WASHINGTON — A House hearing on vaccine safety claims sought to pierce through Americans’ falling confidence in routine shots and the spread of Covid-19 misinformation — sometimes from people in the room.
The latest hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic comes amid a global drop in vaccinations, even routine childhood inoculations. Americans’ belief in vaccine safety has steadily declined during the pandemic, with 71% now saying they believe approved shots are safe.
While most of the committee’s Republicans, four of them doctors, argued that the government fumbled vaccine outreach by initially suggesting getting the shots would prevent transmission or infection — and seemingly encouraging vaccine requirements — they were careful not to question the vaccines’ safety.
“The issue right now, and why we’re seeing a bunch of vaccine hesitancy, is that the information coming from the federal government is murky at best,” said Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Tex.)
However Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took a different tack. She blasted Food and Drug Administration vaccine chief Peter Marks for “rush[ing] through the process of authorizing these vaccines,” said children had “practically zero risk” of hospitalization or death from Covid-19, and accused officials of ignoring thousands of claims that vaccines seriously harmed Americans.
Greene did not ask the witnesses a question, but Marks addressed her allegations later in the hearing.
“I do need to apologize to the 1,000 or so parents of children under four years of age who died of Covid-19, who were unvaccinated, because there were deaths and are continuing to be deaths in children and that is the reason why they need to get vaccinated,” he said.
Much of Thursday’s hearing centered on thousands of Americans’ claims, made to a federal reporting system and compensation program, that vaccines harmed them. However the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and the compensation program both consist of self-reported injuries that are then assessed by federal staff. The three officials testifying told the panel that out of roughly 13,000 claims filed for compensation — the majority of them related to Covid-19 vaccines — the office closed roughly 2,000 cases in 2023 and in total, has determined just 40 of those eligible for compensation. Eleven people have been compensated so far.
The officials overseeing those databases, Commander George Grimes of the Health Resources and Services Administration and Daniel Jernigan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, contrasted those figures with the millions of people who have received coronavirus vaccines and experienced no serious side effects.
Lawmakers pressed HRSA and the CDC to better communicate the actual numbers of people with serious side effects and work through claims faster. Grimes said the office would need more staff. There were four officials in the compensation office and roughly 500 claims total before the pandemic hit; today, there are 35 staff.
Some Republicans argued that the health department’s Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program should not be handling these claims at all.
“I’m concerned that there’s too much government involvement and overlap with Covid-19 vaccine claim adjudication,” said Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), one of the four Republican physicians on the panel. “Furthermore, the CICP was not designed for a pandemic as large as the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The hearing ended with Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), a podiatrist, stressing the need for better and more transparent vaccine messaging from government officials, and nodding to the partisan debates about vaccine misinformation that loomed over the hearing.
“This hearing should not have been political, and most of it was not,” said Wenstrup. “VAERS is not the be all, end all … But it’s the only thing America saw; it’s the only thing that’s out there for the public. So what do we expect?”