Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is calling for a criminal investigation into the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) over a June 2021 directive suggesting healthcare employers not report workers’ adverse reactions to mandated COVID-19 vaccines “so as not to discourage vaccination.”
According to the directive, OSHA said it would not cite healthcare employers for failing to report COVID-19 vaccine injuries, even though workplace injury recordkeeping policy at the time required, and still requires employers to report vaccine side effects.
The agency outlined its COVID-19 vaccine injury reporting policy in the COVID-19 FAQs on its website. CHD learned that this policy was never properly enacted, despite a U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) spokesperson claiming otherwise.
In letters to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Labor (“DOL”), CHD accused OSHA of “apparent violations of law arising from misrepresentations regarding employers’ — particularly healthcare employers’ — non-discretionary duty to track and disclose workplace injuries related to COVID-19 vaccines and failure to properly administer that data.”
OSHA’s failure to collect COVID-19 vaccine injury data among U.S. workers “has created inexcusable and irremediable data gaps,” CHD stated.
OSHA, which is overseen by the DOL, issued the directive despite acknowledging that the vaccines may cause injuries that require employees to take time off work and despite tracking adverse events associated with other vaccines.
The call for an investigation came months after a whistleblower alerted The Defender to OSHA’s directive.
The Defender first published the revelations in October 2025. That story, and The Defender’s email communications with a DOL spokesperson, were included along with CHD’s letters to the DOJ and DOL. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were also sent copies of the letter.
CHD sent the letter just days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices announced it would discuss COVID-19 vaccine injuries at its upcoming meeting next month.
‘An Extraordinary Betrayal of its Mission’
OSHA’s actions created “a deliberate data gap” that “gives rise to potential violations of federal criminal law, including under [the] Occupational Safety and Health Act … which mandates hazard-free workplaces,” according to CHD CEO Mary Holland and General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg, who authored the letters.
The letter suggests that OSHA may also have violated other federal statutes, including making false statements in official guidance, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., falsification of injury logs, mail/wire fraud, and intent to deprive workers of a constitutional or federally protected right.
OSHA’s directive “warrants an investigation to determine who was involved in this deception, why it was perpetrated, and whether political pressures, pharmaceutical influences, or other factors drove this sustained deception … OSHA’s illegal directive prioritized propaganda over safety,” CHD stated.
Holland called OSHA’s directive “an extraordinary betrayal of its mission and the employees around the country who depend on it to protect health and safety in the workplace.”
“By instructing companies not to report COVID-19 vaccine injury, they undermined science, health and trust in the institution. I am pleased that CHD is sending this issue to authorities at the DOJ, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] and Congress, so that they can fully investigate what happened to ensure that it never happens again,” Holland said.
CHD’s letter questioned OSHA’s justification for enacting the directive — namely, the agency’s desire to “encourage” workplace vaccination. The letter states:
“This supposed justification is arguably propaganda, but certainly unrelated to employee safety, and begs the question of what results OSHA anticipated that might impair uptake?
“Indeed, employers’ failure to record work-related injuries arising from a brand new product with no safety profile meant OSHA purposefully obfuscated critical information about harm to employees from COVID-19 vaccines.”
OSHA Directive May Have Affected Millions of Americans
Policies implemented under the Biden administration forced millions of U.S. healthcare workers to choose between getting the experimental COVID-19 vaccine or losing their jobs.
These policies, including OSHA’s directive, potentially affected millions of Americans, according to the letter:
“At a minimum, OSHA deprived at least 17 million healthcare workers (the largest employment sector in the United States) of this information, which could have impacted not only their personal choices concerning taking the shot and how to treat their own injuries but, for frontline healthcare workers, also decisions they made in treating their patients.
“Many workers — including healthcare workers — were forced to either take the COVID-19 vaccine (often without meaningful exemptions available and without valid informed consent), or face termination. Many workers were seriously injured or lost their lives as a result. But OSHA’s actions have made it harder to answer the question, ‘How many?’”
Mack Rosenberg said CHD copied Johnson because the senator “has been a stalwart voice in calling out wrongdoing” concerning the pandemic generally and particularly with respect to COVID-19 vaccines.
“We copied Secretary Kennedy because, while this data should have been compiled by a different agency, we feel that it is important that HHS, the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are aware of purposeful data gaps that may impact their decisions.”
‘This Subterfuge Continues Today’
According to the letter, OSHA’s new guidelines also incentivized employers to achieve full employee compliance with COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
OSHA “indirectly pressured health care institutions to mandate Covid-19 vaccines, by fully exempting certain healthcare employers from the onerous Covid illness protocols/reporting if all employees were vaccinated, and exempting fully vaccinated employees from the requirements for facemasks, physical distancing, and barriers in certain circumstances,” the letter states.
OSHA enacted its directive despite an acknowledgement that COVID-19 shots would put healthcare workers at risk of injury, by “mandating employers to give employees time off to recover from such injuries.”
The letter also argues that OSHA’s directive contradicted the agency’s long-standing 2003 guidance — which has never changed — clarifying that injuries related to vaccines that impair an employee’s ability to work must be reported.
Though OSHA’s 2003 guidance has not changed, the letter states that OSHA has never reversed its COVID-19 vaccine injury non-reporting policy. Instead, the letter states that “this subterfuge continues today.”
According to the letter:
“CHD initially believed this non-recording policy ended subsequent to CHD’s contact, with the removal of the language from OSHA’s Covid-19 FAQ page and because of [DOL’s] statement that the ‘non-recording provisions’ had been withdrawn in February 2025.
“This does not appear to be the case, however. Indeed, OSHA’s policy of non-enforcement continues to be featured in another area of OSHA’s website, suggesting that it remains the policy of the department today.”
OSHA Failure to Collect and Publish Vaccine Injury Data ‘a Travesty’
According to the letter, the DOL obfuscated attempts to track down vaccine injury reports that OSHA has collected. The letter stated that the DOL spokesperson “referred The Defender to OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application.” The site provides downloadable spreadsheets of raw data from injury reports submitted to OSHA — but there was no immediately “apparent way to search for reports about vaccine injuries in these datasets.” The letter continued:
“Moreover, attempting to perform analysis on data that was admittedly never properly collected, is an exercise in futility.
“Though the spokesperson also indicated that ‘detailed case reports are available for calendar years 2023 and 2024,’ these only included a few records describing vaccine adverse events, primarily from influenza vaccines.”
Mack Rosenberg said OSHA’s failure to collect and make available vaccine injury data “is a travesty.”
“Our research suggests that OSHA employees violated not only their own regulations concerning data collection, retention and reporting, but potentially violated numerous federal laws. As a result of their actions, we will never know the true measure of COVID-19 vaccine injuries in the critically important healthcare sector,” she said.
Mack Rosenberg invited other whistleblowers to contact CHD with information about potential wrongdoing they may know of.
“CHD remains committed to working with whistleblowers who bravely come forward with information to help shed light on wrongdoing that harms children and others,” she said.
