Medical and Public Health History Revisionism Is Not Healthy for Medicine and Public Health

Jake Scott, MD has CIDRAP peddling fairy tales and fables on a tidy response to myocarditis from COVID-19 vaccines. But no one is buying it. Nor should they.

Medical history revisionism is not healthy for medicine. It is especially unhealthy when it arrives wrapped in the soothing claim that a safety system simply detected a signal, studied it, acted on it, and moved on. That is the cleaned-up story Jake Scott, MD, now tells in CIDRAP about myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.

Jake’s paragraph in the section “A signal detected, studied, and acted on” carries all the weight of the article:

“Myocarditis following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination is real. It was identified early, investigated extensively, and used to guide clinical recommendations.”

Nice. Clean. But that’s not what happened.

Myocarditis was real. That part is no longer honestly disputable. Jake is laundering the chronology.

The Bona Fide Myocarditis/COVID-19 Timeline

The actual record does not show a smooth arc of candor. It shows early warning, public denial, internal hesitation, downgraded alerting, White House and agency message management, and only later an acknowledgment that could no longer be avoided.[14]

By the end of February 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health had already notified CDC about large reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people, after Pfizer vaccination. On April 12, a Defense Health Agency consultant warned federal officials that v-safe was not even asking about cardiac symptoms, writing, “If you do not ask, you will not see it.” Yet on April 27 Rochelle Walensky publicly said, “We have not seen a signal,” and stressed that CDC had looked for one in more than 200 million doses. That was the public line while the internal discussion was already underway.[1][2]

By May, the problem had shifted from whether the concern existed to how it would be framed. In CDC materials circulated to providers and partners, officials wrote that there had been “no safety signal identified in either VAERS or VSD” and even asked whether there were any “media talking points” worth sharing.

The official CDC VaST report published on May 24 captured the same tension in public-facing form. VAERS showed more observed-than-expected myocarditis and pericarditis cases in 16- to 24-year-olds after dose two, while VSD, in the agency’s own wording, did not show rates differing from expected “at this time.” That was not a false statement in the narrowest statistical sense. It was a dangerously incomplete one. The injury was concentrating in a subgroup, and the public-facing frame leaned on the broader, more reassuring aggregate.[3][4]

Jake complains about VAERS, and yet nowhere does he propose new rule-making to completely overhaul VAERS. For Jake, it’s just fine for VAERS to continue to be a distracting failed system that prevents inference of causality. It provides a rote seemingly plausible deniability.

Well, Jake, I hate to tell you. The VAERS excuse will die soon.

Similarly, the VSD has been in hands of organizations that have proven untrustworthy with studies of those data in ways that would protect the public from harm. It should be a public database, but our past experience with data manipulations on the question of vaccine risk awareness tells us that the FBI should raid and forensic analysis of the system should be undertaken with haste due to suspicion of fraud.

VSD is not to be trusted, and should be dismantled. It should be replaced with mandatory reporting with penalties for non-reporting and use of medical records for long-term safety follow-up (Total Health Outcomes). I wonder what people like Jake will say when the reliable and robust data on health outcomes associated with exposures to vaccines start streaming live to the public, open access, for unfettered analysis? But I digress…

The most damning stretch of the timeline runs from May 23 to May 28. Data from the VSD were floated to try to quell the inquiry. In what I believe was a felony, on May 17, 2021, CDC officials presented early COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring data to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The presentation included an analysis of myocarditis reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The CDC safety team, led by Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, reported that the number of myocarditis cases observed at that time was not above expected baseline rates and concluded that no confirmed safety signal had been detected. The assessment was widely interpreted as reassurance that mRNA vaccination was not associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration nevertheless required Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to update their vaccine labeling to include warnings about increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly in adolescent and young adult males—an update issued only weeks after the earlier CDC presentation had concluded that no signal was present.

Investigators thereafter dispproved Shimabukuro and identified a clustering of myocarditis cases occurring primarily in young males aged 16–24, typically within several days after the second dose of mRNA vaccines. By June 23, 2021, ACIP acknowledged a likely causal association between mRNA vaccination and myocarditis.

Internal CDC emails show that a Health Alert Network message was under discussion. One staff exchange said the agency was going to “hold and stabilize the numbers” before releasing the HAN.

On May 25, according to the Senate-released records, the Biden White House circulated talking points to senior health officials that downplayed the myocarditis issue. On May 26, Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock wrote that FDA did not concur with issuing the HAN as written. The next step, again in the documentary record, was to “nix the HAN” and replace it with quieter website “clinical considerations.”

Let’s be clear about this, because it’s very important: Scott’s own claim was that CDC “issued” a HAN May 27, 2021, yet the released record says FDA did not concur, the HAN was nixed, and only web guidance posted May 28.

