The claim that the synthetic mRNA-based COVID-19 genetic therapies were "safe and effective" was repeated ad nauseam not only by former President Joe Biden during the pandemic but by health officials in his administration — including former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, former National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky.
It may then come as a surprise that not all high-ranking federal health officials were keen on this particular characterization.
'Science doesn't tell you what your actions should be.'
When reached for comment about a new tranche of recently released emails of Anthony Fauci, former Biden administration acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock told Blaze News that she protested the "safe and effective" description.
But first let's rewind. On Sunday, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) published a May 27, 2021, email sent by Dr. Woodcock to Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins regarding the perceived need to set aside scientific research funds to later investigate COVID-19 vaccine side effects.
"I have been contacted by a number of people who have experienced adverse events post COVID-19 vaccination (from all three of the current vaccines)," wrote Woodcock. "Many are healthcare professionals, some of whom I know. The symptoms do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing."
Woodcock, who became acting FDA commissioner in January 2021 as the vaccines were being pushed on the nation, was sympathetic to the concerns of some apparent vaccine casualties that "no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them" and that there had been "no effort to study this."
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"I think it would be worthwhile to do a study and evaluate a cohort of these individuals," said Woodcock. "But of course $ need to be made available, and you would need an investigator who is interested in 'medical mysteries.' I doubt the industry would support, for obvious reasons."
Woodcock provided Blaze News with insights into her proposal.
"I was thinking, 'Could we find some kind of treatment to offer these folks?' But first, you have to understand what's going on, right? You can't just sort of go out and treat people," Woodcock told Blaze News. "So that was my objective in this. ... I don't think it's probably different than any other immune challenge, and I wouldn't want anyone to think that I felt the vaccine was dangerous or should not be used or anything. By no means. It was simply that if people were having this reaction, we could find a way to study it."
When pressed — in light of her concerns at the time — about the "safe and effective" description, Woodcock responded, "Well, look. I always told our press office, 'Don't call it safe and effective, because no medical intervention is 100% safe.' Even water. You could kill yourself by drinking too much water, literally."
The FDA noted in recent years that it was "confident in the safety and effectiveness" of the COVID-19 vaccines. While apparently hesitant herself to use that phrasing, Woodcock stated in 2021 that "the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product."
Woodcock offered Blaze News what she regards as a better pitch for the vaccine: "What it is is the benefits far outweigh the risks, and that's the standard for all drugs that are approved, all medicines that are approved, because none of them are free of side effects, which is the kind of ordinary, you know, meaning of the term 'safe.'"
While the former acting commissioner noted that many health experts suggested during the pandemic that the "benefits way outweigh the potential harms" of the vaccines, people nevertheless "do use the term 'safe and effective' a lot, which is a statutory term."
Woodcock emphasized that any intervention "that you do has to be pretty safe, right? But that doesn't mean it's totally without adverse events."
Adverse events were in some cases deadly.
The FDA admitted in an internal letter last year that FDA Office of Biostatistics and Pharmacovigilance career staff had "found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination."
Dr. Vinay Prasad, the former chief medical officer at the FDA and director at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in the letter that the OBPV performed an analysis of 96 deaths between 2021 and 2024 and concluded "that no fewer than 10 are related. If anything, this represents conservative coding, where vaccines are exculpated rather than indicated in cases of ambiguity. The real number is higher."
On the matter of takeaways from the handling of the pandemic, Woodcock told Blaze News that while the "development of the vaccines was a scientific triumph," "science doesn't tell you what to do. Scientists often forget that."
"Science just tells you the facts," she continued. "What do to do — especially about society, right — is a value judgement that should take into account the facts, but science doesn't tell you what your actions should be."
HHS and the FDA did not immediately respond to Blaze News' requests for comment.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) recently asked the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation into the abortion group Plan C.
According to Hawley’s complaint, Plan C teaches Americans how to obtain chemical abortion drugs in violation of state law and advises users to conceal their activity through privacy-focused browsers, virtual private networks, and encrypted email.
Lawmakers are rewarding an industry that treats the isolation of women as empowerment and the removal of medical oversight as progress.
The complaint raises a larger question: How much risk is the abortion industry willing to impose on women and girls in pursuit of unrestricted access?
Recent cases have shown how easily men can obtain mifepristone online and use it to coerce or drug women. Yet the industry continues pressing to remove safeguards, minimize medical supervision, and treat mail-order abortion as ordinary consumer health care.
Congress, meanwhile, recently allowed taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood to resume, despite sustained public opposition to federal support for the abortion provider.
