Four high-ranking U.S. government officials met in secret in Oct. 2021 to discuss whether people with natural immunity could be exempt from COVID-19 vaccine requirements, The Epoch Times reported.
Government officials included Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Dr. Francis Collins, former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and former White House vaccine coordinator Dr. Bechara Choucair.
The officials brought in four “experts,” including Dr. Peter Hotez, a notoriously pro-vax enthusiast and frequent flyer on CNN who got COVID after getting vaccinated and boosted, Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and vaccine advisor to the FDA, Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a former member of Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board and Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, professor of immunobiology and molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale University.
“There was interest in several people in the administration in hearing basically the opinions of four immunologists in terms of what we thought about … natural infection as contributing to protection against moderate to severe disease, and to what extent that should influence dosing,” Offit told the Epoch Times.
Offit and Osterholm took the position that those with natural immunity needed fewer vaccine doses. They believed having had COVID-19 should count as the equivalent of two vaccine doses, meaning Americans would only need to receive a booster dose.
Hotez and Iwasaki argued natural immunity should not count—as has been the position adopted in the U.S. since the start of the vaccine rollout. Iwasaki added there’s a “clear benefit” to boosting regardless of prior infection.
Iwasaki, after the meeting, received more than $2 million in grants from the NIH. Hotez received $789,000 in grants from the NIH in 2020 and millions in previous years. Offit, who co-invented Merck’s rotavirus vaccine, received $3.5 million in NIH grants from 1985 through 2004.
According to an email obtained by The Epoch Times, Fauci and Murthy arranged the meeting. Walensky asked who would be there and Murthy responded with a list of participants. Walensky knew all but one person and answered that it “sounds like a good crew.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, condemned the meeting that took place behind closed doors with the chosen few.
“It was a really impactful decision that they made in private with a very small number of people involved. And they reached the wrong decision,” Bhattacharya told The Epoch Times.
On Twitter, Bhattacharya said, “That the head of the CDC and the surgeon general both ignored basic scientific facts [about recovered immunity] is a scandal. It resulted in countless Americans losing their jobs for nothing.”
Research at the time (and currently) shows natural immunity is durable, long-lasting, robust, and superior to vaccination. Yet, the CDC had published a “paper” concluding vaccination was better. Research has also shown that people who have had COVID are at a higher risk of experiencing an adverse event from getting vaccinated.
Hotez has repeatedly made false claims vaccination is superior to natural immunity, despite an exhaustive amount of data showing otherwise. To support his position, he cited the misleading CDC paper showing vaccination provided superior immunity based on only two months of testing in a single state.
In an Oct. 29, 2021 tweet, Hotez referred to another CDC study claiming those with natural immunity were five times as likely to test positive for COVID-19 compared to vaccinated people with no prior infection and stated:
“Still more evidence, this time from @CDCMMWR showing that vaccine-induced immunity is way better than infection and recovery, what some call weirdly ‘natural immunity’. The antivaccine and far-right groups go ballistic, but it’s the reality.”
Months later, the CDC acknowledged natural immunity was better than vaccination against the Delta variant but has continued to advocate a position entirely unsupported by science.
According to The Epoch Times, Iwasaki was initially open to restricting the number of doses for those with natural immunity but later argued vaccination was better because natural immunity wanes over time. Ironically, COVID-19 vaccines provide no immunity, do not stop transmission of the virus, and their unproven “protection” against “severe disease” rapidly wanes; hence the need for an endless barrage of booster shots.
Osterholm believes in natural immunity but claims vaccine immunity is better and has flip-flopped during advisory meetings.
Offit has surprisingly challenged government officials several times since the vaccine rollout. He said boosters are unnecessary for the young and healthy and yielded little benefit to the primary series. He also criticized regulators for authorizing bivalent boosters absent clinical data and for bypassing their advisory panels.
Yet, at the most recent FDA advisory meeting, Offit voted to change the original COVID-19 vaccine doses to the experimental bivalent booster formula.
It’s a given at this point that everything Americans have been told about COVID-19 and vaccines was decided behind closed doors with chosen experts who ascribe to the government’s narrative on vaccines. None of the numerous physicians who have challenged government policy and “scientific consensus” have been consulted along the way, let alone allowed to freely share their positions publically without being censored.