The HAN point is the hinge because it separates two very different stories. In one story, CDC saw an emerging myocarditis problem and sent out a formal, urgent warning through its own top-tier alerting channel. In the other story, CDC and FDA discussed doing that, hesitated, pulled back, and substituted a quieter webpage for a formal alert. CDC’s own description of the Health Alert Network says HAN is its primary method for sharing cleared information about urgent public health incidents, and that a Health Alert is the highest level of importance. So whether there was an actual HAN is not a semantic quibble. It goes directly to whether the response was prompt and conspicuous or cautious and diluted.

When, on May 28, CDC posted those clinical considerations instead of issuing the formal HAN, the world only heard were told only that clinicians should report myocarditis and pericarditis cases after vaccination and that CDC was continuing to investigate.[4][5][6]

In his 2025 Senate testimony, Jake wrote that when early myocarditis signals emerged, CDC “issued a Health Alert Network notice on May 27, 2021” urging clinicians to report cases. That is a specific, testable factual claim. The problem is that the documentary record points the other way: contemplated HAN, internal delay, FDA non-concurrence, decision to drop the HAN, then May 28 website clinical considerations instead.

Jake chose a precise institutional term, Health Alert Network notice, and attached it to a precise date, May 27, 2021. These specific are false and they are important details. Jake’s thesis is that “A signal (was) detected, studied, and acted on”. Facts say otherwise: Jake is peddling factual mismatches. His is wishful thinking at best.

We can call all of the agency obfuscation exactly what it was. It was not an even-tempered, transparent warning process. Under any definition, It was a cover-up, but for vaccine risk, it was just the ordinary institutional delay, dilution, and message management around a real safety signal while officials tried to control how the risk would land politically and behaviorally. The point is not that nobody inside government knew anything. The point is that too many of the people who knew enough still acted as though the first obligation was reassurance.[4][5]

That same pattern ran through the public expert class. On June 1, Israel said the link between Pfizer dose two and myocarditis in young men was probable, especially in males 16 to 19. Reuters reported 275 myocarditis cases among more than 5 million vaccinated Israelis. In that same Reuters story, Paul Offit called vaccine-associated myocarditis a “theoretical and unproven risk.” That is not a retrospective caricature of elite denial. It is the contemporaneous record.[7]

By June 10, the public position had begun to crack. Reuters reported CDC data showing a higher-than-expected number of heart inflammation cases in young men after second mRNA doses. Tom Shimabukuro said, “We clearly have an imbalance there.” The same report noted 283 observed cases in 16- to 24-year-olds after dose two, against an expected 10 to 102, and that VSD showed increased incidence in 16- to 39-year-olds after the second shot compared with the first. Yet even then the agency said it had not concluded there was a causal relationship. That is the Tom Shimabukuro problem in one paragraph: not that CDC had no concerning data, but that the public language lagged the subgroup signal that mattered most.[8]

On June 23, the federal messaging machine moved into its familiar posture: concede just enough, reassure aggressively, and keep the campaign moving. The AMA later reproduced the joint HHS statement issued that day after the ACIP meeting: “The facts are clear. This is an extremely rare side effect.” Two days later, FDA revised Pfizer and Moderna fact sheets to add myocarditis and pericarditis warnings. The warning was real. The problem is the chronology. The institutions spent weeks saying no signal, then no confirmed causal link, then rare and mild, before finally labeling the risk they had already spent weeks trying to soften.[9][10]

Did Pfizer or Moderna bury a known myocarditis cluster inside the original pivotal trials? If internal documents found it could occur, why and how was it missed in the clinical trials? One indictment is the mismatch between clinical trial reports FDA’s August 2021 COMIRNATY clinical review described myocarditis and pericarditis as one of two rare serious adverse reactions “detected through post-authorization safety surveillance,” not as something plainly visible and hidden in the original randomized trial tables. The same review explicitly noted that other rare adverse reactions might emerge only with “increased exposure and longer follow up.” [11] That’s an odd thing to say when the long-term data from the trials were intentionally destroyed by vaccinating the control group.

Another indictment is the Pfizer papers - the ones FDA fought to have buried for 75 years. In Pfizer's court-ordered clinical documents, Naomi Wolfe and colleagues found that Pfizer and the FDA were aware of cardiac harms and that the public characterization of the risk as minor and self-resolving was misleading. Their book has slide graphics showing aortic deterioration, myocarditis, and other symptoms related to the vaccines, mostly from autopsy samples.

Public-health institutions did not detect and signal, warn, and move on. They did all they could to forestall public and professional awareness.

