On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Vinay Prasad, the FDA's top vaccine regulator, made a claim that shocked the public-health establishment. 'For the first time,' he wrote in a leaked email to his staff, 'the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.' The agency had supposedly identified at least 10 children who died from getting COVID shots. To say the email was poorly received by vaccine experts and physicians would be an understatement. Prasad's claim provoked a rapid series of rebuttals. A response from 12 former FDA commissioners, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, called Prasad's memo 'a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public health security.' All of the potential vaccine-related deaths reported to the government, presumably including those to which Prasad referred, had already been reviewed by the agency's staff, the former commissioners wrote, and 'different conclusions' had been reached. Elsewhere,...
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