Jordan (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Massie (R-Ky.), the chairman of its subcommittee on the administrative state, made the threat in a letter to CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen — which was exclusively obtained by The Post — as part of their investigation into the effectiveness of federally mandated COVID jabs.
If the CDC does not turn over information by May 30, both GOP chairs vowed they would “resort to compulsory process in order to obtain it.”
“On December 6, 2023, Chairman Massie wrote to request documents and information related to a CDC study released on October 29, 2021[,] that supposedly supported the CDC’s inaccurate claims about vaccine efficacy,” Jordan and Massie told Cohen.
“The CDC has continued to promote some of this information, even after being notified that its messaging was inaccurate, and remains steadfast in its insistence that these inaccurate representations are correct,” they said.
Jordan and Massie asked for all the documents in unredacted form following the latter’s initial request for the material in October of last year.
In an Oct. 20, 2023, letter to Cohen, Massie said he had spoken to four CDC officials early in the pandemic about an inaccurate claim “that the [COVID] vaccine was 92% effective in individuals with prior infection” — a correction request that earned him the moniker “Eagle Eye Massie” from a then-chief medical officer at the agency’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Neither Pfizer’s trial data for vaccinations nor the Food and Drug Administration’s analysis of that data supported that finding in December 2020.
Despite a promise to remove the misleading claim and an admission from another official that there was “not sufficient” data to prove it, the CDC only altered it partially in January 2021 to say vaccine efficacy was “similarly high” in people with and without prior COVID infections.
“I would not give my kid one of these COVID shots,” Massie posted on X Sept. 23, 2023, in response to the CDC’s recommendation to vaccinate all children six months or older.
“Just one example of their unscientific approach to the data: they don’t differentiate the ‘previously infected’ from those who’ve never been infected when characterizing the risks and benefits of the shots,” he added.
President Biden’s executive order requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated was blocked by the courts in March 2023 — and scuttled two months later, just days before the national pandemic emergency declaration ended.
Branches of the US military also discharged thousands of service members for refusing to take the shots, before welcoming the troops back late last year. Only a few dozen have returned so far.
The largest vaccine study to date, which involved 99 million people in eight countries and was published in February, found that COVID vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca were linked to rare occurrences of heart, brain and blood disorders.
Branches of the US military also discharged thousands of service members for refusing to take the shots, before welcoming the troops back late last year. Only a few dozen have returned so far.
Massie, the first congressman to introduce legislation banning COVID vaccine mandates for non-US citizens and one of three Republicans to be fined for appearing without a mask on the House floor in June 2021, has pressed the CDC for answers about its public health restrictions throughout the pandemic.
So far, the agency has turned over just 27 documents to his subcommittee, hardly the “fulsome and responsive” answer he was “assured” the House panel would receive, the letter notes.
One of those productions even redacted sections from an email that had already come out in a 2021 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, suggesting further obfuscations by US public health authorities more than four years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Post has reached out to the CDC for comment.