U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., a ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has sent three letters to Department of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin expressing concerns about injuries servicemen and women are reporting, potentially related to the COVID-19 vaccines. He said he’s yet to receive a response.
The letters were sent after Johnson held a Jan. 24 roundtable at which doctors and the attorney of three U.S. military members spoke. They discussed large increases in diagnoses among service members beginning in 2021 after they were mandated to get the COVID-19 shots.
Sen. Johnson’s first letter was sent the same day as the roundtable, after he learned that data in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showing registered diagnoses of myocarditis initially reported from January-December 2021 appeared to have been removed. He requested Austin “preserve all records referring, relating, or reported to DMED.”
Myocarditis is a severe and life-threatening inflammation of the heart. On June 23, 2021, Dr. Matthew Oster, a member of President Joe Biden’s CDC COVID-19 Task Force, said, “It does appear that mRNA vaccines may be a new trigger for Myocarditis,” citing especially the risk to “young men aged 16-30.”
The Defense Health Agency also published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association noting that previously healthy service members developed myocarditis just four days after receiving their first Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shot.
The report noted the incidence rate was small in number compared to the number of vaccinations given: “In this case series of 23 male patients, including 22 previously healthy military members, myocarditis was identified within 4 days of receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine. For most patients (n = 20), the diagnosis was made after the second dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine; these episodes occurred against the backdrop of 2.8 million doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines administered.”
But these concerns were expressed prior to Austin’s Aug. 24 memo directing “the Secretaries of the Military Departments to immediately begin full vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces under DoD authority on active duty or in the Ready Reserve, including the National Guard, who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19.”
In his Feb. 1 letter, Johnson described the testimony he heard that “revealed disturbing information regarding dramatic increases in medical diagnoses among military personnel. The concern is that these increases may be related to the COVID-19 vaccines that our servicemen and women have been mandated to take.”
Military members “found a significant increase in registered diagnoses on DMED for miscarriages, cancer, and many other medical conditions in 2021 compared to a five-year average from 2016-2020,” he adds.
Johnson named the service members who came forward and warned, “any retaliatory actions taken against these individuals will not be tolerated and will be investigated immediately.”
“The Whistleblower data, this DMED database, has provided a control group of sorts,” attorney Thomas Rentz, who helps clients in medical freedom cases, said. “It’s military records dating back several years that supply medical codes for various medical issues that our military face such as cancers, miscarriages, neurological disorders.”
The records provided by three military doctors “show a historical baseline of what the health of the American military was like before 2021, the year the Covid vaccine was released,” he said. “What you see is quite disturbing. From 2016 to 2020 all variations of medical conditions stay consistent. But in 2021, when the variable of the vaccine is mandated, the spike in cancers, miscarriages, infertility, you name it, jumps by factors of hundreds to thousands of percent.”
Johnson is encouraging members of the public to watch the panel discussion and to keep an open mind about what they hear.
The DMED data lists the most common increases in diagnoses:
- Hypertension – 2,181%
- Diseases of the nervous system – 1,048%
- Malignant neoplasms of the esophagus – 894%
- Multiple sclerosis – 680%
- Malignant neoplasms of digestive organs – 624%
- Guillain-Barre syndrome – 551%
- Breast cancer – 487%
- Demyelinating – 487%
- Malignant neoplasms of thyroid and other endocrine glands – 474%
- Female infertility – 472%
- Pulmonary embolism – 468%
- Migraines – 452%
- Ovarian dysfunction – 437%
- Testicular cancer – 369%
- Tachycardia – 302%
Those in the military were required to take the vaccine or be discharged, pay back scholarships, education or other training costs, be disciplined or even court martialed.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed against the mandates, including by Liberty Counsel and Thomas More Society. In their cases, federal district judges ruled that the U.S. military is violating federal law by not granting religious exemption requests.
Johnson asked Austin to respond by Feb. 15. Instead, Austin’s office gave a statement to PolitiFact. As part of its partnership with Facebook’s “disinformation” efforts, the site labeled Renz’s findings as “false.”
It cites a Defense Health Agency’s Armed Forces Surveillance Division spokesperson who claimed the data evaluated “was incorrect for the years 2016-2020. … the total number of medical diagnoses from those years ‘represented only a small fraction of actual medical diagnoses,’” meaning, five years worth of data wasn’t accurately input into the database, which made the 2021 data give “the appearance of significant increased occurrence of all medical diagnoses in 2021 because of the underreported data for 2016-2020.” The DMED system is now offline to “identify and correct the root-cause of the data corruption.”
On Feb. 8, Johnson wrote to Austin a third time. “I was disappointed to see that instead of immediately responding to the American people through their elected representative, DoD apparently decided to prioritize a response to PolitiFact about allegations relating to the same database,” he said.
“Let me be clear, any attempt to alter data contained within DMED without preserving all records before and after these changes are made to the database will completely undermine my preservation request and will be considered an active effort to mislead Congress.”
When asked if or when a response was sent to Johnson, the Department of Defense press office told The Center Square in an email, “As with all correspondence, we will respond to the author of the letter.”
