The US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating possible deaths due to measles vaccines. COVID-19, both children and adults, a spokesman for the health minister in President Donald Trump's administration, Robert Kennedy Jr., a notorious vaccine denier, confirmed to AFP on Tuesday.
The research comes as more and more voices are being raised to denounce the increasing politicization of health services since Robert Kennedy Jr. took office, fundamentally changing US vaccination policy.
"The FDA is conducting an in-depth investigation across age groups into potential deaths from COVID vaccines," Health Department spokesman Andrew Nixon told AFP, confirming reports from Bloomberg and the Washington Post.
The effectiveness and safety of vaccines against the disease caused by the new coronavirus have been confirmed by various studies, as have rare cases of serious side effects, which, however, have not called into question the benefit of vaccinating the majority of citizens of all age groups, according to health authorities in most countries in the world.
The spokesman did not want to specify when the conclusions of this research, the methods of which are currently shrouded in mystery, will be made public.
The investigation, which was initially set to focus on possible child deaths, has sparked fresh controversy in recent weeks after an internal memo was leaked in late November. The memo, attributed to a senior FDA official, cited at least 10 child deaths linked to the vaccines, without any evidence.
About ten former FDA officials have since expressed their deep concern and called for caution, recalling that "no explanation of the procedures and analyses that led to this retrospective assessment" has been made public.
The Trump administration's Secretary of Health, Robert Kennedy Jr., is known to have spread fake news and conspiracy theories in the past on the issue of vaccines, especially these ones.
During the pandemic, he had claimed that these vaccines were "the deadliest ever made," and had even gone so far as to tell the press, during an event, that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) was ethnically "targeted" to affect whites and blacks, but not "Ashkenazi (Jews) and Chinese."
Statements he later retracted.
Source: protothema.gr
