation for blocking the studies never seemed to enter the reporter’s mind.
The Post story, published the same day, additionally noted that this was not the first time the FDA had stopped the publication of a Covid vaccine study. The top brass at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had decided not to publish a report showing that last winter’s Covid vaccine cut the likelihood of hospitalizations. Or so the researchers claimed.
