A grand jury in Florida convened to investigate COVID-19 vaccines concluded its work by issuing no indictment, despite uncovering what it described as “many acute and systemic problems.”
The grand jury faulted Pfizer and Moderna, which have made versions of the vaccines since 2020, for unblinding their first clinical trials after they received authorization for their shots, repeatedly missing deadlines for post-authorization studies, and keeping secret information on vaccine safety.
“It is frustrating to this Grand Jury, as it should be frustrating to everyone who reads this report, to know that these sponsors have taken in billions of taxpayer dollars for creating and selling their vaccines; they cannot be sued if something goes wrong with them; they have access to critical information about deaths related to a side effect of their products; and the public does not have access to that information. Instead, we are left to speculate, and the research community is left to draw inferences as one-off or two-off histopathological reports detailing the events of this death or that death that trickle into scientific journals slowly, year after year,” the grand jury said in the 144-page report released on Jan. 7.
“Somehow, withholding this valuable safety information is not a crime. It certainly should be.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate COVID-19 vaccines. The Florida Supreme Court in 2022 approved the request.
The petition said the grand jury should investigate “criminal or wrongful activity in Florida relating to the development, promotion, and distribution of vaccines purported to prevent COVID-19 infection, symptoms, and transmission.”
The grand jury said there were serious problems with the vaccines, including how there was no proper accounting for pregnant women who enrolled in the original trials and how federal regulators let the manufacturers repeatedly miss deadlines for postmarketing studies aimed at providing insight on possible safety issues.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials “had a duty,” the grand jury said. “Unfortunately, they lacked either the will or the competence to meaningfully rein in the worst impulses of the industry.”
The grand jury looked at various Florida laws but determined none of the conduct it examined warranted charges.
“There are a few reasons for this conclusion,” the grand jury said. “First, our investigation did not uncover any activities by sponsors or other associated organizations with respect to COVID-19 vaccines that were not approved by federal regulators, either directly or indirectly. Some of the things these sponsors did should probably not be legal ... but as far as we were able to determine, these entities operated within the boundaries of existing law.”
The problems also involve multinational corporations and federal regulators, which states like Florida have a limited ability to address, the grand jury added.
The grand jury did make a series of recommendations. The grand jury said that fresh clinical trials of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines should be conducted, that the FDA should reinstate a previous ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of therapeutics, and that manufacturers should be required to publish anonymized data on trial participants shortly after receiving licenses from the FDA.
The grand jury also advised making it a crime to fail to comply with a statewide grand jury and to lie before a statewide grand jury.
An FDA spokesperson in an email to The Epoch Times declined to comment on the report.
Pfizer and Moderna did not respond to requests for comment.
DeSantis said in a post on the social media platform X that his office is still reading through the report and its recommendations.
“The Grand Jury has made a number of recommendations that should be followed,” he wrote. “The status quo cannot continue. The American people deserve transparency on how Big Pharma is using their federal tax dollars, and they deserve regulating entities that operate as watchdogs, not cheerleaders.”