The U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hid how a woman who suffered chest pain and other symptoms following the COVID-19 vaccination received a shot because of a mandate at work, newly obtained documents show.
The agency also redacted how multiple children were diagnosed with Kawasaki disease after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the documents.
Sources obtained more than 1,400 pages of emails from the CDC concerning its Clinical Immunisation Safety Assessment (CISA) project, which analyses post-vaccination problems reported by health care providers. The tranche included numerous redactions.
While redactions are allowed under the Freedom of Information Act, there were signs that too much information was being hidden.
Sources appealed some of the redactions. The CDC agreed to remove some of them, revealing what the agency initially shielded.
In one email, a provider reports a 30-year-old woman who suffered chest pain and leg twitching following the COVID-19 vaccination. The original copy of the email stated in part that she “got vaccinated due to [redacted].”
In the updated copy, the CDC removed the redaction, showing that the woman received a vaccine because of a mandate at work.
Several other portions of the emails that are now unredacted show the CDC hid how multiple children, including a 2-year-old, were said to have suffered from a serious inflammatory illness called Kawasaki Disease shortly after receiving a shot.
One girl suffered inflammation around the eyes, swollen lips, high fever, and a rash and “was admitted last week to Kawasaki,” one of the girl’s parents wrote on Dec. 5, 2021, the new documents show. She received a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine two weeks prior.
Dr. Matthew Oster is a cardiologist who works for the CDC. “The biggest question, of course, here, is whether this was truly [redacted] or whether this was [redacted] related to the vaccine,” he wrote after hearing about the case.
The cleaner copy of the email showed that the redactions covered “KD,” or Kawasaki Disease, and “MIS-C,” or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children. “We do now have a small number of cases like this one,” Dr. Oster said.
The CDC has portrayed MIS-C as only being caused by COVID-19, but studies have found that there were MIS-C cases before the COVID-19 pandemic and that some people suffered the syndrome after vaccination without evidence of COVID-19.
