Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scrambled to cover up a study that revealed two teenage boys died suddenly shortly after receiving Covid mRNA shots.
In a study published on February 14, 2022, experts revealed that the two teens both suffered unexpected fatal heart failure after being injected with the experimental mRNA shots.
The study was the first to detail examinations of American children who died of heart failure after COVID-19 vaccination.
However, the study’s paper set off a firestorm within the CDC that led to attempts by agency officials to overrule the medical examiners who examined the boys, internal emails have revealed.
Within hours of the study being published, federal officials scrambled to respond.
Internal CDC emails show officials were worried the paper would harm their efforts to promote the Covid injections to the public.
“This is important because this report has significant implications for CDC and FDA’s vaccine safety and policy discussions,” Dr. Sarah Reagan-Steiner, a medical officer at the CDC, wrote on Feb. 17, 2022.
The CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have repeatedly promoted widespread COVID-19 vaccination.
Additionally, the federal agencies have downplayed confirmed and possible side effects of the vaccines, despite the threat to public safety.
Another CDC official claimed that not including CDC scientists as co-authors of the paper called into question the ethics of the experts who wrote it.
The agency rapidly submitted a rebuttal to the journal that published the study.
The internal emails were obtained by The Epoch Times through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Combined with comments from two of the study’s authors, the emails shed fresh light on the paper and its aftermath.
The study concluded that the two teens died from myocarditis caused by their Covid shots.
Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, is a known side effect of Covid mRNA shots.
It restricts the heart’s ability to pump blood, causing blood clots, cardiac arrest, strokes, and sudden death.
Dr. James Gill, the chief medical examiner for the state of Connecticut, and two other experts wrote in the study that myocarditis manifested unusually in the two teenage boys.
They said the injuries were similar to cardiomyopathy, which is often caused by extreme stressors.
“This postvaccine reaction may represent an overly exuberant immune response, with the myocardial injury mediated by similar immune mechanisms to those described with SARS-CoV-2 and multisystem inflammatory syndrome cytokine storms,” the experts said.
The boys were both found dead in their beds—one in Michigan and one in Connecticut.
They died just days after receiving Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA shots.
Each tested negative for COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that the injections were supposed to protect them against.
In one case, the heart injury may have started with an initial vaccine dose before healing and restarting with a second dose.
However, the boy’s cause of death was listed on his autopsy as “myocarditis of uncertain etiology,” according to records reviewed by The Epoch Times.
The other boy was said to have possibly suffered inflammation after the heart muscle became enlarged.
His cause of death was also determined to be myocarditis.
In addition to myocarditis, the Covid shot was listed as a cause of death on his death certificate, according to Dr. Gill.
The clinical histories of the boys suggested that acute heart injuries were the primary factor in the deaths, the authors said.
The CDC became involved in the investigations into the boys’ deaths at the request of the medical examiners.
“I wanted to make sure that we weren’t dealing with some sort of infectious disease that would cause inflammation in the heart,” Dr. Randy Tashjian, a co-author of the paper, said in a statement.
The CDC’s Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch (IDPB) had techniques that would enable them to rule out any potential infectious cause, added Dr. Tashjian.
Tashjian examined the boy in Michigan and has never discussed the matter publicly.
Dr. Gill, who also sought the CDC’s help, said the agency is meant to assist pathologists and not make cause-of-death determinations.
“Their role was to test tissues that were sent to them for various pathogens,” Gill said.
“It is up to the submitting forensic pathologist in charge of the case to interpret those findings in the context of the clinical history, etc.
“Laboratories give us information but not conclusions.”
“The analogous example is a toxicology lab,” the doctor added.
“The tox lab may find cocaine and fentanyl but that does not mean the person died of an intoxication and a toxicologist would never make that determination.
“It is up to the forensic pathologists to put all the pieces together.”
CDC officials detected the presence of Clostridium bacteria in multiple organs in the Michigan boy.
