Officials within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sought to end research into injuries linked to the COVID-19 vaccine, emails released by the Informed Consent Action Network suggest.
Dr. Avindra Nath, a senior investigator with the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), had been preparing a study detailing 24 patients who developed neuropathy-like symptoms following their inoculation. The paper was sent to the then-Director of NINDS, Dr. Walter Koroshetz, who passed it along to Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“There have been steady slow stream of reports to me of post vaccination neurologic conditions, seem to be mostly peripheral nerve disorders… maybe an occasional spinal cord issue,” Koroshetz’s email to Fauci read. “Avi has been collecting a bunch. He has a report sent out to publish.”
Upon Nath’s paper being rejected, then-NIH Director Francis Collins asked Koroshetz: “Walter, what do you make of this? The draft letter doesn’t explain how these 32 patients were referred—leaving one to wonder whether this is common or rare.”
Collins later told Koroshetz that he believed “collecting anecdotes and then trying to build a case isn’t scientifically compelling—and will have the main consequence of feeding vaccine hesitancy and social media overreaction.” Then-Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak told Collins that he did not understand why Koroshetz was not putting an end to the matter.
Nath himself had tinnitus with hearing loss believed to be linked to the COVID-19 vaccine, the emails note.
Although the emails do not explicitly state that the health officials directed Nath to end his research, they do suggest that “NIH leadership viewed [Nath’s manuscript’s] potential effect on vaccine confidence as a compelling reason to suppress its publication,” the Informed Consent Action Network wrote. “The manuscript was never published in a peer-reviewed journal and the preprint did not appear online until May 2022—a full year after it was originally written.”
The released emails come as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) also released a more than 1000-page report revealing that the authors and scientists behind the infamous “Proximal Origin” paper doubted their own conclusions. The paper, published in 2020, sought to provide an explanation for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. It argued that “any type of lab-based scenario” was not “plausible.”
Following the paper’s publication, authors Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes exchanged messages backtracking on their initial conclusions.
