I work in HHS. The views I express here are my own.

In late February 2020, I became ill with symptoms including splitting headache, fever, and stomach problems. I saw a doctor and tested negative for influenza. She had no COVID-19 tests to administer and suggested that I contact Virginia Department of Health (VDH). I told her that I had been unable to reach them on the phone so she gave me a number for the CDC. I spoke to someone there who said I should be tested after hearing my symptoms. They gave me a different number for VDH and I was able to reach someone finally. The VDH told me that there was no community spread in Virginia, that I didn’t need to get tested, and that it was perfectly fine to continue riding the Metro. They also were not aware that stomach problems can be a symptom of COVID, despite the fact that the very first patient in the US in Washington State had stomach problems. I recovered from my illness and was never tested.

During the late Spring of 2020  I began a deployment with ASPR and FEMA in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time I was part of a team that assembled reports for FEMA regional commands and the White House Task Force. Our reporting covered testing, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. One of the things that we discovered at that time was that state and federal reporting on cases were very inaccurate, most notably because of duplicate counting, no accounting for false positives, and the mixing of antibody tests together with PCR tests. For example, if a patient tested positive one week and the same patient tested positive the next week, very often this counted as two cases. By the end of my deployment there were very few “hot spots” signaling that the urgency of the pandemic was tapering off.

Fast forward to today and we are told there has been an increase in cases, and cases being reported in our schools, even after many have been vaccinated. How many of these cases are laboratory confirmed vs. false positives? To date I have seen no accurate statistics being kept on this in Virginia. In Taiwan, their CDC issues a daily report which shows the number of cases and the number of confirmed cases. They currently have a 99% false positive rate (https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/mfkzn_n_wzoQei1B-i6hGA?typeid=158). This raises the question: how many cases in Virginia, and in our schools, have been laboratory confirmed? VDH considers a positive test a confirmed case, but this is not reliable (https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/covid-19-in-virginia/covid-19-in-virginia-cases/).

I am by no means against vaccinations, I have had many and support their use when appropriate. However, I oppose rushed vaccine development and the deployment of novel vaccines which are clearly failing and have not been put through the usual safety and efficacy testing, which can take years and rightfully so. These vaccines do not prevent transmission and the trial results reported in the NEJM make clear that the trials did not evaluate prevention of transmission nor prevention of hospitalization and death. Furthermore, evidence is accumulating that these “leaky” vaccines may actually be contributing to the development of the variants we are seeing and that much of the cases and hospitalizations we are seeing are by those who have had these vaccines (whether in full or in part).

I’m opposed to coercion, especially when it comes to medical interventions that are either underperforming or outright failing and which have not been fully evaluated for safety. There is no good reason to be mandating these vaccines to anyone, especially children who are at such low risk (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html). One must ask oneself why a fully vaccinated adult should fear an unvaccinated child? The only reasonable answer is that these vaccines do not work as they were advertised to have done and seem to be causing harms which outweigh their purported benefits.

I appreciate the petitioners concerns, we also have a 10th grader in high school here in Virginia. However, I do not share the petitioner’s views about vaccine mandates as a solution and am absolutely opposed to the proposal to mandate vaccinations. Children should not be forced to get an unproven vaccine that has not been subjected to long term safety and efficacy trials, which other vaccinations have done. We simply do not know what these vaccines will do to our children in the long term and the currently known risks to them are miniscule (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0).