On May 27, 2021, then-acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock sent an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins laying out her concerns about COVID vaccine adverse effects. The email was never made public. By that date, VAERS — the government's own adverse event reporting system — had already logged 440,025 worldwide adverse event reports and 8,650 deaths associated with the COVID injection.
The people calling us conspiracy theorists were writing worried emails to each other behind closed doors.
Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the email on Saturday as part of their ongoing investigation into the federal pandemic response. Johnson chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations; Paul chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The email, reported by Just The News, shows Woodcock raising specific concerns about the type of adverse events being reported — and warning that the existing surveillance systems weren't built to catch them.
"The symptoms do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing," Woodcock wrote. She also warned that VAERS itself was inadequate for the job: "These problems are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect."
That's the acting head of the FDA telling the White House coronavirus czar that the safety net had holes in it.
Woodcock went further. "If you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later, and you are not prepared," she wrote. The next day — May 28, 2021 — Fauci forwarded Woodcock's email to Collins with a note that read: "Asks what we think of this? We cannot ignore her."
They could not ignore her. But they could — and did — ignore the public. No press conference. No updated guidance. No acknowledgment that the FDA's own commissioner had flagged problems with detecting adverse events from a vaccine the government was simultaneously pushing on every adult in America.
The numbers in the email's context are staggering. Of the 8,650 deaths reported to VAERS by the end of May 2021, 3,350 — roughly 39% — occurred within two days of injection. General Dynamics Information Technology, the contractor managing VAERS processing, had projected a worst-case scenario of 1,000 reports per day back in December 2020. The actual volume exceeded that projection by a factor of 2.6.
This wasn't a system under stress. It was a system that had already broken, and the people in charge knew it.
The email also surfaces alongside previously known concerns from inside FDA. Dr. Peter Marks, Director of FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, had warned as early as March 1, 2021, that an algorithm was masking safety signals. FDA researcher Dr. Ana Szarfman and NIH researcher Dr. Avindra Nath had both raised red flags internally as well.
Johnson's April 29, 2026, report on the pandemic response had already documented a pattern of internal dissent that never reached the public. This email adds another layer — not a mid-level staffer with concerns, but the acting commissioner telling Fauci directly that the monitoring systems were failing and the problems needed immediate attention.
Fauci agreed she couldn't be ignored. The public, apparently, could be.
