A newly released email shows the FDA's top official privately urged Anthony Fauci and NIH chief Francis Collins to fund studies on COVID-19 vaccine adverse events in May 2021, a warning that, five years later, appears to have gone unheeded.
Janet Woodcock, then the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, sent the email on May 27, 2021, telling Fauci and Collins that healthcare professionals were reporting side effects from the COVID vaccines that the government's existing safety monitoring systems could not detect. She asked the NIH, the country's leading funder of medical science, to step in and pay for dedicated research, even if the pharmaceutical industry refused to support it.
Fauci's response, preserved in a separate note to Collins, was three sentences long. "Janet asks what we think of this? We cannot ignore her. We should probably bring in CDC and see what Rochelle thinks," he wrote, referring to then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. Whether Walensky was ever brought in, or whether any study of the kind Woodcock requested was ever launched, remains unclear. Sen. Ron Johnson's office, which released the email, said it could not confirm either happened.
Woodcock's email was blunt about the limits of the federal government's vaccine safety infrastructure. She told Fauci and Collins that the problems being reported were "not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect." VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, is the main federal database where doctors and patients can log suspected vaccine side effects. Woodcock said even the CDC's more advanced population-tracking system and the FDA's own medical-records-based system, called BEST, would fall short.
The symptoms healthcare workers were flagging, she wrote, did not "fit together into a distinctive syndrome" and were "not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing." That made them hard to study, but not, in Woodcock's view, something the government could afford to ignore.
She was direct about the political dynamics at play. Woodcock, a 37-year FDA veteran who had cultivated a reputation for working closely with the pharmaceutical industry, told Fauci she doubted drugmakers would fund the research themselves. "I doubt the industry would support, for obvious reasons," she wrote.
And she warned that inaction carried its own risk. As Just The News reported, Woodcock wrote that "the peoples' main complaint is that no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this." She added a line that now reads as prescient:
"But my experience is, that if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared."
Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and steered roughly $5.5 billion in annual research funding, was one of the few people in the federal government with the authority and the budget to commission the kind of study Woodcock described. That he apparently responded with a suggestion to loop in another agency, rather than committing resources, raises a straightforward question about priorities.
Woodcock's warning did not arrive in a vacuum. By the time she sent her email, there were already 440,025 worldwide adverse event reports and 8,650 deaths logged in VAERS in connection with COVID-19 vaccines. VAERS data is self-reported and does not prove causation, but the volume alone was enough to concern the FDA's own leader, and she said so in writing.
Fauci did not respond to the Daily Caller's request for comment. Neither did Collins. Woodcock, now on the board of a patient advocacy group called Every Cure, also did not respond. All three received requests through their current affiliations.
The email's release comes as Senate Republicans continue to press for answers about how federal health officials handled safety signals during the mass vaccination campaign. Sen. Rand Paul, who chairs the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, has used his position since Republicans retook the Senate in 2025 to compel testimony and subpoena records from officials involved in the COVID response. Johnson, who chairs the committee's chief investigative subcommittee, has focused on vaccine safety and official communications.
Woodcock's email is not the only document to surface in recent weeks that raises questions about what Fauci knew privately versus what he said publicly. Texts recovered from Fauci's government-issued cellphone, which contained more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails, obtained by Johnson's subcommittee on August 5, show he was informed in January 2021 that COVID vaccine safety studies had not been performed on women in their first trimester of pregnancy.
Dr. John Mascola texted Fauci on January 25, 2021, warning that initial vaccine studies had avoided first-trimester vaccination because of possible fever and higher miscarriage rates. Fauci himself texted then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Walensky that "since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester," the New York Post reported.
Nine days later, on February 3, 2021, Fauci told JAMA, one of the country's most widely read medical journals, that the FDA had found "no red flags" for pregnant women receiving the vaccine. The gap between what he said privately and what he said publicly is now part of the Senate investigation's focus.
Fauci has since invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a Senate hearing on July 29. His attorney called further compelled testimony an attempt to "impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes," the Washington Examiner reported.
That decision has only intensified congressional pressure. Sen. Paul has since moved to refer Fauci to the Department of Justice for contempt, and Sen. Ted Cruz has publicly called for criminal prosecution.
Woodcock was not the only federal official whose safety concerns appear to have been sidelined. An April 29, 2026 interim report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson's panel, revealed that Peter Marks, then the director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, brushed off warnings from a safety data expert who flagged that the FDA's own surveillance systems might be missing statistically significant side effects.
Marks's stated reason for dismissing the analysis was that it could "create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric." The identity of the safety data expert was not disclosed in the report. Marks, who now serves as senior vice president of molecule discovery at Eli Lilly, did not respond to a request for comment sent through his employer.
The pattern that emerges from these documents is consistent: officials inside the federal health bureaucracy raised concerns about vaccine safety through internal channels, and the institutional response ranged from deflection to active suppression. Woodcock asked for studies. Fauci suggested a meeting. A safety expert flagged data gaps. Marks worried about public relations.
Fauci has declined requests to testify before multiple Senate panels, and his repeated invocations of the Fifth Amendment have left the public record incomplete. The emails and texts now filling that gap tell a story the officials themselves have refused to.
Woodcock warned in plain language that ignoring the problem would make it worse. Five years later, the problem has not gone away, but the people she warned still will not talk about it.
