Sen. Johnson Sounds Alarm Over Explosive VAERS Death Data Linked to COVID Vaccines

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin presented analysis at his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on April 29, 2026, showing that the COVID-19 vaccine produced death reports in the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System at a rate 55 times higher per million doses than the flu vaccine, based on data compiled by Johnson’s office from CDC and VAERS records. The finding was presented as part of the broader “Unmasked” report hearing examining how Biden-era health officials allegedly suppressed safety signals related to COVID-19 vaccines, and represents one of the most striking numerical conclusions drawn from the federal government’s own adverse event reporting data.

Johnson described the chart showing reported deaths in VAERS since the system was established in 1990. He explained that for decades the numbers historically remained in the low hundreds each year across all vaccines. The data depicted on those charts, he said, should have raised the alert level to Defcon one the moment the COVID-19 vaccine numbers began appearing. The dramatic visual break in what had been a consistently flat trend line, beginning in 2021 and running through the peak of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, formed the core of his visual presentation to the subcommittee.

Johnson explained that when critics of his analysis argued that the higher death numbers simply reflected the fact that billions of COVID doses were administered, his office sought to account for that argument directly. To do so, Johnson wrote to the CDC requesting comparative death rates per million doses for both the COVID-19 vaccine and the flu vaccine. The CDC produced those numbers. Johnson’s office then calculated the per-million-dose death rate for the COVID injection using all available VAERS data. The result was 25.5 reported deaths per million doses of the COVID vaccine.

Johnson then compared that figure against the historical death rate for the flu vaccine, which is administered to hundreds of millions of Americans annually and has one of the most robust and well-established VAERS safety records of any vaccine in the system’s history. The flu vaccine’s historical reported death rate in VAERS was approximately 0.46 deaths per million doses. Dividing 25.5 by 0.46 produces the 55-fold difference that Johnson cited during the hearing. “That’s a 55 fold increase over the deaths for the flu vaccine,” he said.

The 55-fold comparison is a VAERS-based finding, and it is essential to understand what VAERS data can and cannot establish before drawing conclusions from those figures. VAERS is a passive surveillance system that captures reports of adverse events occurring after vaccination. A report in VAERS documents that an adverse event occurred following vaccination, not necessarily that the vaccination caused the adverse event. The system is designed to detect potential safety signals that warrant further investigation, not to serve as definitive proof of causation.

Johnson acknowledged that limitation during his remarks and addressed the argument directly. He noted that some scientists and public health officials have argued that the higher number of VAERS death reports for COVID vaccines is explained entirely by the massive scale of the COVID vaccination campaign, which administered hundreds of millions of doses in a short period and generated an unprecedented volume of reports simply because of the program’s size. His response to that argument was the per-dose rate comparison, which he said controls for the volume difference by normalizing the comparison to a deaths-per-million-doses metric.

The 55-fold difference per million doses, if it reflects a genuine causal signal rather than a reporting artifact, would be extraordinary. The flu vaccine is one of the most widely administered vaccines in American history and has a VAERS safety record that spans 35 years, during which it generated approximately 2,663 death reports in total.

By contrast, VAERS had recorded more than 38,000 death reports associated with COVID-19 vaccines as of April 2025, across a vaccination campaign that, while large, covered a shorter time period than the flu vaccine’s VAERS history.

Whether the difference reflects a genuine causal difference in vaccine safety or a product of changes in reporting behavior during the COVID era is one of the central scientific debates that Johnson’s hearing was designed to force into the open.

Several factors have been cited by public health officials as potentially inflating COVID vaccine VAERS reports relative to flu vaccine reports. These include heightened public awareness of the reporting system during COVID, active promotion of VAERS reporting by physicians and pharmacists during the vaccine rollout, media attention to adverse events that may have encouraged reporting that would not have occurred for the flu vaccine, and the use of electronic health record integrations that automated some COVID vaccine adverse event reporting.

Johnson and the expert witnesses at his hearing challenged those explanations as insufficient to account for the magnitude of the difference. Dr. Karl Jablonowski, a senior research scientist who testified at the April 29 hearing, stated that pharmacovigilance conducted behind closed doors should give everyone pause because it is too important not to do correctly and timely, and that lapses can be and were catastrophic. His testimony placed the statistical anomaly in a human health policy context: when adverse event surveillance fails to correctly identify safety signals, patients are harmed by injuries that the system was designed to prevent.

The 55-fold finding connects directly to the central allegation in Johnson’s “Unmasked” report: that Dr. Ana Szarfman, a senior FDA medical officer and safety data-mining expert, had developed an improved analytical methodology that was detecting serious safety signals in COVID vaccine VAERS data that the FDA’s standard method was missing entirely, and that senior Biden administration health officials ordered her to stop using it. If the improved methodology was picking up signals for sudden cardiac death, acute myocardial infarction, pulmonary infarction, and death across Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, those signals would contribute to the per-dose death rate differential that Johnson is now presenting publicly.

