When Joe Biden was installed as president, he wanted one thing more than almost anything else: to be remembered as the president who beat COVID. His strategy was simple: go all in on pushing the COVID vaccines — the same vaccines he said before the election shouldn’t be trusted. Be that as it may, his decision to put all of his chips on pushing the vaccines forced his administration to make some very shady decisions.
New details emerging from a Senate investigation confirm that Biden administration officials at both the FDA and CDC knew about a significant stroke risk tied to Pfizer's bivalent COVID-19 booster in people over 65.
They knew. And they said nothing.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, formally notified HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the findings in a letter backed by roughly 2,000 pages of federal documents.
On August 31, 2022, the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) authorized the PfizerBioNTech COVID-19 bivalent booster. By late October 2022, HHS reported that approximately 14.4 million people 12 years and older had received the booster. In November 2022, federal health officials became aware of a statistically significant safety signal for ischemic stroke among individuals age 65 and older following administration of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 bivalent booster. An ischemic stroke occurs when a blood vessel supplying the brain becomes blocked, preventing blood and oxygen from reaching parts of the brain. Despite the monthslong persistence of this safety signal in multiple vaccine safety surveillance systems, Biden’s FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) did not issue any formal health alerts, nor did they advise the public to avoid the vaccine. Instead, federal health officials continued to tell the public the vaccine was safe, but behind closed doors, they initiated multiple studies and statistical analyses—including a so-called “Stroke Project”—to investigate the validity of their assertion. These investigations continued through at least September 2025.
Between November 2022 and March 2023, seven separate analyses of incoming data flagged the same stroke signal for the same vulnerable population.
Seven. Yet not a single formal warning went out.
"HHS records show that as early as October 2022, federal health officials identified a potential connection between the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 bivalent booster and ischemic stroke for individuals over the age of 65,” Johnson wrote.
The CDC's own data shows 226 stroke cases reported between August 2022 and February 2023, with additional cases continuing to roll in through 2024.
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Instead of warning the public, the Biden administration buried the data and hired a private contractor. In February 2023, HHS brought in Lukos LLC to run an internal program called “The Stroke Project” — a deeper dive into the data — while continuing to tell the public that the vaccines were safe. As Johnson put it, "from the initial detection of the safety signal in late 2022, through contractor-led case review, VAERS data-mining analyses, and follow-up VSD studies referenced in MMWR publications through at least September 2024, health officials continued to say the vaccine was safe while simultaneously searching for evidence to support that assertion."
This cover-up fits a broader pattern of the Biden administration. In December, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary revealed that the Biden administration hid data from the public about the links between the mRNA COVID vaccines and myocarditis.
“We have done more to study myocarditis and to go back and look at deaths of people, of children from the COVID vaccine,” Makary told NBC News. “Internal data submitted on myocarditis, we found that the Biden administration was sitting on data on myocarditis in young people, and it was not made public.”
These cover-ups were the actions of a White House desperate to control the pandemic narrative, and thus Biden’s political legacy. Biden needed the vaccines to work; he needed the boosters to work. He had fused his legacy with a COVID victory and was willing to do anything to make it look like he succeeded. And when inconvenient data surfaced, the administration's instinct wasn't transparency — it was damage control.
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