They concluded that sepsis from the bacteria likely caused the boy’s death, arguing that the Covid shot was not to blame.
They also found parvovirus B19 in the heart of the other boy and concluded it was an alternative explanation for his myocarditis.
Those claims were not mentioned in the study, however.
The paper was quickly circulated across the CDC and FDA, including to two of the CDC’s top vaccine safety officials, email threads show.
Fifty-five government employees received copies of the paper or links to it within three days of publication, according to the internal emails.
Officials held meetings and discussed the paper in lengthy email chains.
They drafted a formal response and figured out how to respond to media queries.
Officials said they didn’t know about the paper before it was published, and expressed concern that the study neglected to mention most of the CDC’s testing results.
Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, the head of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office at the time, said in one missive to colleagues that the study was “an ethics issue.”
“There is both a scientific integrity issue (omitting relevant information) and an ethics issue (not including CDC scientists who participated in the evaluations as authors),” he claimed.
“I did not notify the CDC that we were publishing the cases,” Dr. Gill, the lead author of the paper, responded after the emails were published.
“There is no obligation to do so.
“They did laboratory testing for us and that does not merit notification or inclusion as authors.”
Dr. Shimabukuro said in another message to the editor of the Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, the journal that published the paper, that “the authors chose to selectively present results from the CDC lab that supported their position and deliberately omit results that ran counter.”
“In the process, they have misrepresented CDC’s role and CDC’s overall findings, and potentially damaged CDC’s reputation for openness and transparency,” he added.
“All I can say is that they were not ‘open’ to discuss anything with me when I contacted them,” Gill said.
“Their published letter was more damaging to the reputation of their lab than anything written in the case report.”
Dr. Shimabukuro, who has previously been caught promoting false information about Covid vaccine side effects and safety signals that have yet to be corrected, has yet to respond to the internal emails being published.
In a separate internal email, Shimabukuro wrote that he believed the cases involved Takotsubo syndrome, also known as the “broken heart” syndrome.
He said the syndrome “almost exclusively occurs in post-menopausal women.”
After IDPB officials reached the sepsis determination for the Michigan boy and communicated the findings to Dr. Tashjian, he said he would keep them posted on his final conclusions in the case.
However, Tashjian did not provide any updates, even though the official cause of death determination differed from that of the agency.
Tashjian said he now regrets not keeping them informed.
“Had I given them a heads up that that was what was going to happen, I think it would have not been maybe so bitter of a back and forth between the two sides,” Tashjian told The Epoch Times.
Dr. Tashjian told the CDC’s Dr. Reagan-Steiner after the paper was published that he determined the cause of death for one boy was “myocarditis of unknown etiology.”
He said he avoided attributing it to sepsis because there was no “obvious GI [gastrointestinal] source of infection.”
Tashjian said he had been planning to tell the CDC about the paper.
He thanked the CDC for helping test tissue from the boys, and hoped reactions to the paper were not “blown out of proportion.”
In an email to CDC officials, Dr. Gill noted that while parvovirus was detected in the other boy, the histopathology did not support a viral source for the myocarditis.
He also pointed out to Reagan-Steiner that Shimabukuro had shared confidential information with the editor of the Archives journal.
Reagan-Steiner forwarded the message to Shimabukuro, saying she would need advice on how and whether to respond.
Shimabukuro told her he would “take this off your plate.”
“Any concerns you may have on this matter should be directed to the editorial office at the Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine,” Shimabukuro told Gill.
Shimabukuro, who is not a pathologist, “stifled an academic discussion between two pathologists,” Gill told The Epoch Times.
The emails show CDC officials scrambling to cover up the study’s findings and disprove the links between the vaccines and fatal heart failure.
Additionally, the CDC has falsely claimed that “the available evidence” shows the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have “contributed to or caused” no deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
Both the deaths detailed in the paper were reported to the system, which is managed by the CDC and FDA, and investigated by a CDC team.
READ MORE – Hospital Whistleblower: ‘Patients Dying within Hours from Covid Shots’
