- The CDC’s contractor, GDIT, warned in January 2021 that COVID-19 vaccine injury reports overwhelmed VAERS, but the CDC publicly reassured Americans the system was fine.
- By February 2021, more than 70,000 reports were backlogged, yet a CDC safety analysis called the vaccines "reassuring" days later.
- CDC officials repeatedly told Congress and the public that the system worked while internal records showed death reports lacked follow-up for weeks.
- V-safe survey data revealed thousands of medically attended cases never resulted in a VAERS phone call, indicating systemic surveillance failures.
- Former FDA official Peter Marks did not acknowledge the avalanche of reports under oath until 2024.
When the CDC’s own contractor says it can’t process the flood of vaccine injury reports, that’s usually the moment alarms sound. But in January 2021, just weeks into the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the alarms did more than go unanswered; they were met with public reassurance.
That’s the scene described by two recent Brownstone Institute articles, one by founder Jeffrey Tucker and one by Leland Lehrman, executive director of the MAHA Institute. Both pieces are based on the contractor’s own monthly reports, as well as internal emails obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), the company the CDC hired to process reports for its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), sent a Jan. 15 memo to the agency. The message was clear: COVID-19 vaccine injury reports had “significantly exceeded the estimated maximum of 1,000 reports per day.” GDIT said it could no longer meet its processing deadlines for data processing or telephone and clinical inquiries.
So why did the American public hear nothing about this?
Because the CDC told them everything was fine.
The contractor sounded the alarm; the CDC called the shots ‘reassuring’
By Feb. 10, 2021, GDIT reported a backlog of more than 70,000 unprocessed reports. The government’s own “worst case scenario” had been blown through in the first week of the vaccine rollout. Reports crossed the 1,000-per-day line on Dec. 21, 2020, and from early January 2021 through January 2022, just nine weekdays fell below this threshold, according to Lehrman’s analysis of public VAERS data.
But on Feb. 19, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published its first safety analysis. Epidemiologist Julianne Gee and Tom Shimabukuro, then deputy director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, reviewed 6,994 processed reports from the rollout’s first month and declared the vaccines’ safety profile “reassuring.” Tucker estimates that only accounted for around 6% of the reports that had been filed by the time the analysis was released.
The problem? Tens of thousands of reports were still sitting in the contractor’s backlog. The CDC based its public reassurance on a sliver of data while its own contractor drowned in the rest.
Tucker said: “They knew this. They lied anyway.”
What the public heard vs. what the data showed
While GDIT struggled under the weight of injury reports, CDC officials repeatedly told the public and Congress that the safety system was working.
On Jan. 27, 2021, Shimabukuro told the government’s vaccine advisory committee that death reports were “processed the day of report.” But the contractor’s own records show one death report received March 25 still had no follow-up 46 days later.
On March 1, Shimabukuro briefed the same committee on 104,763 VAERS reports, a total his slide labeled “pre-processed.” By Lehrman’s calculation, the adverse-event figures on the following slide reflected only about 17,400 fully processed reports, roughly one in six. That same day, the contractor tallied its backlog at 93,940.
The closing slide of that briefing read: “No other safety signals for serious adverse events have been detected in VAERS.” The official meeting summary depicts one member impressed by “what an amazing job CDC is doing.”
At the same time, the agency’s companion program V-safe — a text-message survey that checked on vaccinated people — also showed strain. By Lehrman’s count, of roughly 105,500 survey answers reporting medical care before Feb. 16, 2021, only 5,088 resulted in a VAERS report taken by phone. About 15,100 people who reported being hospitalized show no record of any attempted call.
Officials vouched for the system as the backlog grew
The reassurances kept coming. FDA’s Peter Marks told the Senate on May 11, 2021, that “our safety surveillance systems are doing what they’re supposed to do.” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told senators in November that the U.S. had “the most robust vaccine safety system that we have ever had.”
Yet internal FDA emails from March and April 2021 acknowledged the backlog. One FDA staffer wrote that the contractor’s processing troubles “may not be widely understood outside of” the office.
It took until February 2024 — nearly three years — for Marks to acknowledge under oath that “the avalanche of reports was tremendous.” Even then, his answer did not mention any backlog.
The final problem? Some of the people involved are still there. According to Tucker, Shimabukuro is now deputy director of the CDC’s Influenza Division, and Gee remains at the agency. The contractor still holds the VAERS contract, which runs through September 2027.
Tucker asks the obvious question: “Do you see now why so many people are screaming for accountability and justice?” Americans who were pressured or forced into getting these shots deserved the full picture. Instead, all they got was a backlog and a pep talk.
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