Project Tony

The FDA requires the Comirnaty and Spikevax labels to warn that myocarditis and pericarditis are most likely in males 12 through 24, in the week after a dose. For the 2023–2024 formula, commercial insurance claims put the unadjusted rate at about 8 cases per million doses in people from 6 months through 64 years, and about 27 per million doses in males 12 through 24, counting days 1 through 7.

Earlier surveillance was higher at the second dose of the original series. In June 2021 the CDC reported about 41 myocarditis cases per million second doses in males 12 through 29, about 63 per million in males 12 through 17, and about 51 per million in males 18 through 24. A later Vaccine Safety Datalink look at boosters found the highest chart-reviewed rate in males 16 through 17 after the original Pfizer booster, 188 per million doses, with a wide confidence interval.

Most of those patients recovered clinically. The FDA also required the labels to carry follow-up cardiac MRI findings, so the record treats this as more than a same-week headline. Infection with the virus inflames the heart too. A rare harm, concentrated by age and sex, is still an issue with these shots.

Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca used a viral vector, a different product from the mRNA shots. Regulators confirmed a rare syndrome of unusual clots together with low platelets. By April 21, 2021, after about 8 million Johnson & Johnson doses in the United States, the CDC had confirmed 15 of these cases. The reporting rate was 7.0 per million doses in women 18 through 49, and 0.9 per million in women 50 and older. The CDC and FDA paused the product, then resumed it with a warning. Health authorities later preferred the mRNA shots because of this syndrome, and the adenovirus-vector products left major markets.

The mRNA shots have a different principal harm, the heart inflammation above. Lumping every COVID shot into one injury erases which product did what.

In the Vaccine Safety Datalink, confirmed anaphylaxis in the day after a dose was about 5.1 per million Moderna doses and about 4.8 per million Pfizer doses, in people 12 and older during the original series. The usual suspect is the polyethylene glycol lipid. Clinics stock epinephrine because the reaction is fast and uncommon, and because it happens.

The pivotal Pfizer trial reported about a 95 percent relative reduction in symptomatic COVID, 8 cases in the vaccine group and 162 in the placebo group after the second dose, over a median follow-up of about two months when regulators authorized it. Moderna’s trial landed in the same range. Relative reduction is a ratio. The chance of symptomatic illness in that short window was already modest, so the absolute number of cases prevented in each hundred people was small.

Those trials were built to count symptomatic illness in the first months. They were not built to measure transmission, rare harms, or anything that takes years to appear. A later claim that vaccination would stop people catching or passing the virus was larger than the endpoint those papers reported.

The PREP Act shields manufacturers and the people who gave covered COVID countermeasures from ordinary injury lawsuits. The remaining court path is willful misconduct, a high bar. Everyone else is sent to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program. A request has to be filed within one year. The program can pay medical costs, lost wages, and death benefits when compelling evidence shows a serious injury was the direct result of the countermeasure. Pain and suffering is outside it. Time alone, the fact that a symptom followed a shot, is not enough.

HRSA’s figures as of September 1, 2026: 14,206 COVID-19 claims filed, 11,145 of them alleging a vaccine injury or death. Of 8,122 decisions, 120 claims were found eligible and 63 had been paid. Among the denials, 2,711 missed the one-year deadline, 3,387 never produced the required records, and 1,640 failed the proof standard or were found not to have a covered injury. Those are decisions, not a census of biological harm. They are enough to see that a label can admit a risk while almost everyone who believes they were hurt remains unpaid.

The mRNA is transcribed from a DNA plasmid. Regulators allow up to 10 nanograms of residual DNA in a dose. Speicher and colleagues, writing in Autoimmunity in 2025, tested vials from Ontario. Sequence-specific PCR mostly sat under that line. The exception was the SV40 promoter-enhancer, found only in the Pfizer vials: in two of six Pfizer lots, that one target ran about twice the regulatory limit. A dye method, fluorometry, even after they tried to stop it counting RNA, sat far above the limit. Sequencing of one vial found short pieces, on the order of a few hundred base pairs.

Australia’s regulator tested batches by PCR under controlled storage and reported every batch under 10 nanograms per dose. Their account of the high dye readings is that the dye binds the mRNA, so it counts the active ingredient as DNA. A 2025 paper in npj Vaccines used four methods on 15 batches, including a dye assay set up to separate the two, and reported the same: under the limit, and made of short plasmid fragments.