The myocarditis signal is particularly significant in this context. Johnson stated during the hearing that his committee found, upon searching the HHS documents produced under subpoena, that FDA officials had and admitted they had a safety signal on myocarditis by approximately May 2021. The myocarditis signal was detected in the 16 to 17 and 18 to 24 age groups, precisely the age groups in which young males were found to be experiencing cardiac inflammation following COVID vaccination at rates that ultimately prompted the FDA and CDC to add a warning label to the mRNA vaccines. Johnson said the officials hid the signal, failed to immediately issue a warning on the Health Alert Network, and downplayed it in subsequent communications.

The deaths-per-million-dose comparison also contextualizes a specific VAERS fact that has been widely cited in COVID accountability discussions: the total number of death reports in VAERS associated with flu vaccines over 35 years, which stands at approximately 2,663, compared to over 38,000 death reports associated with COVID vaccines accumulated in a much shorter time. Johnson cited these comparative figures not as proof of causation but as evidence of a statistical anomaly so dramatic that the failure of federal health officials to investigate it more aggressively constitutes, in his assessment, a dereliction of their fundamental public health duty.

The Biden administration’s response to the VAERS data was, according to Johnson’s documents, not to investigate more thoroughly but to restrict access to the weekly data-mining reports that captured the safety signals. Internal CDC communications obtained by the subcommittee showed that officials discussed limiting the distribution of the FDA’s weekly COVID-19 vaccine data-mining outputs specifically because of ongoing Freedom of Information Act requests from members of the public seeking to understand what the government knew about vaccine safety. The weekly reports were pulled back in direct response to transparency demands, a decision that ensured the accumulating VAERS data received less systematic scrutiny at precisely the moment it most warranted more.

The 55-fold per-dose death rate comparison is not the only metric that emerged from Johnson’s hearing to characterize the scale of the VAERS data anomaly. The hearing also noted that 9,228 of the 38,607 death reports, representing 25 percent of the total, occurred on Day 0, Day 1, or Day 2 following COVID vaccine administration.

The concentration of reported deaths in the immediate 72-hour post-vaccination window is a pattern that epidemiologists treat as significant when it appears in adverse event surveillance, because it strengthens the temporal association between the vaccine administration and the adverse event, even if it cannot by itself prove causation.

Senator Johnson has been consistently and explicitly clear about what the VAERS data can and cannot establish. He is not asserting that every one of the 38,607 reported deaths was caused by the COVID vaccine. He is asserting that the magnitude and pattern of the data, combined with the documented suppression of a superior analytical methodology that was surfacing additional signals, constitutes evidence of a systemic failure in vaccine safety surveillance that demands a full, transparent, independent investigation. That investigation, he argues, was deliberately prevented from happening by Biden administration health officials who were more concerned about protecting vaccine confidence than protecting vaccine recipients.

The political and institutional response to Johnson’s hearing and findings has followed entirely predictable lines. Conservative media and Republican lawmakers have covered the 55-fold finding extensively and characterized it as confirmation of the COVID accountability narrative they have been pressing since 2021. Mainstream media outlets have largely framed the VAERS-based comparison as statistically misleading because of the passive surveillance nature of the reporting system. That divergence in coverage ensures that the 55-fold finding will continue to be interpreted through pre-existing ideological frameworks rather than receiving the kind of neutral scientific examination Johnson has been demanding.

The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have not issued formal responses to the specific 55-fold comparison presented at the April 29 hearing. The agencies under the current HHS leadership of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have committed to greater transparency on COVID vaccine safety data, and Kennedy has pledged to produce all remaining records requested by Johnson’s subcommittee. Whether that commitment translates into a formal reinvestigation of the VAERS data anomalies using the improved Szarfman methodology remains to be seen.

The question at the center of all of this is not complicated. The federal government’s own adverse event reporting system recorded COVID vaccine-associated death reports at a rate 55 times higher per million doses than the historical rate for the flu vaccine. The government’s own internal documents, obtained under congressional subpoena, show that a scientist developed a better analytical tool for detecting adverse event signals in that data, that the tool was detecting serious safety signals including cardiac events and death, and that senior officials ordered the scientist to stop. Whether those facts, taken together, represent a public health catastrophe that was deliberately concealed or a statistical artifact of the unprecedented scale and public attention surrounding the COVID vaccination campaign is the central question that Johnson’s investigation is pressing the American public to demand an answer to.

The hearing has concluded. The report has been released. The documents are in the public record. The 55-fold figure is now part of the congressional record. And the American people, who were told throughout 2021 that the COVID vaccines were safe and effective and were actively discouraged from asking questions, are still waiting for the full accounting that Senator Johnson has been demanding for five years.