As the June 30 deadline nears for compliance with the U.S. military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, U.S. Army officials publicly claim a very small percentage of its members are unvaccinated, reporting 96% or more of its members are fully vaccinated.

However, the Army’s vaccination rate is in fact significantly lower than 96%, an active-duty senior Army official with access to senior-level information told The Defender — so low, that if the Army were to enforce the deadline, the loss of up to 120,000 service members would render it “combat-ineffective.”

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Army is strongly considering pushing the June 30 deadline much further into the future — but will not announce the date change until closer to, or even after, the upcoming deadline.

Concern about the number of unvaccinated service members was the topic of recent senior-level briefings, according to the official.

He said he’s blowing the whistle now because many service members who remain unvaccinated and/or who are “on the fence” about getting the vaccine may feel compelled to do so to meet the June 30 deadline — unaware the deadline may soon change.

He said by going public with this information now, service members who have not yet been vaccinated but who are feeling increasing pressure to get the COVID-19 vaccine may reconsider.

Real numbers of unvaccinated Army members ‘higher than anybody thought’

As far back as December 2021, an article on the U.S. Army website stated 96% of the Army’s 461,209 members were fully vaccinated.

In March 2022, as the Army began to announce the initiation of separation procedures for unvaccinated soldiers, officials again claimed 96% of its service members were fully vaccinated.

Later that month, an article on the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) website claimed “the entire force may be vaccinated for COVID-19 by early summer.”

According to the whistleblower though, the “real numbers of unvaccinated service members are way higher than anybody thought,” adding that while “everyone thought” the number of unvaccinated in the Army was approximately 8,000-10,000 members, it is actually around 120,000.

To confirm that number, the official confidentially shared an internal U.S. Army document, dated June 2022.

According to the document, in the Army National Guard (ARNG), there are 280,678 members who are fully vaccinated (84.6%), and 7,735 who are partially vaccinated (1 dose) (2.3%) — leaving 43,269, or 13%, who have not yet received a single dose.

In some states, such as Oklahoma, the document shows the vaccination rate for members of the ARNG is as low as 74.11%. Of those, the document lists 15,698 members as “refusals” and 6,749 (2.0%) as going through an exemption process — with 6,257 (1.9%) requesting a religious exemption and 492 (0.1%) requesting a medical exemption.

The document also notes that 80% of unvaccinated soldiers in the ARNG are age 32 or younger, with an average age of 26.2 and median age of 24.

The document adds that “unvaccinated soldiers in their first 1-3 years of service and 4-7 years of service represent the greatest risk to readiness” for the ARNG, and that “Infantry, Maintenance, Engineer and Transportation career fields represent the greatest areas [of] concern for the ARNG.”

The document also states “projected losses could drive [the ARNG] below 70% available strength.”

According to the document, “Current forecasts project unprogrammed, vaccination mandate-related losses to range from … 3-6% of assigned strength,” which would require an anticipated “seven-year effort at 1,500-2,000 ramp per year to restore [the] End Strength necessary to meet required Force Structure.”

The same document also provides figures for the U.S. Army Reserve (USAR), stating that 157,390 members are fully vaccinated (87.9%), with an additional 1,411 members partially vaccinated with one dose (0.8%), leaving 19,872 members (11.3%) fully unvaccinated.

Among the unvaccinated, 7,623 members (4.3%) are listed as “refusals” and 4,100 (2.3%) are listed as undergoing an exemption process, with 3,982 members (2.2%) having requested a religious accommodation, and 118 (0.1%) having requested a medical exemption.

In some states, such as Wyoming, the vaccination rate in the USAR is as low as 80.9%, according to the document.

The document also notes 65% of unvaccinated soldiers in the USAR are age 30 or younger, with an average age of 28 and a median age of 26.

“Supply and Services, Mechanical Maintenance, Engineer and Transportation career fields represent the greatest areas [of] concern for the USAR,” the document states.

The document recommends commanders counsel “every unvaccinated Soldier,” “explore [the] impact of Bars to Reenlistment” and “publicize [the] Novavax option as [U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)] approves” as it “may appeal to some seeking religious exemptions.”

The number of unvaccinated service members in the ARNG and USAR is confirmed in a second document — an internal “information” document — that the whistleblower shared with The Defender.

According to the whistleblower, this leaves approximately 56,000 unvaccinated service members in the U.S. Army itself.

These figures refer only to the Army, the whistleblower said. He does not know the figures for other branches of the armed forces, such as the Navy, Marines and Air Force.

