While the Biden administration was telling parents the COVID vaccines were safe for their children, its own FDA doctors were quietly reviewing files on 96 dead kids and concluding that some of them had probably been killed by the shots.
Advertisement
They wrote it up. They classified it as new safety information under federal law. And they never told the public.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) released the records this week, referenced in a May 11, 2026, letter directed to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge was first to report them.
EXCLUSIVE: Records via @SenRonJohnson Allege Biden Administration Suppressed COVID Vaccine Pediatric Deaths and Total Death Count “Grossly UnderReported”
“…2025 memorandum detailing 96 pediatric deaths following COVID-19 vaccination, some of which were labeled as “possibly” or… pic.twitter.com/ud2IVIfMo1
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) May 12, 2026
The key document is a December 5, 2025, FDA memorandum. It covers 96 pediatric deaths following COVID-19 vaccination reported to VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a federal database where patients and doctors report side effects following vaccination. FDA medical officers reviewed every case, including autopsy reports, death certificates, and medical records, and classified seven as “possibly” or “probably” related to the vaccine. Five of those seven deaths involved myocarditis.
The agency concluded those fatal cases constituted “new safety information” under federal law, information that was never added to the vaccine’s warning label. Not while the Biden administration was mandating the shots. Not while it was pressuring parents. Not while it was dismissing anyone who raised concerns as an anti-vaxxer.
Advertisement
The children were mostly boys. Median age: 13. Age range: 7 to 16. Every death occurred between 2021 and 2022, the height of the government’s vaccination campaign targeting children. All seven probable and possible cases involved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. These were not statistics. These were children with autopsy reports and death certificates that FDA doctors reviewed, flagged, and quietly shelved.
Read More: Dr. Anthony Fauci Is Butthurt Because Americans Rejected the COVID Jab, and I Have Thoughts
DOJ Indicts Top Fauci Aide David Morens for Concealing Records in COVID Origins Probe
Those 96 deaths are almost certainly a fraction of the real toll. An HHS-commissioned Harvard study found that fewer than one percent of vaccine adverse events are ever reported to VAERS. As of March 2026, VAERS is reporting 39,077 deaths worldwide following COVID-19 vaccination. The FDA memo itself does not extrapolate from that figure, but the systematic underreporting it acknowledges means the true scope of pediatric harm may never be fully known.
The underreporting was only part of the problem. The system was also deliberately broken.
Johnson’s April 2026 report, “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals,” documented that the FDA’s vaccine division director, Dr. Peter Marks, was told in March 2021, weeks after rollout, that the agency’s own system for analyzing safety reports was actively hiding red flags. Three weeks later, officials were handed results from a better system: 49 cases where signals had been buried, and 25 serious safety warnings the old system had missed entirely, including sudden cardiac death and pulmonary infarction.
Advertisement
FDA shelved the new algorithm. Kept running the broken one.
“They could be confident they would never find what they weren’t looking for,” Johnson wrote.
Meanwhile, according to accounts reported by Johnson’s investigation, NIH doctors were secretly treating patients injured by COVID injections starting in March 2021, the same month the FDA learned its safety monitoring system was broken. Dr. Avindra Nath reportedly led the team, which treated 23 patients. Those patients were allegedly told to stay quiet, promised that a study would eventually be published acknowledging what had happened to them. That study was never published. Their injuries were never officially acknowledged.
They were used, silenced, and forgotten.
Johnson’s May 11 letter to Kennedy is a demand, not a courtesy call. He wants the remaining records on pediatric vaccine deaths that FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has refused to fully produce. He wants confirmation that the HHS Inspector General is investigating allegations that Dr. Tom Shimabukuro deleted federal records, a referral Johnson sent to DOJ in April 2025.
That Kennedy, a Trump appointee, is being asked to clean up incomplete document production by Makary, also a Trump appointee, says everything about where the bureaucratic resistance still lives. The swamp does not drain itself along party lines.
Dr. David Morens, a senior NIH official, was recently indicted on conspiracy and records destruction charges tied to COVID-era conduct. Johnson wants to know if Shimabukuro is next.
Advertisement
“Five years have already passed since Dr. Marks decided to ignore VAERS safety signals,” Johnson wrote. “We must speed up the discovery process.”
These are not outside critics reading spreadsheets. These are the FDA’s own doctors, in the FDA’s own files, concluding that children probably died from vaccines the government was mandating for school attendance, pushing on military families, and pressuring parents to accept under threat of being called dangerous extremists. They called it new safety information. Neither HHS nor FDA had responded at the time of publication. They never changed the label.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy RedState’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.