Thanks to Pixabay and NoPixelZone for the injection sketch

A Covid Vaccine Reckoning Under Trump?

by James Bovard, March 31, 2025

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. forced Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, to resign on Friday. Good Washingtonians were horrified, especially since Marks had played a key role in enabling federal dictates during the COVID pandemic.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) responded to Marks’ exit enthusiastically: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) responded to Marks’ exit with a tweet mentioning the hearings he held last year “exposing COVID vaccine malfeasance led by Peter Marks at the FDA. Instead of verifying safety and efficacy of the shots, Marks swept things under the rug and became a cheerleader for the jab.”

Marks’ ejection produced the usual ludicrously biased coverage from the corporate press. Former FDA boss Scott Gottlieb gushed that Marks “presided over an extraordinary period of medical progress, spearheading breakthroughs” in numerous areas. The Washington Post touted that quote but failed to mention that Gottlieb is on the Pfizer Board of Directors—and Marks practically gave Pfizer a license to print money.

On September 9, 2021, President Joe Biden dictated that more than one hundred million Americans must get COVID-vaccine injections. But the Food and Drug Administration finding behind that order, the official certification of the jabs as “safe and effective,” was the result of a bureaucratic bait-and-switch, as I reported in the New York Post on April 15, 2023.

In December 2020, the FDA approved COVID vaccines on an emergency-use basis. That ruling provided an absolute waiver of liability for vaccine manufacturers for any harm their products inflicted. The following month, Joe Biden became president and the White House touted the vaccines as national salvation from COVID.

But it soon became clear that many Americans were hesitating to get jabbed, in part because the FDA approval was solely for emergency use. Many Americans have long been wary of vaccines, including cynics who avoid annual flu shots that are notoriously ineffective.

Biden championed vaccines with evangelical fervor. “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” he proclaimed during a July 21, 2021 CNN town hall. Biden’s claim was the single biggest shard of disinformation during the pandemic.

The effectiveness of the COVID vaccines was already collapsing. The week after Biden’s promise, headlines revealed that almost four hundred fully vaccinated people contracted COVID on holiday visits to Provincetown, Massachusetts. A few days later, The Washington Post and New York Times published leaked CDC documents warning that vaccines were utterly failing to stop COVID transmission. A Mayo Clinic study found that vaccine efficacy had fallen to 42%. But Biden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was covering up the debacle by refusing to count “breakthrough” COVID infections that did not result in death or hospitalization. The Washington Post castigated the CDC for withholding COVID information, noting that its “overly rosy assessments of the vaccines’ effectiveness against delta [variant] may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security.”

The Biden administration responded to the vaccine failure by using an iron fist to force Americans to get injected. But Biden could not issue a mandate until the FDA gave final approval to the COVID vax.

In May 2021, Pfizer applied for full approval; the FDA said it aimed to announce a decision in January 2022. But that wasn’t fast enough for the Biden White House. Internal emails revealed that acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock was concerned because “states cannot require mandatory vaccination” without FDA final approval, according to the chief of FDA’s vaccine-review office, Marion Gruber. Gruber warned that a thorough evaluation was needed due to “increasing evidence of association of this vaccine and development of myocarditis (especially in young males).”

After Gruber balked, Woodcock placed Peter Marks in charge of the process, and the vaccine got full approval on August 23. Biden boasted that day of achieving a COVID “key milestone” and labeled FDA approval the “gold standard,” proving vaccines were safe and effective. The White House arm-twisting spurred a “mutiny” at the FDA, as Politico put it: Gruber and her top deputy resigned in protest.

When he dictated his vaccine mandate on September 9, Biden promised to “finish the job [on COVID] with truth, with science.” But the White House had already buried the truth and effectively exiled dissenting scientists. Four months later, the Supreme Court ruled that most of Biden’s vaccine mandate was illegal. By that point, the catastrophic failure of the vaccines was resulting in a million new COVID cases per day.

The COVID vaccine’s rushed approval was the pharmaceutical version of a riverboat gamble—except Biden was betting the lives and health of Americans. But Biden’s bluster could not prevent the vaccines from increasing the risk of myocarditis up to six fold in young males. The CDC is investigating a possible link between Pfizer vaccines and strokes in the elderly. According to a Swiss medical study, up to three million Americans may have asymptomatic heart damage thanks to COVID booster shots. A recent Spanish medical study found that people who received multiple COVID boosters were almost twice as likely to get COVID infections. But, as The New York Times reported, legitimate COVID vaccine injury cases have been swept under the rug. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Yale University, stated that people report injuries from COVID vaccines are “just completely ignored and dismissed and gaslighted,” she added. As former New York Times science reporter Alex Berenson quipped, “The bestest vaccines ever keep getting bester.”

There have been successful vaccines that saved millions of lives. But the political racketeering surrounding the COVID vaccination is thus far preventing Americans from receiving a full accounting of the risks and benefits of the injection that Biden sought to mandate. Hopefully Donald Trump’s administration will open the files and disclose hard facts ASAP.