The reason most members of the Army thought the number of unvaccinated was much smaller, aside from the information provided via the Army’s official channels, is that the Army has been “very tight-lipped” about these figures, “not leaking [them] to anybody, even internally,” according to the whistleblower.

“Those who are not vaccinated are segregated, so it is hard to find out who isn’t vaccinated,” he said. “The Army has done a very good job of not letting that information be leaked across the service.”

As a result, according to the whistleblower, “sometimes you feel you’re the only one, that there’s only a few people left” who have not received the COVID-19 vaccine.

However, those who are unvaccinated and who are privy to the real figures are, as the whistleblower described it, “re-energized and encouraged” by these numbers.

Army will be ‘combat-ineffective’ unless it moves June 30 deadline

The whistleblower told The Defender the DOD still plans to separate the unvaccinated soldiers, but instead of enforcing the June 30 deadline, “what they are going to do is hold off on separating soldiers on July 1,” and “will most likely push that into 2023 at the earliest.”

The June 2022 Army document confirms this, as it proposes that a “phased approach to involuntary separation” for unvaccinated service members would begin on October 1, 2022, with a “mandatory bar to reenlistment,” while “mandatory involuntary separations for COVID vaccine refusal” would begin January 1, 2023, and “last up to approximately 2 years.”

The document also recommends “separations for Soldiers start in FY23 [fiscal year 2023] with a phased approach.”

The whistleblower said the later date and “phased approach” are necessary because the Army is having a difficult time recruiting new troops, as “recruiting numbers have tanked over the past six months.”

The June 2022 document confirms this, describing an “extremely challenging recruiting environment.”

Moreover, the whistleblower claims that “the Army knows they cannot separate 120,000 soldiers,” as the Army would become “combat-ineffective,” which the whistleblower states is another reason why the real figures have been tightly guarded.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/whistleblower-military-covid-19-vaccine-mandate/

By  Megan Redshaw

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is asking the company that manages the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database to turn over records after the company failed to fully comply with a previous request seeking information about its “awareness of potential data problems” with the military’s database.

This is the second time Johnson has requested the records from Unissant Inc.

Johnson’s office previously sent three letters to the DOD following allegations by DOD whistleblowers that the DMED showed significant increases in registered medical diagnoses in 2021 following the authorization of COVID-19 vaccines and implementation of the DOD’s vaccine mandate.

The DMED is the military’s longstanding epidemiological database of service members.

Claiming the DMED data for 2016-2020 was incorrect, the DOD temporarily disabled the database — after whistleblowers came forward — then updated it with accurate figures, which resulted in less of an increase in medical conditions that potentially could be related to the vaccines.

The DOD said the DMED system was taken offline to “identify and correct the root cause of the data corruption.”

Given what Johnson said was the DOD’s lack of transparency, the senator asked his staff to contact Unissant to discuss its “awareness of potential data problems in DMED.”

Johnson, a ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, first sent a formal letter to Unissant on March 7, requesting records related to its management of the DMED.

Unissant responded by stating it was prohibited from answering Johnson’s questions or “providing any details about the work it performs for the Defense Health Agency.”

Johnson’s staff provided Unissant with information from the DOD stating the company did not need the DOD’s consent to answer questions from Congress. A DOD contracting officer informed Unissant that “when it comes to Congressional or Senatorial inquiries, you don’t need my permission” to respond.

Despite approval to release information to Johnson’s office, Unissant requested written approval from its DOD contracting officer to release the information.

“Our letter explains why we are making this request even though you’ve stated we do not need your permission,” the email stated.

The DOD on May 2 gave Unissant permission to provide responsive documents to Johnson’s initial March 7 request, but Unissant’s letter detailing why it needed the DOD’s written permission was omitted from the records provided to his office.

“The records Unissant has provided to date as well as the company’s unclear explanation for requesting DOD’s approval to respond to Congressional inquiries raise additional questions,” Johnson said in a June 14 letter to Kenneth Bonner, president and chief growth officer of Unissant.

Johnson asked Unissant to provide the following additional information no later than June 28.

Johnson wrote:

1. Does Unissant agree with DOD’s claim that “the data in DMED was corrupt for the years 2016-2020 when accessed after September 2021?” If so, please explain why the DMED data for registered diagnoses of certain medical conditions from 2016-2020 was incorrect.

2. Please explain why registered diagnoses of myocarditis in 2021 decreased from 1,239 registered cases as of August 29, 2021, to 273 registered cases as of January 10, 2022. Please explain why the average annual registered diagnosis of myocarditis from 2016-2020 increased from 216 as of August 29, 2021, to 559 as of January 10, 2022.

