CDC Study Doesn’t ‘Debunk’ Link Between COVID-19 Vaccines and Sudden Deaths
Study falsely represented by reporters, while authors failed to note earlier findings.
A new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study does not disprove a link between COVID-19 vaccines and sudden deaths among young people, contrary to claims.
Among people who died with evidence of vaccination, three died within 100 days of a shot, Drs. Juventila Liko and Paul Cieslak with the Oregon Health Authority found.
None of those three deaths could be attributed to messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination, or shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, according to the doctors. Two of the deaths were attributed to underlying conditions while the cause of death for the third was “undetermined.”
“These data do not support an association between receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and sudden cardiac death among previously healthy young persons,” the doctors wrote.
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The new study “is at odds with a higher quality and peer-reviewed journal article published in the European Heart Journal,” Dr. David McCune, who was not involved with either paper, told The Epoch Times via email. “The study, from Korea, found a small but significant group of patients who had SCD and autopsy evidence consistent with vaccine-induced myocarditis.”
Multiple media outlets published stories on the new study, but none mentioned the South Korean article.
The stories also included false or misleading claims.
NBC reporter Berkeley Lovelace Jr. also wrote that “there is no evidence that COVID vaccines cause fatal cardiac arrest or other deadly heart problems in teens and young adults, a CDC report finds.”
“I don’t think that is close to an accurate assessment of the CDC paper or the overall level of knowledge we have about vaccine risk,” Dr. McCune said.
Dr. Ofer Levy, an adviser to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, told NBC that no vaccine has ever been conclusively linked to sudden cardiac death and that the new study “adds to evidence that people don’t drop dead from getting their mRNA COVID vaccines.” Dr. Levy did not respond when asked whether he was aware of the South Korean paper and other literature.
Authors Respond
Asked why they didn’t mention literature that presents evidence of sudden cardiac death among previously healthy young people after vaccination, the authors told The Epoch Times in an email that they had. The studies they included are an Israeli paper that does not mention sudden death; a letter that noted sudden deaths among athletes, regardless of vaccination status, since the vaccines were rolled out; an analysis of 911 calls from Israel; and a case definition for myocarditis that says it can be a cause of sudden death. None of the papers cite autopsy data or other strong evidence that has emerged.
The authors did not say whether they were unaware of the South Korean study or chose not to include it.
The CDC should “not have published their study without acknowledging the international studies that have identified post-mRNA vax-related cardiac death in young people,” Dr. Tracy Hoeg, who was not involved in the research, wrote on the social media platform X.
Asked why they didn’t cite any of those other studies, the authors referred back to the papers they did cite and said they “also clearly expressed the limitations in the research.”
Limitations of the paper include the small population size, which would make it “less likely” for Oregon to record “a rare event such as sudden cardiac death among adolescents and young adults,” the authors wrote in the study.
CDC Journal
The CDC published the study in its journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), which only publishes papers after officials shape them to align with the agency’s messaging. The CDC has been relentlessly promotive of the COVID-19 vaccines since they were rolled out.
Previous releases of documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that CDC officials engage in multiple rounds of editing of papers published in the journal.
The authors of the new paper acknowledged that the paper was edited prior to publication.
“CDC made no edits that altered the conclusions of the study,” they said.
The CDC journal’s editor-in-chief did not respond to a query.
The Epoch Times has filed FOIA requests to ascertain which edits were made, and by whom.
The authors also defended the choice to submit the paper to MMWR, rather than a traditional journal.
“Many times there is a large amount of observational data that is critical for time-sensitive reporting to inform public health practitioners and clinicians. These sorts of time-sensitive publications that might impact the actions of state and county public health leaders have long been published in the CDC’s MMWR,” they said. “In fact, there are numerous examples of CDC’s MMWR being the first source of information during many important historical events, including the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, the discovery of Legionnaires disease, the initial cases of H1N1 in 2009.”
This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Epoch Times can be found here.