The SV40 sequence in Pfizer’s plasmid is a short on-switch used so bacteria will copy the plasmid during manufacturing. It is a fragment of a common laboratory tool. It is a different object from the SV40 virus. Whether a promoter fragment inside a lipid particle carries a risk that older residual DNA did not is a real scientific argument. These papers do not show that the fragment caused cancer or any other injury in a recipient. Until that evidence exists, the claim stays on the disputed shelf, and the dye-versus-PCR fight stays a fight about the assay.

mRNA is chemically fragile. The working account, and most measurements, put expression on a scale of days. A smaller set of papers reports spike protein or mRNA fragments for longer in some blood or tissue samples. Longer detection in a subset of samples is a finding about duration. It is a different claim from a permanent installation, and the duration is not settled. This shelf should move when a pre-registered study, with proper controls, publishes a duration that other labs can repeat.

Countries recorded excess deaths through the pandemic years and after. In most large studies, vaccinated groups had fewer COVID deaths. All-cause comparisons are tangled. People who were vaccinated differed, on average, in age, illness, and access to care from people who were not. The infection itself killed and injured people. Hospitals postponed other care in 2020 and 2021. A paper that skips those facts can produce almost any total.

This page will not quote an excess-death figure as a vaccine body count. Absence of a clean number is also not proof that nothing late is happening. The study that would settle a progressive injury is described in the standard at the bottom of this page.

Public claims that vaccination would stop infection and transmission were broader than the trial endpoint, which was symptomatic illness over about two months. Later waves of infection in vaccinated people made the gap obvious. In January 2022 the Supreme Court blocked the large-employer vaccine mandate and, the same day, allowed the healthcare-worker mandate to stand. People lost jobs under rules that rested in part on a transmission claim the authorization trials had not measured.

The record of what was said, and what was later revised, belongs in any serious reading of the era. Why it was said — mistake, fear, career pressure, or intent — is not settled by the fact that the sentences changed. Motive stays disputed. The mismatch between the trials and the speeches is established.

On January 25, 2023, Project Veritas, James O’Keefe’s outlet, released a recording of Jordon Trishton Walker, whom they identified as a Pfizer director of research and development strategy. On the tape he says the company was exploring mutating the virus to get ahead of future variants, including a monkey serial-passage idea he called directed evolution, and that this was not what they tell the public. He also described it as a thought from a meeting. When confronted, he said he had been lying to impress a date.

Pfizer’s statement of January 27, 2023 said the company had not conducted gain-of-function or directed-evolution research in developing the COVID vaccine. The work it described was different: taking spike proteins from variants public-health agencies had already identified, putting them on the original virus, and testing whether vaccine antibodies still neutralized them; and, separately, Paxlovid resistance tests that regulators require, including some work in a high-containment lab.

The tape is a reason to read a company’s public research statements against what its people say when they think they are off the record. It is evidence about a conversation in 2023. It does not identify an ingredient in the 2020 vials, and it does not show a shot built to injure years later.

The published contents of the mRNA shots are the mRNA, four lipids, salts or a buffer, and sugar. Graphene oxide is not on those lists, and it is not used in the manufacturing process. The European Medicines Agency reviewed the microscopy and spectroscopy reports that claimed otherwise and said the available data did not show graphene in the vaccines. The best-known of those reports examined a vial whose origin the author could not establish.

A separate paper reported dozens of undeclared chemical elements, including rare earths, and then concluded that military nanotechnology was at work. The elemental table was challenged as sitting at or below what the instrument can detect, with unit errors in the figures. A trace reading near the floor of a machine is also what contaminated needles, glass, and water produce. The jump from that table to a device assembling itself in the body is the authors’ interpretation. National batch-release testing has not confirmed that payload.

Profit, liability protection, overconfident speeches, and a handful of real injuries are all on this page. Together they show a product and a program with serious problems. They do not show a device built to degrade a person on a delay.

The finding that would support that stronger claim is specific. Injury would rise with time since the dose. It would scale with the number of doses. It would show up across organ systems. It would still be there after analysts accounted for the infection, for age, for care that was postponed, and for the fact that healthier and better-connected people were vaccinated first. That study is not on the shelf. If it arrives and holds up, this claim moves.