3. Unissant claimed that on February 10, 2022, DOD discovered the need to “fix DMED monthly data for 2021.” However, emails produced by Unissant show that on Jan. 31, 2022, Unissant’s Vice President Stephen Gehring wrote that, “the team worked over the weekend to identify and resolve the issues” with DMED. Later that day, a DOD employee confirmed that “DMED access was restored after the data was corrected.”

Did Unissant identify the issues discussed on January 31, 2022, in its list of issues relating to DMED (see enclosure)? Were the issues discussed on January 31, 2022, different from the issue identified on February 10, 2022? Did DOD or Unissant discover the issues discussed on January 31, 2022? Please provide all communications showing this.

It does not appear that Unissant provided communications referring or relating to the DMED issue discovered on February 10, 2022 (as requested in the March 7, 2022 letter). Please provide those documents.

4. Provide a list of communications and documents discussing the “need to fix DMED monthly data for 2021” and the communications relating to the DMED issues discovered on Feb. 10, 2022, that Unissant failed to disclose with the previous request.

5. On January 31, 2022, Unissant Vice President Stephen Gehring noted that his team had “worked over the weekend to identify and resolve the issues” with DMED. He added that “the team uncovered other findings in testing that need to be addressed.” What were those “other findings”? Did those finding [sic] relate to issues with DMED? If so, were those findings identified in Unissant’s chart regarding issues relating to DMED (pursuant to the March 7, 2022 letter)?

If these findings were not identified, please provide a description of those findings, when Unissant communicated those findings to DOD, and the status of any corrective action(s).

6. In a March 3, 2022 email provided by Unissant, a Unissant representative informed Unissant officials Kenneth Bonner and Stephen Gehring that as recently as August 2021, DOD and Unissant were aware of problems with DMED but still let it “go live” with those problems. What were the problems? Why did Unissant allow DMED to “go live” if it knew it had problems?

7. On April 22, 2022, Unissant’s President Kenneth Bonner attached a letter to an email to DOD Contracting Officer Kevin Hodge regarding DOD’s permission to release information to Sen. Johnson. This attachment was not included in Unissant’s May 4, 2022 production. Please provide this letter.

8. Unissant’s May 4, 2022 production included several emails between the company’s representatives and DOD officials regarding DMED issues in August 2021. It does not appear those issues were identified in Unissant’s production Exhibit 3 or Exhibit 4 (enclosed). What were those issues, who discovered those issues and when, how long did those issues exist in DMED and when were those issues corrected?

9. Unissant’s May 4, 2022 response noted that because its employees use DOD email addresses to communicate with DOD employees referring or relating to DMED, “Unissant does not have access to these documents and communications.” Does Unissant not maintain records of its employees’ communications between and among Unissant and DOD employees regarding their contracted work?

When performing work on behalf of the federal government, how does Unissant ensure that its employees are following federal record preservation requirements if Unissant cannot access its employees’ documents and communications?

DOD changes DMED data on myocarditis after whistleblowers come forward

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/sen-ron-johnson-dod-military-medical-database-records/

By  Sustainable Pulse

The U.S. Court of Appeals last week overturned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision that the pesticide glyphosate, used in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, is safe for humans and wildlife, and ordered the agency to reassess the chemical’s risks.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto-Bayer’s flagship Roundup weedkiller, the most widely used pesticide in the world.

The 54-page opinion held the Trump administration’s 2020 interim registration of glyphosate to be unlawful because “EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and shirked its duties under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).”

Represented by the Center for Food Safety, the petitioners in the lawsuit included the Rural Coalition, Farmworker Association of Florida, Organización en California de Lideres Campesinas and Beyond Pesticides. A consolidated case is led by Natural Resources Defense Council and includes Pesticide Action Network.

“Today’s decision gives voice to those who suffer from glyphosate’s cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney with the Center for Food Safety and lead counsel in the case.

“EPA’s ‘no cancer’ risk conclusion did not stand up to scrutiny. Today is a major victory for farmworkers and others exposed to glyphosate. Imperiled wildlife also won today, as the court agreed that EPA needed to ensure the safety of endangered species before greenlighting glyphosate.”

“We welcome and applaud the court on this significant decision,” said Jeannie Economos, Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project Coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida, a plaintiff in the case.

“While it comes too late for many farmworkers and landscapers who suffer after glyphosate exposure, we are grateful for the court’s ruling, and hope that now EPA will act quickly to protect future workers from illness and disease resulting from this toxic pesticide.”

