The Florida Grand Jury appointed by Gov. DeSantis to investigate COVID-19 vaccines has issued its report. The full document can be downloaded below. It is 140 pages. I have excerpted key parts of it to highlight its findings. The report is remarkably thorough and well-written. It reads as though composed by someone with a highly developed knowledge of statistics and clinical trials. There must have been at least a few members of this Grand Jury who were medical professionals. The entire report is worth reading, but realizing that few readers will make such an attempt the portions below should give a good sense of what it contains.

COVID-19 vaccines were a triumph of science, technology and public health that saved countless lives. COVID-19 vaccines were heedlessly licensed, excessively recommended, and even mandated to broad swathes of people that did not need them, placing their health-and sometimes their lives-at unnecessary risk. Both of these statements sit on opposite ends of an ideological war that has been waged in public health, popular culture and media for the better part of the last four years. As it happens, both of these statements are true. The world’s approach to SARS-CoV-2 exemplifies both the best and the worst our system has to offer. The invention, testing and licensing of these novel therapeutics required an unprecedented degree of coordination in the fields of science, engineering, politics and finance; and they produced an effective vaccine in early 2021 that dramatically reduced many of the risks associated with SARS-CoV-2. Unfortunately, all the goodwill generated by that amazing achievement was squandered in the following years, as sponsors and federal regulators collaborated to push out booster after booster based on shallow, inaccurate safety and efficacy data, sidelining their own ombudsmen to get doses of these vaccines into the arms of every American, regardless of their underlying risk from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Erstwhile gatekeepers became cheerleaders as federal regulators with the trust of the American people dragged their feet in publicly confirming important safety signals, and then sanctioned long delays in mandatory postmarketing studies involving those very same signals. Sponsors abused the scientific journal system and regulatory reporting requirements, delaying public disclosure of serious adverse events from their clinical trials for years. Experienced and respected scientists saw their careers turned upside down for dissenting from “the science,” while experts with opinions matching those of regulators filled the gaps with contrived research and ill-conceived study designs, propagandizing citizens into believing things about the SARS-Co V-2 virus and the COVID-19 vaccines that simply were not true...

Our investigative efforts in both of those categories were directed in large part towards Pfizer and Moderna, whose mRNA-based vaccines were the primary focus of our investigation

The risk/benefit analysis for vaccines is not as direct a calculation as it would be for a cancer treatment, primarily because vaccines are almost always administered to healthy people who are not sick and may never get sick. This means that an individual who takes a vaccine may suffer some harm from side effects, even rare, serious side effects, but may never get the corresponding “benefit” of disease protection if they are never exposed to the disease. For this reason, a big part of the challenge in calculating the benefit of a vaccine is being able to determine the actual risk of acquiring the disease once a person is exposed to it. At an individual level, it is impossible to count a disease event that did not occur, just as it is often difficult to predict who exactly will suffer from a given side effect. Therefore risk/benefit analyses for vaccines are done at a population level, comparing disease reduction results between populations to infer “efficacy,” then comparing the frequency of side effects to infer “safety.” For this analysis to be accurate, the FDA and sponsors must have an accurate understanding of two things: The baseline risks presented by a given disease; and how often rare health events that may be associated with vaccine side effects actually occur...

[T]he manufacturers of these vaccines are fully insulated from any financial liability, and persons who experience adverse effects can only seek redress through a limited and highly bureaucratic federally-controlled program. As insular and limited as that may seem, this is the current design of our system…

There was a backdrop of near-constant, often-histrionic reports of rising cases, hospitalizations and deaths associated with the SARS-CoV-2 viruswe do wish to emphasize that much of the reporting around those risks-especially the reporting occurring in 2020—was oversimplified, inaccurate and did little to adequately inform citizens as to the state of good science around SARS-CoV-2’s actual incidence and disease burden...

With the president and prominent scientists on board, the media sensationalized the pace of vaccine development, creating celebrities out of regular participants in the drug approval process. Physicians, researchers and regulators were thrust into the limelight, making regular appearances on major news networks to elucidate details or explain away concerns. Scores of clinical trials were closely tracked by major newspapers, and pharmaceutical company representatives were routinely interviewed by major media outlets as their stocks soared in value. The president and his senior public health leaders spoke daily about the progress being made to develop a vaccine. Much of this activity was completely foreign in the history and scientific process of vaccine approval, even in the pharmaceutical-friendly United States...

we do not believe that the COVID-19 “emergency” necessarily applied to everyone; the EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) should only have been granted to the elderly and comorbid populations most at risk from SARS-Co V-2 complications...