Jake reconstruction of the timeline matters, too. In his September 2025 Senate testimony, Scott wrote that CDC “issued a Health Alert Network notice on May 27, 2021.” The documentary record released months earlier points the other way: a HAN was contemplated, delayed, and then shelved in favor of lower-profile web guidance. Scott’s March 3, 2026 CIDRAP op-ed smooths that history into the antiseptic formulation that the signal was “detected, studied, and acted on” and that “The system worked.” No. The system eventually acknowledged what it was literally forced to acknowledge. That is not the same thing.[5][12][14]

The “Better Communication” Trope

Every time public health gets it wrong on the practice of established, expensive policy, they blame in on poor communication.

H5N1 failure: Better communication.

Ebola response failure: Better communication.

Jake believes that

“The answer to concerns about how findings were communicated is better communication, not a revision of the rules governing how those findings are weighed.”

COVID-19 failure: Better communication.

Don’t buy a word of it. Come back to this point and read this article when you are done with this one:

Jake also propagates the MIS-C construct, a diagnosis that was created out of thin air in two small case studies just in time for the COVID-19 debacle in two studies. A significant percentage of children new MISC-C diagnosis ever had confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection or any evidence of having had COVID-19.

He claims without evidence that the COVID-19 vaccination program should be credited with “largely eliminated the risk of MIS-C”, a claim made with no evidence. This is fairy tale build on pipe dreams. This same Jake Scott will deny that the spike protein induced by the vaccine is in any way capable of creating chronic illness of any kind. Because he knows who butter his bread.

Jake also does not want ACIP to consider causality. He claims that is role of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. I have news for him. The public knows that the NVICP is corrupted; it exists to deny claims of vaccine injury. The public understand that the emulated judiciary system is Administered by HHS (executive branch), which is also the defendant, and that tyranny exists where the separation of powers is violated.

Example: My readers and the MAHA community knows that a Special Master (a simulated judge) attempted to bribe me to change my testimony on aluminum. I rebuked the Special Master, recorded the attempted bribe in my submitted testimony, and quit the program. The evidence that aluminum causes autoimmunity is not disputable: aluminum hydroxide, the same compound used an an adjuvant in many childhood vaccines, is used to induce autoimmune conditions in animals so drugs to treat the symptoms can be brought to market. Aluminum-containing vaccines are a gateway drug to other pharmaceuticals.

To see CIDRAP engage in historical revisionism is not surprising. Their publication of Scott’s 2026 essay puts them clearly in the camp of propagandists: they do not revisit the denial interval, the downgraded warning, or the political messaging. Instead, their website carries a converted and embarrassingly false chronology into a tidy civics lesson about how well the machinery worked.[13][14]

CIDRAP comes across as an industry front group masquerading as those who do and know about science. Yet their complicity in the minimization of myocarditis liability is now in the public record and they are widely recognized as having pushed COVID-19 vaccines to prevent infection against the available evidence. (I understand they have announced that they will be doing it evidentiary review of the safety and efficacy of the TDaP vaccine. I wonder if their evidentiary review will include the history of Tom Shimabukuro burying fetal mortality data and studies of vaccines during pregnancy?)

CIDRAP reality laundering matters because the government’s own current materials now say plainly what large parts of the expert class resisted saying promptly in 2021. CDC states that evidence from multiple monitoring systems supports a causal association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis and pericarditis, most often in adolescent and young adult males within a week of dose two. FDA, in June 2025, required updated warnings stating that the observed risk remains highest in males 12 through 24 years of age, estimated at about 27 cases per million doses for the 2023–2024 formula, and noted that persistent abnormal cardiac MRI findings were common at roughly five months in a follow-up study, with unknown long-term significance. So no, the history cannot honestly be rewritten into a fairy tale in which the concern was imaginary, irrational, or too trivial to deserve prompt, formal warning.[15]

These individuals and organizations believe that the public and informed medical professionals should listen to them. But the historical fact is that we soundly rejected what they were peddling when we overthrew the Fauci regime. That revolution is still underway in the form of revolutionary reform and there is far more than conversations and votes at ACIP meetings coming.

The deepest problem here is not only myocarditis. It is medicine’s recurring temptation to tell just-so stories about injury after the fact. First the signal is dismissed. Then it is hedged. Then it is acknowledged. Then the acknowledgment is retrofitted into a story of orderly competence. That sequence is poisonous to trust. The public can tolerate uncertainty. It can tolerate rare adverse events. It can even tolerate a bad call made under pressure. What it will not tolerate indefinitely is being managed, patronized, and later told that the historical record says something cleaner than what actually happened. As long as medicine keeps rewriting the history of vaccine injury into morally flattering fables, public trust in medicine will continue to plummet, and the profession will have no one to blame but itself.[1][4][5][7][8][9][10][11][14][15]

Jake, bud, you need to figure it out: No one is listening to you because you are an unreliable source of information.