How Moderna hid the death of a child in a Covid vaccine clinical trial - even as it seemed to disclose the trial's results

Selective publication is a hell of a drug

(SECOND OF TWO PARTS)

Last week, I disclosed that a pre-school aged child had died of “cardio-respiratory arrest” in Moderna’s pivotal KidCOVE clinical trial for its mRNA Covid vaccine.

Given the controversy over mRNA jabs for children, the death would likely have been big news - if Moderna and the supposedly independent physicians involved with the trial had reported it.

But a review of Moderna’s articles around KidCOVE shows the company hid reporting the death while pretending to be transparent. In 2024, it published results from KidCOVE that excluded the part of the trial where the death occurred. Had European regulators not made Moderna report and publish the full results in September, albeit on an obscure Website, the death would still be a secret.

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(I’ll never stop fighting for the truth. With your help.)

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Why didn’t Moderna report the KidCOVE death in the United States?

So far, Moderna will not comment on the death, or even acknowledge questions on it.

Dr. Buddy Creech, a Vanderbilt University vaccine researcher and the lead author on the first major KidCOVE article - published in 2022 in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in a sign of its importance - also failed to acknowledge emailed questions.

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(Creech and Wrong!¹)

SOURCE

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As I reported last week, the child who died during KidCOVE was under 5 years old and healthy, as the trial only enrolled generally healthy children.

Moderna conducted the trial only in North America, with most recruiting sites in the United States, so the child was very likely American. He or she died about two years ago, in late 2022 or early 2023, after receiving a 10-microgram dose of Moderna’s first Omicron-specific booster, called mRNA-1273.214. The company had introduced the booster because its original mRNA-1273 jab did not work well against Omicron.

Moderna found that the death was not “causally related” to the shot.

And those are more or less the only facts the company has publicly disclosed.

But Moderna knows much more: the child’s exact age, if he or she had underlying conditions, how quickly the death followed the jab, and additional details about how the child became ill and died. Those bits of information are crucial for anyone trying to determine what happened, and whether the death might reveal broader problems with the jab.

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(Totally safe and effective, especially if you ignore the deaths!)

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Had Moderna published a paper with data from the KidCOVE trial that included the death, it would almost surely have to had to go into more detail about what had happened.

But it didn’t.

Instead, on August 19, 2024, Moderna published a paper in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases called "Safety and Immunogenicity of an mRNA-1273 booster in Children." Dr. Creech of Vanderbilt is the second author listed; a Moderna scientist is the paper’s senior author.

The scientists submitted the paper in May 2024, after KidCOVE had officially concluded and the child had died. Yet it does not include the death.

Why?

Because the children the Clinical Infectious Diseases paper covered were mostly older participants in KidCOVE who had received the original mRNA-1273 vaccine - not the updated 1273.214 - as a booster.

Even more confusingly, Moderna also published data on 539 younger children who received 1273.214 booster from a separate, smaller trial it called ROVER.

The ROVER trial included KidCOVE participants who were then shifted to the new trial and given the 1273.214 jab. Moderna first reported the ROVER data as a preprint in June 2023, and officially published it in the Lancet Infectious Diseases 2024. But no children died in the ROVER trial group, so Moderna was again able to report a clean safety profile.

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(This kind of reporting isn’t cheap. Actually, it is - less than 20 cents a day. I hope you think it’s worth it.)

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By reporting the ROVER trial findings along with the partial KidCOVE data for older children, Moderna effectively made the death of a healthy young child in its clinical trial disappear.

Unfortunately, making the death disappear is not the same as making it not happen. With Moderna and public health authorities still pushing Covid jabs on healthy kids at essentially zero risk from the virus, perhaps Dr. Creech or someone at Moderna will decide to tell us what really happened to the child who died.

Or maybe not. After all, Moderna’s stock has already fallen 90 percent since those heady 2021 days of vaccine mandates.

It doesn’t need any more bad news.

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(SECOND OF TWO PARTS. PART 1 HERE.)

1. A kinda lame “Cheech and Chong” reference.