The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) needs to up its game when it comes to monitoring vaccine safety and communicating that information to health professionals and the public, according to a new consensus report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM).
NASEM also urged the CDC to better distinguish between the role of its Immunization Safety Office (ISO) in monitoring vaccine risks and the agency’s broader efforts to promote vaccination. The overlap “continues to raise public concerns about the objectivity of risk assessments,” NASEM said in a press release.
“CDC should protect ISO’s independence, keeping the office operationally and administratively insulated from units in CDC that carry out promotion or policymaking activities, such as promoting vaccination,” NASEM concluded.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker, who has been advocating for a more transparent and robust vaccine safety monitoring system for decades, told The Defender the report was “too little, too late,” and “doesn’t go nearly far enough.”
“It is notable,” Hooker said, “that the assessment was headed up by Dr. Kathleen Stratton, who was instrumental in NASEM’s denial of the vaccine-autism link in the early 2000s.” Leaked documents showed that Stratton coordinated with the CDC to deny any links between vaccines and autism.
Hooker said the new NASEM report “is a word salad joke and represents the best efforts of Stratton to continue to lie and hide about the gross failures of the CDC to protect the public from vaccine injury. “
The report, “Vaccine Risk Monitoring and Evaluation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” (2025), reviews the performance of the CDC’s ISO during the COVID-19 pandemic. The office is responsible for studying vaccine risks when vaccines are administered to the public.
During the pandemic, the office was headed by Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, best known for authoring a key paper and participating in public messaging claiming the COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective for pregnant women.
The ISO was tasked with detecting, investigating and reporting potential COVID-19 vaccine safety concerns. The CDC commissioned NASEM to comprehensively assess ISO’s epidemiologic and statistical methods for vaccine safety monitoring, and its public-facing communication strategies.
The committee concluded that the ISO operates a robust and thorough system of vaccine surveillance, but there remain gaps in consistency, timeliness, and clarity that could delay detection of rare adverse events or weaken public confidence in the agency. However, the “gaps” they identified were minor, experts told The Defender.
No mention of ISO’s delays in reporting myocarditis signal
During the pandemic, ISO used established systems for vaccine safety monitoring — including the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the Vaccine Safety Datalink and the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment network — together with V-safe and the COVID-19 Vaccine Pregnancy Registry, newer tools introduced during the pandemic.
These systems are designed to detect safety signals — indications that an adverse event may be linked to a vaccine — and to investigate those possible associations and help guide public health decisions. NASEM identified several problems that emerged in that process.
The different surveillance systems sometimes didn’t communicate effectively, making it harder to triangulate signals or compare findings across databases. The lack of a permanent national reporting infrastructure, geographical fragmentation and inconsistent standards “hinder comprehensive, long-term surveillance,” NASEM said.
Public transparency was lacking around “the criteria for elevating, deferring, or ceasing work on a specific signal.” The ISO identified some key signals late, or didn’t prioritize them for rapid review, either due to a lack of resources or a failure to have proper procedures in place, according to the NASEM committee.
Problems integrating safety signal data across systems and the failure to transparently prioritize which signals mattered meant that emerging public concerns, such as menstrual changes, “often outpaced analytic response,” the report said.
However, the committee also lauded ISO’s early identification of side effects, including thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, myocarditis and Guillain-Barré syndrome in ways they said “allowed for timely clinical guidance, reduced preventable morbidity, and informed risk–benefit assessments for distinct populations.”
But those statements contradict the findings by others, including CHD, that the CDC knew of the myocarditis risk months before it informed the public.
“As reported in the Congressional Record, the ISO lied about the myocarditis risk for 6 months after the first reports were made to them,” Hooker said. NASEM did not mention that in the report.
During NASEM’s public presentation on the report today, The Defender submitted a question asking why the report didn’t address the ISO’s delay in reporting myocarditis to the public, but NASEM declined the question.
A truly independent board likely would have shut down the vaccination campaign in January 2021
NASEM raised concerns that CDC’s messaging to the public and health professionals sometimes lacked clarity about the magnitude of risk associated with COVID-19 vaccines or the agency’s rationale for recommending the vaccines.
The report also noted that ISO’s scientific publications and CDC communications so consistently included strong messages about vaccine benefits that it fueled public perception that the ISO was biased in favor of the vaccines.
Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist who sounded the alarm about vaccine-induced myocarditis early in the pandemic, said public comments about this issue were “spot on.” He added:
“Because the main goal of the CDC was to increase vaccination rates, the agency was biased and did not bring forward important safety information on a timely basis.
“The CDC should have installed an independent data safety and monitoring board to meet monthly during the campaign. Likely such a board would have shut down the CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine program for excess mortality in January 2021.”
Despite these critiques, NASEM lauded ISO’s pandemic work.
The ISO “carried out scientifically robust, timely, and effective monitoring and evaluation of vaccine risks throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” NASEM concluded. “Its proactive identification of emerging vaccine risk concerns informed critical public health decisions.”
Recommendations focused on rebuilding confidence in the system
The NASEM committee expressed concern that its own focus in the report on the risks of the COVID-19 vaccines could detract from “the overwhelming evidence of their benefit.”
The committee offered recommendations for a more robust risk monitoring system in hopes that a better system would “increase understanding of and confidence in federal studies of vaccine risks.”
Recommendations included improving integration of the health data surveillance system, identifying and reviewing safety signals more quickly, clarifying communication, providing sufficient long-term budget and staffing to ISO, and encouraging methodological innovation.
The committee also encouraged transparency in communication and in the data used to make risk evaluations. Hooker said he agreed with those recommendations, and noted that researchers have been trying to get access to that data for decades.
All vaccine safety data should be deidentified and shared with independent researchers, Hooker said. McCullough and Hooker agreed that NASEM’s proposal — that ISO should be completely separated from the offices of the CDC that advocate vaccination — was important.
“This recommendation is notable as it separates vaccine safety and vaccine advocacy,” Hooker said. “We’ve been calling for this for 25 years, and it is high time that the ISO woke up and smelled the coffee.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
