They Knew About the Strokes. They Pushed the Shots Anyway

A bombshell Senate investigation reveals the CDC detected a statistically significant stroke signal in November 2022 — then spent months burying it while the White House demanded more boosters.

Mar 26, 2026

On November 27, 2022, the CDC’s own Vaccine Safety Datalink lit up with a statistically significant safety signal: ischemic strokes in people 65 and older following Pfizer’s bivalent COVID booster.

The signal didn’t flicker and fade. It screamed — week after week after week.

December 4. December 11. December 18. December 25.
January 1. January 8. January 15. January 29.

Nine consecutive weeks of a statistically significant signal for strokes in the elderly.

The CDC saw it every single time. And what did they do?

They kept pushing the shots.

The Paper Trail

This week, Sen. Ron Johnson — chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — released a devastating letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that lays bare the internal machinery of suppression. It’s 30+ pages of emails, meeting notes, contractor reports, and internal communications that tell a story far worse than mere negligence.

It’s a story of people who knew — and chose to look away.

What the CDC Found

The Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) — one of the most robust active surveillance systems in the country — first flagged the ischemic stroke signal on November 27, 2022, just three months after the FDA authorized Pfizer’s bivalent booster. At that point, roughly 14.4 million Americans aged 12 and up had already received it.

The signal didn’t resolve. It intensified. By late December, CDC officials were reviewing VAERS reports and finding 53 cases of ischemic stroke following the bivalent vaccine — including three deaths.

By January 6, 2023, a senior CDC official identified 39 additional cases. By January 10, another 22. By February 7, the count had reached 226 stroke cases.

The White House Edit

Here’s where the story turns from troubling to damning.

On December 15, 2022 — with the stroke signal already confirmed across multiple consecutive weeks — CDC official Michael Bell drafted an internal communication noting the “WH and HHS intense push to increase uptake of the booster” for people 65 and older. The email was edited by Tom Shimabukuro, CDC’s vaccine safety lead.

Read that again. The CDC had a confirmed stroke signal in the elderly. The White House was simultaneously running an “intense push” to get those same elderly people boosted.

Then came January 11, 2023. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky received a draft communications plan about the stroke signal. The document contained apparent White House edits. The key change? The word “moderately elevated” was crossed out and replaced with “slightly elevated.”

One word swap. A stroke signal — confirmed nine straight weeks in the most reliable surveillance system available — downgraded from “moderately” to “slightly” at the apparent direction of political officials.

The Public Statement

Two days later, on January 13, 2023, the FDA and CDC released a carefully worded joint statement acknowledging the signal’s detection while continuing to recommend the bivalent booster for people over 65. They posted it on the FDA website — not as a press conference, not as a formal safety alert, but as an informal notice.

The message was clear: Nothing to see here. Keep getting your shots.

Pfizer’s Response

On January 24, 2023, Pfizer submitted a confidential response to the FDA:

“There is no evidence at this time that thromboembolic events, including ischemic stroke, are a safety signal or risk of Bivalent Comirnaty.”

The CDC’s own surveillance system had been screaming for two months. Pfizer said there was “no evidence.”

The “Resolved” Signal

By July 24, 2023, FDA officials circulated a quarterly surveillance report claiming: “The previously reported signal for ischemic stroke has resolved.”

Except it hadn’t — not really. An Empirical Bayesian data-mining analysis of VAERS through both February and March 2023 had independently identified statistically significant signals for ischemic stroke in the 65+ population following the Pfizer bivalent booster. Those findings appear nowhere in the FDA’s “resolved” declaration.

As late as September 2025, CDC official John Su acknowledged the VSD signal remained subject to further analysis.

Three years later. Still analyzing.

The Children They Didn’t Protect

Buried in the Johnson letter is a detail that should stop every parent cold.

On March 7, 2023, FDA officials circulated VAERS reports on three “Notable US Deaths” following the booster — including a 13-year-old girl. In the same batch: a report on a healthy 8-year-old boy who suffered four episodes of transient ischemic attacks after his booster.

The FDA’s own sender comment on the boy’s case:

“Based on the temporal relationship, the association between the event transient ischemic attack with BNT162B2 … cannot be fully excluded.”

Cannot be fully excluded. Government-speak for: the shot probably did this to a healthy child.

This echoes what we covered on Rational Ground in November 2025 — the FDA’s own internal review that flagged at least ten deaths in children aged 7–16 as “likely, probable, or possible” causally related to COVID vaccination. Deaths acknowledged by the agency years after they occurred, buried until new leadership pried them loose.

The Pattern

If you’ve been reading Rational Ground, none of this surprises you. We’ve been documenting this pattern for years:

September 2023: Ignoring the Heart of the Matter — how myocarditis became the silent scandal of COVID vaccination
November 2023: The Censorship Industrial Complex — how the government built a machine to suppress exactly this kind of safety information
August 2024: FDA Laughed as People Died — the ivermectin horse tweet FOIAs revealing an agency that treated public safety as a punchline
December 2025: The Deaths They Said Couldn’t Happen — 60+ published case reports of severe or fatal events following vaccination, all peer-reviewed, all ignored
January 2026: New Study Reveals WHY Regulators Missed the DNA Contamination — the systemic failures that allowed contaminated vaccines to reach hundreds of millions of arms

And just yesterday, we covered the Missouri v. Biden consent decree — the government’s own admission that it used “misinformation” labels to suppress constitutionally protected speech. The very speech that might have warned people about signals like this one.

What This Actually Means

Seven Facts from the Johnson Investigation

The CDC detected a stroke signal in November 2022. Not a maybe. A statistically significant finding in their gold-standard surveillance system.
The signal persisted for nine consecutive weeks. This wasn’t noise. This was a pattern.
The White House edited the CDC’s communications to downgrade the severity. Political officials changed “moderately elevated” to “slightly elevated.”
Pfizer denied the signal existed while the CDC’s own data said otherwise.
The FDA declared the signal “resolved” while independent analyses continued to find it.
Children were affected. A healthy 8-year-old boy had four strokes. A 13-year-old girl died.
Three years later, they’re still “analyzing.” The bureaucratic equivalent of running out the clock.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a paper trail. Senator Johnson didn’t speculate — he quoted their own emails back to them.

The Question That Matters

Every American over 65 who received the bivalent booster between November 2022 and January 2023 — the period when the signal was confirmed but no meaningful public warning was issued — deserves an answer to one question:

Would you have taken the shot if they’d told you the truth?

Not “slightly elevated.” Not an informal notice buried on the FDA website. The truth: that their own surveillance system had detected a statistically significant stroke signal in your age group, week after week, and the White House was editing the language to make it sound less alarming.

That’s not informed consent. That’s managed consent. And managed consent isn’t consent at all.

The full Johnson letter is available here. Read it yourself. The paper trail speaks for itself.

Rational Ground by Justin Hart

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