Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson held a hearing probing Biden officials over the handling of COVID-19 vaccine safety signals.
Johnson, chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, held the hearing Wednesday entitled, “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.” Witnesses included Dr. David Wiseman, PhD, the president and founder of Synechion, Inc., a consulting and development firm specializing in products for preventing postsurgical scar tissue buildup between organs; Dr. Karl Jablonowski, PhD, a senior research scientist with Children’s Health Defense; and Maria Young, a COVID-19 survivor.
Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals, PSI Hearing 4.29.26 https://t.co/eKJf9LoPeQ
— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) April 29, 2026
The hearing was based on the findings of the chairman’s interim Majority Staff Report, along with approximately 600 pages of records detailing how, in early 2021, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials became aware of a new, “state-of-the-art” data mining method that could better detect statistically significant safety signals for adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. (RELATED: DOJ Indicts Fauci’s Former Top Advisor For Conspiracy Against US)
Rather than adopting the method, the report claims, Biden health officials continued to employ their older data mining method with known limitations that prevented the FDA from detecting adverse events.
One of the central findings in Johnson’s report highlights Dr. Ana Szarfman, a former senior medical officer and safety data-mining developer at the FDA. In 2021, Szarfman helped work on the agency’s surveillance system and allegedly notified senior officials about a “superior” method designed to improve detection capabilities. The report says this alternative approach addressed “masking,” a limitation in the FDA’s current system that can conceal or weaken signals of possible adverse events.
“Masking occurs when statistical signals for one vaccine in a database are obscured by reports associated with other vaccines. For example, Moderna’s myocarditis signal becomes hidden if its comparison baseline is artificially inflated by including Pfizer’s myocarditis reports,” Dr. Wiseman explained during Wednesday’s hearing. “As Chairman Johnson recently highlighted, regulators were well aware of the masking problem. Nonetheless, officials claimed ignorance on how to address masking, and that developing solutions exceeded FDA’s capabilities. They considered it ‘problematic to use a brand new, possibly unvalidated tool in the context of an EUA.’”
Among those briefed during the Biden-era pandemic response was Dr. Peter Marks, who led the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. However, the report says the agency did not adopt the method, even after presenting it to leadership.
🚨TODAY AT 2:30PM ET: I will be holding a hearing where I’ll present additional evidence of individuals within the FDA making similar corrupt statements.
The hearing is entitled “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety… https://t.co/fgQN5Qwu2g
— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) April 29, 2026
Between March and July 2021, Szarfman also conducted analyses of COVID-19 vaccine adverse event data using the enhanced approach, the report reveals. Those analyses reportedly identified a greater number of statistically significant safety signals than the FDA’s standard system.
One review cited in the report found evidence of what it described as “49 examples of extreme masking,” including roughly 25 previously undetected safety signals. These included conditions such as sudden cardiac death, Bell’s palsy, and pulmonary infarction. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Trump Admin Puts Nail In Coffin Of Biden-Era Vaccine Discrimination)
Another set of analyses reportedly identified stronger statistical signals for a range of serious outcomes, including acute myocardial infarction associated with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, embolism and thrombosis linked to the Pfizer and Janssen vaccines, and reports of death and sudden death associated with both Moderna and Pfizer products.
Johnson further alleged that administration officials appeared more focused on Szarfman’s methodology than the findings themselves. According to the report, Dr. Peter Marks warned Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, then-director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, that Szarfman’s data-mining work could “create erroneous conflicts that feed into anti-vaccination rhetoric.”
The report states that FDA officials ultimately instructed Szarfman to “hold off on creating and sending data mining reports and analyses.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: How Fauci And A Deep State Cabal Suppressed Intel In Historic Deception)
The following year, FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials also discussed limiting the distribution of FDA’s weekly COVID-19 vaccine data-mining reports. In internal communications, one CDC official wrote, “I think that because of the FOIAs [Freedom of Information Act requests] we may have asked FDA to stop sending these weekly data mining outputs.”
Today, I released a report showing that Biden health officials knew that safety signals for COVID-19 injection injuries were being hidden by their VAERS analytic algorithm.
They were shown an updated algorithm that signaled serious adverse events, but they refused to use it.… pic.twitter.com/R5L99g8DiO
— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) April 29, 2026
“Our knowledge of the safety of the mRNA vaccine prior to the issuance of the Emergency Use Authorization was poor,” Dr. Karl Jablonowski, PhD, testified on Wednesday. “Pharmacovigilance behind-closed-doors should give everyone pause. It is simply too important to not do it correctly and timely. Lapses can be, and were, catastrophic.”
In a December 15 letter obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said he will continue pressing for records on deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine after a “blockbuster” November revelation that the Trump administration had verified deaths in children. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Ron Johnson Demands Docs After ‘Blockbuster’ FDA Memo Links Child Deaths To COVID Vaccine)
The letter seeks additional details on those deaths, as well as information on the U.S. vaccine safety surveillance system and what he described as a “complacent” FDA bureaucracy under the Biden administration that delayed reporting for years.