(The Epoch Times)—Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Thursday that many officials who tried to warn the public about potential problems with COVID-19 vaccines were pressured into silence and that it’s high time to admit that there were “significant” side effects that made people sick.
Dr. Redfield made the remarks in a May 16 interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, during which he lamented the loss of public confidence in public health agencies because of a lack of transparency around the vaccines, which he said “saved a lot of lives” but also made some people “quite ill.”
“Those of us that tried to suggest there may be significant side effects from vaccines … we kind of got canceled because no one wanted to talk about the potential that there was a problem from the vaccines, because they were afraid that that would cause people not to want to get vaccinated,” Dr. Redfield said.
In his role as head of the CDC, Dr. Redfield was part of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a project to surge COVID-19 vaccine development at a time during the pandemic when little was known about the virus and rapid vaccine rollout was widely seen as key to getting the outbreak under control and lockdowns lifted.
In September 2020, a few months before the first COVID-19 vaccines were given in the United States, Dr. Redfield testified before the Senate that COVID-19 represented the “most significant public health challenge to face our nation in more than a century,” and that the prevailing view among scientists at the time was that the overall case fatality rate of the disease was somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6 percent in the United States.
“If you were to look right now, individuals under the age of 18, it’s about 0.01 percent, 19 to say 69, it’s more like 0.3 percent. And if you’re over the age of 70, it’s about 5 percent now,” he testified at the time.
While there’s lingering controversy about the severity of COVID-19, a recent study estimates that the global case fatality rate was 8.5 percent in February 2020 but had plunged to 0.27 percent in August 2022, meaning that the estimated relative risk reduction over that time was a whopping 96.8 percent.
In his interview on NewsNation, Dr. Redfield said that the vaccines that were developed as part of Operation Warp Speed were “important” and saved “a lot of lives.” However, despite their benefits, the drawbacks of the vaccines must be a matter of open discussion, he said.
“They’re important for the most vulnerable people, those over 60, 65 years of age. They really aren’t that critical for those that are under 50 or younger. But those vaccines saved a lot of lives, but they also—we have to be honest, some people got significant side effects from the vaccine,” he said.
“I have a number of people that are quite ill and they never had COVID, but they are ill from the vaccine,” he continued. “And we just have to acknowledge that.”
Vaccine Controversy
The severity of COVID-19 remains a matter of debate because it’s unclear whether deaths were overcounted or undercounted due to various factors, such as lack of clarity around the role of underlying medical conditions in fatalities in cases where COVID-19 was listed as the primary cause, or underreporting of asymptomatic infections. Aside from the issue of whether people died “from” COVID-19 or “with” a positive test for SARS-CoV-2, there have also been questions about the role of secondary pneumonia caused by mechanical ventilation.
Either way, a study from January 2023 indicates that the global case fatality rate from COVID-19 has dropped dramatically over the course of the pandemic. Global case fatalities ranged from 1.7 to 39.0 percent in February to March of 2020, according to the study—but fell to below 0.3 percent in July to August 2022.
The researchers estimate that the risk of death from COVID-19 has dropped by 96.8 percent over the course of the pandemic.
Along with a decline in COVID-19 fatalities, there have been growing concerns about vaccine side effects, given that a significant number of vaccinated people have reported various adverse reactions.
The most common COVID-19 vaccine adverse events are those that affect the body generally, with fever, fatigue, and overall discomfort being the top three, according to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). But there are others.
For instance, heart muscle inflammation (myocarditis) and inflammation of the lining outside the heart (pericarditis) have both officially been acknowledged by the CDC as a known side effect of Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
Nervous system disorders have also been reported, with such disorders being the third most common in the Pfizer trials, coming after general and muscle-related adverse events.
There have also been papers linking spike-protein-based COVID-19 vaccines to skin problems, a dull ringing in the ears known as tinnitus, visual impairments, blood clotting, and even death. Recent reporting from EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders“ program indicates that the likelihood of death associated with COVID-19 vaccines (in close proximity to the shot rather than proven as caused by it) was over 100 times greater than for flu vaccines.
There are also concerns about a post-vaccination jump in excess deaths and disability.
The CDC still recommends that people of all ages receive a COVID-19 vaccine, saying that the potential side effects do not outweigh the potential harms of getting sick with COVID-19.
In a notice published in late April, the agency again called for adults aged 65 and older to get the latest version of the vaccines.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
