(DCNF)—Senior Biden Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials spent weeks casting doubt on reports of cardiac risks associated with the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines to young adults and teenagers in the spring of 2021, according to a Senate report released Wednesday.
Among the officials named in the report is former FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Peter Marks — responsible for dubbing the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine development push “Operation Warp Speed”— who resigned from his post in March in opposition to what he described as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “unprecedented assault on scientific truth,” particularly on vaccines.
But a new interim report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ Select Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — which draws on 2,473 subpoenaed documents — raises questions about Marks’ own judgement on the COVID-19 vaccine and the judgement of other Biden administration officials.
The report chronicles how early warning signs for myocarditis and pericarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle or heart lining — were first communicated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by February 2021. Yet Marks and longtime FDA official Janet Woodcock raised doubts about the need to disseminate a formal warning in May 2021, the Senate committee’s report alleges.
The doubts of the FDA officials in May 2021 apparently prompted the CDC to “walk back” planned language for its website about the need to restrict exercise after myocarditis or pericarditis, according to the Senate report.
“The Biden administration’s decision to downplay the COVID-19 vaccine health risks and delay warning the public about cardiac-related adverse events associated with the mRNA vaccines jeopardized the public’s health,” the report alleges.
HHS turned over the documents in response to a January subpoena issued by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, finally responding to yearslong requests that were either ignored or barely answered under the Biden presidency.
Marks and Woodcock could not be reached for comment.
FDA recently ordered the drugmakers to expand the population covered by myocarditis and pericarditis warnings from males 18 to 24 years old for Moderna’s vaccine and 12 to 17 years old for Pfizer’s vaccine, as well as to males ages 16 to 25 for both products, CBS reported Wednesday, citing letters posted to the FDA website.”
Timeline
As early as Feb. 28, 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health reached out to CDC to request a point of contact to discuss reports of myocarditis in young people receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, the report shows.
“The Israeli National Focal Point is noticing a large number of reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people, following the administration of the Pfizer vaccine,” an email obtained by the committee reads.
The ministry had seen about 40 cases mostly in people from 16 to 30 years old, a separate CDC email indicates, according to the committee’s report.
By April 21, 2021, a cardiovascular immunologist working with the U.S. Defense Health Agency warned public health officials about an association between myocarditis and the COVID-19 vaccines, documents obtained by the committee show.
The immunologist, Renata Engler, also warned that V-safe, a surveillance program to monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines that the CDC rolled out in December 2020, may not fully capture the prevalence of this side effect, the Senate report states.
Users of the V-safe app were asked if they experienced 10 symptoms ranging from muscle aches to nausea, but were not asked about symptoms that could signal a cardiac problem like chest pain, palpitations or shortness of breath, according to the Engler’s presentation, which was obtained by the committee.
“If you do not ask, you will not see it, but does that mean it does not exist?” her presentation reads, according to the committee’s report.
Engler did not respond to a request for comment.
By mid-May, momentum for a warning to be issued was building within CDC, the report shows: On May 14, 2021, CDC received notice that the European Medicines Agency had asked the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna for more information about the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. On May 17, 2021, the CDC’s advisers on the issue, the COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group, stated that members “felt that information about reports of myocarditis should be communicated to providers.”
By May 23, 2021, the Senate report shows, the CDC had drafted a formal notice to clinicians about myocarditis and pericarditis risk in young people through the Health Action Network or “HAN” with an expected release of May 25, 2021.
But on May 26, 2021, Woodcock alerted CDC Director Rochelle Walensky that “FDA does not concur with the issuance of the myocarditis HAN as written,” according to an email obtained by the committee.
The HAN was nixed the same day, other emails obtained by the committee indicate.
Walensky did not respond to a request for comment.
The CDC pivoted to less formal communication of the possible side effect through “clinical considerations” posted to its website, the report states.
But Marks raised doubts about even that less formal action being necessary, according to another email obtained by the committee.
“I need to ask for your patience with me,” Marks wrote on May 26, 2021. “We still have concerns here if myocarditis and pericarditis have not actually signaled.”
“Can you help me understand why we are doing this when pediatricians and others in the community already seem to be aware?” he continued.
The next day, internal emails obtained by the committee show that CDC official Demetre Daskalakis pared back the planned language for the CDC website about myocarditis.
“One language change around management and then we can move it forward,” Daskalakis wrote in the email. “They want to walk back this sentence: ‘Due to concerns for sudden cardiac events while the heart recovers, consider restricting patients with myocarditis from rigorous activity like competitive sports for at least 3 months until cleared by a healthcare professional.’”
Daskalakis did not respond to a request for comment.
On May 28, 2021, CDC posted its planned “clinical considerations” on its website about myocarditis and pericarditis, which did not contain the sentence about the risk of exercise and sports, the report states.
Another month would elapse before the FDA moved to change patient and provider fact sheets on the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to include information about the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis on June 25, 2021.
“The full extent of the Biden administration’s failure to immediately warn the public about all COVID-19 vaccine adverse events must be completely exposed,” the committee’s report concludes.
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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.