The federal health bureaucracy spent years telling parents the COVID vaccines were safe for their children. No asterisks. No caveats. Just trust us.
Now internal documents suggest career officials at the Food and Drug Administration quietly worked to reduce the number of children suspected of dying from the COVID vaccine — and buried a proposed warning label that could have told parents the truth.
And U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) just released the emails to prove it.
The Numbers That Kept Shrinking
The newly released emails show that the FDA identified 10 deaths in children after the COVID vaccine last fall, but within days reduced the tally to 7 deaths and downgraded others to appear less likely.
That’s not a clerical error. That’s a pattern.
Communications enclosed in the chairman’s letter show FDA officials discussing their plans to eventually reduce the number of pediatric deaths probably or possibly connected to the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which was then reflected in their December 5, 2025 memo.
“Although what drove the decision to change these three cases remains to be seen, what is clear is that these officials appear to have determined that the seven cases warranted warning about the risks,” Johnson wrote.
So even by the FDA’s own downgraded accounting, the data was alarming enough that their own pharmacovigilance division wanted to put a warning on the label. Even after downplaying some of the previously suspected deaths, the FDA’s Division of Pharmacovigilance recommended a change to the label of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to warn the public about the risk of “myocarditis with fatal outcomes” — heart inflammation and death — but that change never happened.
Let that sink in. The FDA’s own scientists pushed for a warning. Their bosses said no. And parents never found out.
A Forensic Pathologist Who Knows These Cases Firsthand
The new FDA documents show that two of the cases were downgraded in part because of positive tests for parvovirus, and Yale School of Medicine pathologist James Gill, a forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsies of two teenage boys who died of myocardial injury days after receiving the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, called the mention of parvovirus a “red herring.”
Parvovirus can be found in the tissues of about half of the population, and sensitive PCR tests can pick up the virus years after the infection, Gill told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Essentially they could exclude about half of the potential complications because of this finding,” Gill said.
But heart issues from parvovirus and the heart issues discovered after the vaccine have different histologies, or microscopic markers, Gill said. In other words, a trained pathologist can tell the difference. The FDA, apparently, chose not to ask him.
Gill said the FDA and CDC did not reach out to discuss the cases with him either in 2022 or during the 2025 review. “Why would you even not want to discuss it with me professionally and sort it out?” he said. “I tried to engage them in that dialogue and they shut it down because they had already made up their mind that this was not a death due to the vaccine,” Gill added.
Documents released in Johnson’s investigation show that in its 2025 assessment, FDA classified one of the Gill cases as “probably” vaccine related and another as just “possibly” vaccine related, citing evidence of parvovirus. FDA’s conclusion on the second case contrasts with that of Gill, the leading pathologist on the case.
Where This Investigation Started
This didn’t come out of nowhere. Johnson has been pulling on this thread for years.
The 3,000-word memo that started this chain of events was written by Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. In it, Prasad claims that agency staff determined that “no fewer than 10” of 96 child deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, between 2021 and 2024 were “related” to COVID vaccination.
Prasad wrote: “For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children. Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced, at the behest of the Biden administration, via school and work mandates, to receive a vaccine that could result in death. In many cases, such mandates were harmful. It is difficult to read cases where kids aged 7 to 16 may be dead as a result of covid vaccines.”
“Nobody wanted to admit that these things were causing death. This is absolutely a case of willful ignorance,” Johnson said in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
But Johnson didn’t stop at the Prasad memo. He kept digging. And what he found next raises an entirely different set of questions.
The $1.24 Billion Question
Johnson released the new FDA emails in a June 16 letter demanding more information about a recent $1.24 billion purchase by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for Pfizer vaccines despite bipartisan concerns about their safety.
The contracts, awarded on June 1, include about $735.7 million for pediatric COVID-19 vaccines and nearly $505.3 million for adult doses for fiscal year 2026-2027.
Think about the timing. The FDA’s own pharmacovigilance team was recommending a fatal myocarditis warning on the label. Career staff had flagged children’s deaths as possibly or probably connected to the shots. And the CDC turned around and handed Pfizer over a billion dollars for more of the same product.
“The decision to award these contracts raises questions about CDC’s commitment to vaccine safety,” Johnson wrote. “The safety issues with the COVID-19 injections that the Subcommittee has uncovered so far should have raised serious concerns at HHS and CDC about the mRNA COVID-19 injections. Instead, CDC’s reported awarding of approximately $1.24 billion in new contracts to Pfizer for a vaccine linked to serious adverse events — including potentially the deaths of children — suggests CDC continues to fail to take its vaccine safety responsibilities seriously,” Johnson concluded.
Neither the FDA, Pfizer, nor Moderna responded to requests for comment.
A System That Hid What It Knew
The pediatric death review is only one piece of a much larger investigation Johnson’s subcommittee has been conducting into how the federal health bureaucracy handled COVID vaccine safety data from the very beginning.
In April 2026, Johnson released an interim majority staff report titled *Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals*. Supported by around 600 pages of internal FDA and HHS communications obtained through congressional oversight, the report alleges that federal health officials were aware as early as March 2021 that their standard VAERS data-mining system was obscuring statistically significant safety signals tied to the COVID-19 vaccines.
“The raw number of reports to VAERS should have been cause enough to raise the alarm,” Johnson wrote, claiming that officials at the time decided to stick with an old algorithm “that they knew hid safety signals.”
And the kids who died in the meantime got no warning. Their parents got no warning. Nobody did.
“One reason I’m writing this letter is that this memo needs much greater attention. This should be a blockbuster,” Johnson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
He’s right. A federal agency’s own pharmacovigilance experts concluded that children’s deaths warranted a label warning about fatal heart inflammation. That warning was never added. The agency then quietly reduced the number of deaths it was willing to acknowledge. And through all of it, the CDC kept writing nine-figure checks to the same vaccine manufacturer.
Parents were told to trust the process. The process, it turns out, was busy protecting itself.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now leads the Department of Health and Human Services, has built his career on exactly this kind of institutional accountability — the kind that career bureaucrats in federal agencies have resisted for decades. The documents Johnson is releasing give Kennedy’s office the paper trail it needs to demand real answers, not the sanitized version federal agencies have been handing Congress for years.
But the CDC’s $1.24 billion Pfizer contract sits out there like a flare in the dark. Whatever the internal review said. Whatever the pathologists found. Whatever the pharmacovigilance team recommended. The money kept flowing.
Someone needs to explain that.
Sources: Daily Caller News Foundation (Emily Kopp, June 18, 2026); Sen. Ron Johnson press release, June 18, 2026; Sen. Ron Johnson press release, December 15, 2025; Sen. Ron Johnson press release, May 12, 2026; Biocentury, Dr. Vinay Prasad memo, November 28, 2025; Children’s Health Defense, June 2026; Liberty Daily, June 18, 2026.