{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2026/04/29/media-advisory-psi-chairman-johnson-releases-report-will-hold-hearing-on-biden-health-officials-failure-to-detect-covid-19-vaccine-safety-signals/", "***MEDIA ADVISORY*** PSI Chairman Johnson Releases Report; Will Hold Hearing on Biden Health Officials\u2019 Failure to Detect COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals", "2026-04-29", "2026", "2026-04", "Republican", "Senate", "WI", "Ron Johnson", "J000293", "www.ronjohnson.senate.gov", "ronjohnson", "https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/category/press-releases/", "scraper", "WASHINGTON \u2013 Today, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, will hold a hearing entitled, \u201cUnmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.\u201d\n\nIn conjunction with the hearing, the chairman released an interim Majority Staff Report, along with approximately 600 pages of records detailing how in early 2021, Food and Drug Administration (\u201cFDA\u201d) officials became aware of a new, \u201cstate of the art\u201d data mining method that could better detect statistically significant safety signals for adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. Rather than adopt the \u201cstate of the art\u201d method, Biden health officials continued to employ their older data mining method with known limitations that prevented FDA from detecting adverse events.\n\nKey findings from the report include:\n\nIn 2021, Dr. Ana Szarfman, who at the time was a senior medical officer and safety data mining developer at FDA and helped develop the FDA\u2019s data mining system, made senior FDA officials \u2014 including Dr. Peter Marks, who led the FDA\u2019s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research \u2014 aware of a \u201csuperior\u201d data mining method that could adjust for \u201cmasking,\u201d a known limitation of the FDA\u2019s current data mining system that hid signals for adverse events. However, senior FDA officials chose not to utilize this more effective methodology.\n\nBetween March 2021 and July 2021, Dr. Szarfman shared analyses of COVID-19 vaccine adverse event reports using the more effective methodology with FDA officials that, unsurprisingly, detected far more statistically significant safety signals for adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccines.\n\nOne analysis identified \u201c49 examples of extreme masking,\u201d including approximately 25 statistically significant safety signals for adverse events that were not previously detected, such as sudden cardiac death, Bell\u2019s palsy, and pulmonary infarction.\n\nOther analyses Dr. Szarfman shared identified statistically significant safety signals with higher values for adverse events, including acute myocardial infarction associated with the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines, non-site specific embolism and thrombosis associated with the Janssen and Pfizer vaccines, and death and sudden death associated with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.\n\nFDA officials appear to have been more concerned with Dr. Szarfman\u2019s efforts than the alarming findings, with Dr. Peter Marks warning Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, the then-Director of the FDA\u2019s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, that Dr. Szarfman\u2019s data mining could \u201ccreate erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric.\u201d FDA officials eventually directed Dr. Szarfman to \u201chold off on creating and sending data mining reports and analyses.\u201d\n\nIn 2022, FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (\u201cCDC\u201d) officials discussed limiting the distribution of FDA\u2019s weekly data mining reports on COVID-19 vaccines with one CDC official writing, \u201cI think that because of the FOIAs [Freedom of Information Act requests] we may have asked FDA to stop sending these weekly data mining outputs.\u201d\n\nThe hearing will be livestreamed on Sen. Johnson\u2019s X account, Rumble, and Subcommittee\u2019s website.\n\nThe interim PSI Majority Staff Report can be found here.\n\nThe records the chairman is releasing today contain minimal redactions for personally identifiable information which was one of the categories of redactions requested by HHS. The records are linked below:\n\nPart 1\n\nPart 2\n\nPart 3\n\nExcel Documents\n\n###", 1, "2026-06-18T06:41:00Z", "2026-06-18T06:43:25Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2026/04/29/media-advisory-psi-chairman-johnson-releases-report-will-hold-hearing-on-biden-health-officials-failure-to-detect-covid-19-vaccine-safety-signals/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.0163809638470411, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}