As to its cancer conclusion, the court concluded that EPA flouted its own Cancer Guidelines and ignored the criticisms of its own experts. EPA’s “not likely to cause cancer” conclusion was inconsistent with the evidence before it, in the form of both epidemiological studies (real-world cancer cases) and lab animal studies.

In addition to its lack of conclusion as to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma risk (the cancer most tied to glyphosate), the court also concluded that EPA’s general “no cancer” decision was divorced from its own guidelines and experts when EPA selectively discounted evidence that glyphosate causes tumors in animals.

At various points the Court criticized EPA’s “disregard of tumor results”; its use of “bare assertions” that “fail to account coherently for the evidence”; making conclusions that do not “withstand scrutiny under the agency’s own framework” and “failing to abide by” its cancer guidelines.

In sum, the court noted EPA’s “inconsistent reasoning” made its decision on cancer “arbitrary,” and struck it down.

“We are grateful that the court decided in our favor,” said John Zippert, chairperson of the Rural Coalition, a plaintiff in the case.

“We need to halt glyphosate’s devastating impact on the farmworkers and farmers who suffer the deepest consequences of exposure. This decision will hopefully hasten the transition to farming and gardening methods and practices that increase resilience, protecting our children, our planet and all those who feed us.”

“EPA’s failure to act on the science, as detailed in the litigation, has real-world adverse health consequences for farmworkers, the public and ecosystems,” said Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a plaintiff in the case.

“Because of this lawsuit, the agency’s obstruction of the regulatory process will not be allowed to stand, and EPA should start shifting food production to available alternative non- and less-toxic practices and materials that meet its statutory duty.”

The court went on to conclude that EPA’s decision also violated the Endangered Species Act.

As the court noted, EPA itself elsewhere had admitted that “glyphosate ‘may affect’ all listed species experiencing glyphosate exposure — that is 1,795 endangered or threatened species” yet had unlawfully ignored the ESA for this decision.

As to remedy, the court struck down, or vacated the human health assessment. The court also required that EPA redo and/or finish all remaining glyphosate determinations by an October deadline, or within four months.

This includes a redone ecological toxicity assessment, a redone costs analysis of impacts to farmers from pesticide harms, as well as all Endangered Species analysis and mitigation.

Background

In an “interim registration review” decision for glyphosate issued in Jan. 2020, EPA finalized its human health and ecological risk assessments and adopted “mitigation measures” in the form of label changes.

EPA unlawfully concluded there is no cancer risk from glyphosate despite major gaps in its review including coming to “no conclusion” as to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the most well-known cancer linked to glyphosate.

EPA also failed to do any assessment of how much glyphosate gets into a user’s bloodstream after skin contact, a major route of occupational exposure.

Critically, EPA failed to test any of the glyphosate product formulations, which contain ingredients beyond just the active ingredient (glyphosate) and can increase the harmful effects of pesticide exposure.

Finally, because EPA continued the use of glyphosate with minor, unsubstantiated label changes, it needed to consider the impacts on imperiled species and do more to protect them from glyphosate.

CFS and allies originally filed the lawsuit in 2020, incorporating volumes of evidence showing how EPA ignored glyphosate’s health risks, including cancer risks, to farmworkers and farmers exposed during spraying.

Petitioners also challenged EPA’s decision based on risks to the environment and imperiled species, such as the Monarch butterfly.

In response to CFS and allies’ lawsuit, in May 2021 EPA effectively admitted grave errors in its interim registration and asked the court for permission to re-do the agency’s faulty ecological, cost-benefit and Endangered Species Act assessments.

However, the agency stated that Roundup should nonetheless stay on the market in the interim — without any deadline for a new decision.

In July 2021, Bayer announced it will end the sales of its glyphosate-based herbicides (including Roundup) in the U.S. residential lawn and garden market in 2023 to “manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns.”

In California, jury trials continue to be held. Last year, courts affirmed a judgment against Monsanto for cancer from Roundup in Hardeman v. Monsanto — one of the first in a series of high-profile consumer lawsuits filed against Monsanto-Bayer — and in the third appeal of such a claim in Pilliod v. Monsanto.

While EPA has repeatedly declared that glyphosate does not cause cancer, the world’s foremost cancer authorities with the World Health Organization declared glyphosate to be “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.

And as the record in the case showed, EPA’s own Office of Research and Development concluded that glyphosate is either a likely carcinogen or at least there is evidence suggesting that it causes cancer, particularly increases the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/epa-glyphosate-roundup-human-health-environment/

By  Josh Guetzkow, Ph.D.