That decision is especially troubling after the New York Times reported last year that Planned Parenthood was “in crisis.” The story described understaffed clinics, poor conditions, inadequate care, and botched procedures. Planned Parenthood has offered little public evidence that those problems have been corrected.
The pattern is difficult to ignore. Again and again, the abortion industry’s demand for fewer restrictions comes at the expense of basic standards of safety, medical care, and accountability.
Republican lawmakers should follow Hawley’s lead. Organizations that facilitate illegal access to abortion drugs or help users evade state safeguards should face scrutiny. Congress and the administration should also restore protections abandoned in recent years.
Chemical abortion offers the clearest example of what deregulation has produced.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration removed the long-standing in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone. Women and girls may now obtain the drug through online providers without first seeing a doctor.
That convenience carries serious risks.
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Mifepristone can produce dangerous complications when used later in pregnancy or by women with certain medical conditions. It cannot treat an ectopic pregnancy, which may become life-threatening without prompt diagnosis. An online questionnaire cannot perform an ultrasound, conduct a physical examination, or reliably detect coercion.
Many online providers do not require proof that a patient has received an ultrasound or an in-person medical evaluation.
My colleague Dr. Christina Francis, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, recently tested one such system. She told an online abortion provider that she was 13 years old and had a history of ectopic pregnancies, cesarean sections, an intrauterine device, and other serious complications.
Any one of those disclosures should have prompted further screening. Her stated age alone should have raised immediate concerns about abuse, consent, and parental involvement.
Instead, the provider accepted her payment and mailed the drugs.
Women and girls have a right to understand what can go wrong before they are left to experience the consequences alone.
The mail-order system has also enabled horrifying acts of coercion and abuse.
An Army captain was convicted after impregnating a subordinate and giving her mifepristone without her consent. A Texas attorney repeatedly slipped abortion drugs into his wife’s drinks. In Louisiana, a young man used his girlfriend’s information to order mifepristone and then isolated and pressured her into taking it. An Ohio doctor forced the drug down his girlfriend’s throat.
Those are just the cases that became public. How many other women have suffered in silence? How many have lost pregnancies without knowing that a partner drugged them? How many were pressured into abortions while isolated from family, doctors, or anyone positioned to recognize the abuse?
Mail-order abortion removes the very people most likely to detect coercion: physicians, nurses, clinic staff, parents, and trusted family members.
It also leaves women to manage bleeding, pain, fear, and possible medical emergencies without direct supervision.
Research cited by pro-life advocates indicates that many women report feeling pressured into abortions they did not want or that conflicted with their values. Whatever the precise scale, coercion is a real and documented danger. Policies should make it easier to detect, not easier to conceal.
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Yet prioritizing access over safety increasingly appears to be a feature rather than a bug of the abortion industry’s model.
Plan C says it seeks to “transform access to abortion in the U.S. by normalizing the self-directed option of abortion pills by mail.” That mission statement emphasizes access and normalization. It says nothing about medical screening, coercion, abuse, or the risks of taking the drugs without an examination.
A website that teaches users to order abortion drugs secretly and evade state laws does not merely serve women seeking abortions. It may also serve abusers looking for a discreet way to obtain drugs they can use against women.
The beneficiaries are obvious: organizations that sell or distribute the pills and men willing to use them as instruments of coercion.
Lawmakers have tolerated this system for too long. They have permitted the weakening of medical safeguards, restored funding to Planned Parenthood, and resisted efforts to require in-person care for chemical abortion.
They are rewarding an industry that treats the isolation of women as empowerment and the removal of medical oversight as progress.
Hawley and a growing coalition of pro-life groups are right to demand accountability.
Congress and the Justice Department should investigate organizations that knowingly help users violate state law. Federal regulators should restore meaningful medical safeguards for mifepristone. Lawmakers should also ensure that minors, abuse victims, and women with dangerous medical conditions are not abandoned to an online form and a package in the mail.
Women and girls deserve better than an abortion system built around secrecy, isolation, and plausible deniability.
Pennsylvania State Trooper Michael Pahira Jr. was conducting a routine inspection of a tractor-trailer on the side of Interstate 81 South near Ashland on July 1 when a second tractor-trailer allegedly helmed by a Haitian illegal alien careened his way.
The incoming tractor-trailer sideswiped the 44-year-old trooper's cruiser, careened into the truck that Pahira was inspecting, then struck the trooper. Although nearby construction workers were able to pull Pahira free of the flaming wreckage, he was pronounced dead 90 minutes later.
