CDC Director Concerned About 'Breakthrough' Cases Weeks After COVID Vaccine Rollout: Email

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and several other top officials knew in early 2021 that vaccinated people were becoming infected with COVID-19, according to an email obtained by The Epoch Times.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told colleagues in the Jan. 30, 2021, missive that she had spoken with Dr. Francis Collins that morning “and one of the issues we discussed was that of vaccine breakthroughs.”

“Breakthrough” refers to vaccinated people becoming infected.

“This is clearly and [sic] important area of study and was specifically called out this week here,” Walensky added, providing a link to an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the editorial, immunologist John Moore and vaccine inventor Dr. Paul Offit said that there was a “growing threat” of COVID-19 variants emerging that would “escape” the protection bestowed by COVID-19 vaccines, which had been authorized in December 2020.

Early testing, they noted, found that antibodies conferred by Moderna’s vaccine were less active against one of the new variants that had emerged.

Moore and Offit called for testing of vaccinated people who were hospitalized with COVID-19, the creation of a national sequencing program to quickly identify new variants, and the development of a repository of samples taken from vaccinated people.

Walensky said she’d discussed the matter a few weeks prior with Dr. Nancy Messonnier, another top CDC official. “I understand that [redacted],” Walensky wrote to Messonnier and three other CDC employees.

“Should we discuss? What is the best next step forward?” she added.

Collins, at the time the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was discussing the matter with Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the chief architects of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Walensky.

The email was included in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Requests for records from around the same time seeking what top U.S. officials were saying about breakthrough cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are pending.

Walensky did not respond to a request for comment that also asked for an unredacted version of the email. Collins did not return an inquiry. Fauci could not be reached. The CDC said it was looking into when it first became aware of breakthrough cases.

Later Statements

Walensky a few months after the email went onto MSNBC and claimed that data from the CDC and clinical trials “suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus” and “don’t get sick.”

The CDC has been unable to provide citations supporting the claim. No vaccine is 100 percent effective, experts have told The Epoch Times. There were infections in both the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials among the vaccinated, though the efficacy of the shots against symptomatic infection from seven days after dose two was estimated to be north of 90 percent. There were also severe cases in the trials among the vaccinated, including some not counted by Pfizer.

The trials were not designed to measure efficacy against transmission and did not provide evidence of such efficacy, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“The paper that Walensky discussed with Francis Collins explicitly worried about the possibility of ‘breakthrough’ infections caused by variants. It even addressed a variant circulating outside the U.S. that the authors could not say was causing breakthrough cases in January 2021,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“Given that uncertainty, the CDC director should never have endorsed the idea that the COVID vaccines could be used to stop COVID disease spread without definitive proof that they did—proof that she never had. And she should never have endorsed vaccine mandates for a non-sterilizing vaccine,” he added.

Fauci and other top officials had, in 2020 before the email, backed harsh measures during the Trump administration to try to curb the spread of COVID-19, including the forced closure of businesses and schools.

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