In response to a Freedom of Information Request submitted by Children’s Health Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week admitted it never analyzed the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System for safety signals for COVID-19 vaccines.

The admission was revealed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

In September 2021, I published an article in The Defender in which I used the CDC’s published methodology to analyze VAERS for safety signals from COVID-19 vaccines.

The signals were loud and clear, leading me to wonder “why is nobody listening?”

Instead, I should have asked, “Is anybody even looking for them?”

After that article was published, I urged CHD’s legal team to submit a FOIA request to the CDC about its VAERS monitoring activities.

Since CDC officials stated publicly that “COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring is the most robust in U.S. history,” I had assumed that at the very least, CDC officials were monitoring VAERS using the methods they described in a briefing document posted on the CDC website in January 2021 (and updated in February 2022, with minor changes).

I was wrong.

The lynchpin of their safety monitoring was to mine VAERS data for safety signals by calculating what are known as proportional reporting ratios (PRR’s).

This is a method of comparing the proportion of different types of adverse events reported for a new vaccine to the proportion of those events reported for an older, established vaccine.

If the new vaccine shows a significantly higher reporting rate of a particular adverse event relative to the old one, it counts as a safety signal that should then trigger a more thorough investigation.

The briefing document states, “CDC will perform PRR data mining on a weekly basis or as needed.”

And yet, in the agency’s response to the FOIA request, it wrote that “no PRRs were conducted by CDC. Furthermore, data mining is outside of the agency’s purview.”

The agency suggested contacting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which was supposed to perform a different type of data mining, according to the briefing document.

CDC officials repeatedly claimed they have not seen safety signals in VAERS.

For example, on April 27, 2021, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky stated the CDC did not see any signals related to heart inflammation.

But a PRR calculation I did using the number of myo/pericarditis reports listed in the first table produced by the CDC obtained via the FOIA request reveals clear and unambiguous safety signals relative to the comparator vaccines mentioned in the briefing document (i.e., flu vaccines, FLUAD and Shingrix).

The table is dated April 2, 2021, almost four weeks before she made those remarks.

In fact, among the 15 adverse events for adults included in that week’s tabulations, PRRs I calculated also show loud-and-clear safety signals for acute myocardial infarction, anaphylaxis, appendicitis, Bell’s palsy, coagulopathy, multisystem inflammatory syndrome in adults (MIS-A), stroke and death.

The actual monitoring the CDC did diverges from the one promised in the briefing document in other ways.

For example, the CDC never created tables of the top 25 adverse events reported in the previous week, tables comparing different vaccine manufacturers, or tables of auto-immune diseases.

And it only began monitoring in early April 2021, even though reports from COVID-19 vaccines had been flooding VAERS since mid-December of the previous year.

To be clear, VAERS is not the only database the CDC uses to monitor COVID-19 vaccine safety.

For example, the CDC sponsored several studies of COVID-19 safety using the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which is comprised of millions of medical records from HMO’s across several states.

Those studies do not raise many safety concerns. However, they make many questionable methodological choices.

To give one example, a major safety study based on VSD data published in September 2021, in “JAMA,” compares adverse event rates that occur within 1-21 days of vaccination to the rate of occurrence from 22 to 42 days after vaccination.

It makes no comparison between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, or before vaccination versus after in the same individuals.

Moreover, the VSD is far from infallible, having failed initially to detect the increase in myocarditis rates.

In contrast, although calculating PRR’s is a blunt pharmacovigilance tool and far from perfect, it nevertheless has the advantage of being straightforward and difficult to manipulate with statistical sleight of hand.

PRRs are one of the oldest, most basic and most well-established tools of pharmacovigilance. The calculations are so straightforward that the CDC automated it several years ago, so it could have been done at the press of a button.

It simply beggars belief that the CDC failed to do this simple calculation. Even now, a paper published by CDC staff in March on the safety of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines remains purely descriptive with no PRR calculation.

Meanwhile, a study published by a researcher not affiliated with the CDC in February in “Frontiers in Public Health” analyzes VAERS and EudraVigilance data using a method similar to PRRs, revealing clear and concerning safety signals.

And while it is true that VAERS is not the only database the CDC can use to monitor COVID-19 vaccine safety, it is of critical importance because it can reveal signals much faster than any other method — if anybody cares to look for them.

It remains to be seen if the FDA was properly monitoring VAERS. That will be the subject of a future FOIA request.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-vaers-covid-vaccine-safety/