'Because of these reckless policies, a Pennsylvania State Trooper is dead.'
In the wake of the horrific crash, the Pennsylvania State Troopers Association and lawmakers demanded answers — especially to the question of how the illegal alien, 33-year-old Michael Bon, managed to obtain a non-domiciled commercial driver's license.
While a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles attempted to displace blame for her agency's issuance and renewal of Bon's CDL, the U.S. Department of Transportation has corrected the record, making abundantly clear that Massachusetts helped set the stage for Pahira's untimely demise.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, Bon was released into the U.S. by the Biden administration in July 2024. He filed an application for Temporary Protected Status in October 2024, which was never granted.
The DHS claimed that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services terminated Bon's parole in June 2025, but the Haitian refused to leave and has remained in the country illegally — living in Massachusetts — ever since, the Boston Herald reported.
In March 2025 — months prior to the termination of his parole — Bon obtained a non-domiciled commercial driver's license from the MRMV. After his transition to illegal alien, Bon had his CDL renewed in February 2026.
Amelia Aubourg, a spokeswoman for the MRMV, recently attempted to assign blame for Bon's licensing to the Trump administration, telling the Herald that the "Non-Domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses program is a federal program," and that "this individual was ruled eligible based on the Trump administration database and allowed to drive by federal law and Trump administration policies."
What Aubourg neglected to mention was that the Trump administration issued a rule in September 2025 barring DACA recipients, asylum-seekers, refugees, TPS holders, and other noncitizens from obtaining, renewing, upgrading, or transferring non-domiciled CDL licenses.
This interim final rule, which would have barred Bon from renewing his CDL in February, was understood at the time to be a lifesaving measure.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a Sept. 26, 2025, statement, "Licenses to operate a massive, 80,000-pound truck are being issued to dangerous foreign drivers — oftentimes illegally. This is a direct threat to the safety of every family on the road, and I won’t stand for it. Today’s actions will prevent unsafe foreign drivers from renewing their license and hold states accountable to immediately invalidate improperly issued licenses."
After reviewing emergency legal challenges filed by the American Federation of Teachers and other liberal outfits, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit put the rule on hold in early November.
As part of the broader campaign to torpedo the rule, Massachusetts led 18 other states in filing a joint submission characterizing the rule as unnecessary and unlawful.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell (D) claimed in a November 2025 letter to Duffy that the rule's "dramatic new restrictions on eligibility for non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses and commercial learner's permits are unlawful" and complained that it would "strip nearly all of the country’s 200,000 non-domiciled CDL holders of their licenses and their livelihoods."
Campbell not only claimed that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration lacked the authority to impose the restrictions but cast doubt on whether "these restrictions provide any additional safety benefits."
Campbell was joined in her opposition by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and numerous other radical Democrat officials.
A source familiar with the matter told Blaze News that "had those rules been in place during the driver's February 2026 license renewal, [Bon] would have been deemed ineligible for renewal."
A U.S. Department of Transportation spokesperson told Blaze News, "Secretary Duffy has spent the last year in office reining in a trucking industry allowed to operate like the Wild West under Biden and Buttigieg. That's why the Department issued a final rule stopping unqualified and unvetted foreign drivers from obtaining licenses to drive commercial trucks and buses."
"States that operate recklessly and fail to enforce our common-sense rules will be held accountable," added the spokesperson.
Blaze News did not immediately receive a response from Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell's office or the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, which oversees the MRMV.
The Trump administration successfully issued its final rule preventing unqualified foreign drivers from driving big rigs on March 16.
As for Michael Bon, he has been charged with felony vehicular homicide, felony vehicular aggravated assault, misdemeanor counts of recklessly endangering another person and involuntary manslaughter, and various traffic offenses.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also lodged a detainer asking Pennsylvania officials not to release Bon from jail.
"This Haitian illegal alien was RELEASED into our country by the Biden administration, and the sanctuary state of Massachusetts gave him a commercial driver’s license," DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement.
"Now, because of these reckless policies, a Pennsylvania state trooper is dead after a crash that was 100% preventable. Illegal aliens should not be driving trucks on America’s highways," added Bis.
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Democrats inflate spending on government programs without anyone noticing and then attack Republicans for 'cuts' when they attempt to scale back these stealth spending increases.
The temporary and extralegal bailout that provided billions of dollars in subsidies to insurers cost the program far more than Dems claimed.
The witness who appears and stonewalls needs an objectively valid excuse; Fauci's blanket Fifth is not one.
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