We are not sure whether it was a lack of will, a lack of imagination or a lack of competence that led our federal public health agencies to ultimately sanction the “open label” model, but it was a disaster from a public health perspective, casting a cloud of scientific doubt and undermining public confidence for years to come. We wish we could say that the unblinding and vaccinating of the placebo groups was the first and last major public health blunder we would see in the COVID-19 pandemic. The reality, however, was that the real mess was just beginning...

It is disconcerting to learn our regulators and sponsors chose not to be burdened with “formal statistical comparisons” in their efforts to get the latest formulations of BNTI 62b2 (Pfizer vaccine) into the arms of children all over the United States. Was the administrative burden of performing these statistical comparisons too large? Was it determined to be not worth the effort? Maybe there is a good answer, but we did not see it in the volumes of records we reviewed, nor did we get it from the FDA or from the sponsors. Perhaps some enterprising member of the federal government could ask again on our behalf...

We return to the essential question of risk, asking the fundamental question: How well are MRNA-1273 (Moderna) and BNT162b2 (Pfizer) protecting people from the risks associated with SARS-CoV-2 disease in 2024? The answer is that these products may be affording at least some people of advanced age and with significant comorbidities at least some protection; we have no idea how much, in whom, or for how long-and we may never know. We had gold-standard RCT (Randomized Placebo Controlled Trial) data regarding how vaccines affected COVID-19 outcomes in 2020 and 2021. The sponsors have been using those numbers ever since to infer correlates of protection, but the incidence, disease burden and population immunity today are very different than they were at the time those correlates were derived. We do not believe this is good science...

Troubling results that occurred in newly pregnant women in the flagship clinical trials were not contemporaneously disclosed by the FDA, Pfizer or Moderna, nor do they appear to have been meaningfully investigated beyond allowing pregnant women to serve as human guinea pigs based on limited observational data that did not address infant health risks, then using statistically unreliable safety databases like VAERS to “enthusiastically recommend vaccination” to this vulnerable group. We believe RCTs in this population could have been conducted and completed with promptness, and the results would have affirmed public faith in our apparatus of vaccine testing and approval. Such studies possibly could have also saved lives. We also recognize our belief that RCTs were needed in this population places this Grand Jury at odds with a number of major medical associations and agencies of the United States government. We are comfortable with that, however, because we believe their positions are at odds with common sense

It is frustrating to this Grand Jury, as it should be frustrating to everyone who reads this report, to know that these sponsors have taken in billions of taxpayer dollars for creating and selling their vaccines; they cannot be sued if something goes wrong with them; they have access to critical information about deaths related to a side effect of their products; and the public does not have access to that information...

Do the benefits of these mRNA COVID-19 vaccines-as defined by reduced SARS-Co V-2-associated infection, disease, hospitalization and death-outweigh their risks-as defined by vaccine-associated adverse events and SAEs?The answer to that question in early 2021 was straightforward:…Those results could be inferred to provide protection against other risks associated with the SARS-Co V-2 virus, and those inferences were supported by other results from observational trials as massive numbers of people around the world were vaccinated...

In 2024, however, circumstances have changed. First, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is different. It infects and causes COVID-19 disease at a much lower rate than it used to. When it does occur, it causes fewer hospitalizations and deaths. It is hard to say how much of this change is due to the development of effective treatment regimens and how much of it is due to the natural mutation of the virus toward equilibrium with the human race, but the end result is the same. This virus is just not as dangerous as it used to be. Second, we are different….

The issue in 2024 is that the COVID-19 vaccines may not be different enough. The SARS- Co V-2 virus still mutates to new variants on a frequent basis. Even with the extra speed derived from the FDA’s willingness to accept immunogenicity results rather than clinical endpoints, new formulations of BNTl-62b2 and MRNA-1272 regularly lag more than a generation behind the latest variants by the time they reach consumers, meaning that they provide less protection from SARS-Co V-2 risks, and that whatever protection they do provide is likely to wane quickly. The side effects of these vaccines, however, are still present...

This is where we find ourselves in 2024. We no longer have a clear idea of which demographic groups are still deriving a meaningful benefit from BNT-162b2 and MRNA-1273 and whether that benefit is worthwhile in the context of their side effect profiles. As difficult as the task will be, we need new RCTs to reevaluate their clinical benefit. If the benefits of these vaccines are so small that the number of participants required for those RCTs to reach statistical significance is impractically large, perhaps that would speak volumes about whether most of us really need them at all...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, our government’s amplification of certain, preferred messages was coupled with something as ugly as it was new: A concerted effort by government officials, federal regulators and other public health actors to seek the suppression of opinions not in line with messages they wanted to amplify. At this point, it is well-established that government officials exercised considerable soft power during the COVID-19 pandemic by attempting to control vaccine-related narratives on social media websites, asking for specific posts or authors to be removed altogether, or even “blacklisted”-reducing their visibility to other users-on the grounds that they contained “misinformation” or “disinformation.”