The manuscript that reached Francis Collins in April 2021 described patients whose nerve symptoms began after COVID-19 vaccination, and its authors included a line meant for clinicians: “Early recognition and treatment with corticosteroids can reverse the symptoms.” Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, asked how the 32 patients had been referred, “leaving one to wonder whether this is common or rare,” which is a fair question to put to any case series. Then he named the consequence he expected. The paper, he wrote, “will have the main consequence of feeding vaccine hesitancy and social media overreaction.” His principal deputy, Lawrence Tabak, wrote to him separately: “I don’t understand why Walter does not shut this down.”
The Informed Consent Action Network obtained those emails and released them on July 22, and Zachary Stieber reported them in The Epoch Times. ICAN is careful about their limits: they “do not prove that Collins, Tabak, or Fauci expressly ordered Nath to abandon the manuscript.” On October 16, the board that oversees the NIH’s own hospital took up the government’s new vaccine-injury clinic. Its chairman’s statement, which the board backed unanimously, warned that “science only helps patients when the public believes it.”
will have the main consequence of feeding vaccine hesitancy and social media overreaction
Danice Hertz is a retired gastroenterologist. She received the Pfizer-BioNTech shot shortly after its 2020 authorization, became severely ill, and was one of the patients the NIH team examined. She says the patients were later dismissed without explanation, and she has her own theory about why. “I have always believed that Fauci must have told Nath to stop talking to us,” she told Stieber. The released emails do not establish that. What they do record is the agency’s two most senior officials discussing her doctors’ manuscript in terms of hesitancy, and one of them asking why it had not been shut down.
The record also shows the route the paper took. Avindra Nath, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, sent the draft to that institute’s director, Walter Koroshetz, on April 10, 2021. Koroshetz forwarded it to Anthony Fauci the next day, writing that Nath “has been collecting a bunch” of these cases, which were timed to vaccination even if chance was hard to exclude. Another NIH employee then told Collins and Tabak that the New England Journal of Medicine had rejected it. The work finally surfaced in May 2022, more than a year after Nath first sent it up the chain, as an unreviewed preprint on medRxiv.
That preprint describes 23 patients, 92 percent of them women, with a median age of 40, who developed new neuropathic symptoms within a month of vaccination, and its authors suggest that in some of them the process may be immune-mediated. The draft Collins read counted 32. Nothing in the released emails explains how the cohort was defined or why the count changed. A small observational series cannot prove the shots caused the symptoms, or that steroids reversed them. It is the kind of early signal a federal research agency exists to run down, and the consequence its director chose to put in writing was public reaction.
“Science only helps patients when the public believes it”
On Monday, October 5, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cut the ribbon on a Vaccine Injury Center on the NIH campus in Bethesda. NPR reported that the agency had ordered thousands of campus employees to work from home that day, and that nothing was made public until a press release and video in which Kennedy said injured people and the parents of injured children “have been marginalized, vilified, demonized and gaslighted.” CIDRAP’s account of the package lists research funding, a new CMS policy and billing code to pay physicians for reporting suspected injuries to VAERS, and an overhaul of VAERS itself. Kennedy called vaccine injury an invisible disease. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said the agency was “listening to the voices of people who have suffered vaccine injury so we can learn from them.” An internal memo obtained by NPR describes an observational study that would follow vaccinated people for complications and their causes, and might also review the recommended schedules and try to develop treatments.
The ribbon did not open an enrollment desk. The NIH’s October 19 statement, signed by Bhattacharya and NIAID Acting Director John H. Powers III, says the study protocol is still being finalized and the launch is expected before the end of 2026. The first enrollment will be several hundred people, beginning with those who have the most serious symptoms after vaccination or infection, and the center will take no walk-ins and offer no routine appointments to the public.
The Clinical Center’s board held its quarterly meeting on Friday, October 16. Its chairman, Jack Leslie, read a statement saying he was “troubled” by Kennedy’s unannounced visit, and the board voted unanimously to back it. Leslie wrote that serious vaccine injuries are “rare but real” and deserve rigorous research. Then he turned to how the findings would be received. “If this research finds evidence of harm, many will dismiss it as the work of a secretary who has long argued” that vaccines are dangerous, he wrote, according to the New York Times account excerpted by the Genetic Literacy Project. “If it finds none, patients will be told that the clinic was a sham.” The hospital’s standing, he said, rests on “the confidence of patients, physicians and the public that the research done here is designed to find the truth, not to confirm a conclusion reached in advance.” He ended: “Trust is slow to build and quick to lose.”
Leslie is a former chairman of the global public relations firm Weber Shandwick. He has advised the World Health Organization and chairs the board of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. His objection to the staging has a basis, since an unannounced ribbon-cutting on a campus whose staff had been sent home invites exactly the suspicion he describes. But none of the passages the Times quoted says what a seriously ill patient will be offered, or when. Collins in 2021 and Leslie in 2026 both allowed that the injuries deserve study, and the consequence each committed to the record was the public’s reaction: hesitancy for one, lost trust for the other.
The same measure has traveled well beyond Bethesda. When a small Yale preprint on post-vaccination syndrome drew attention in February 2025, STAT ran its story as “A small study on Covid vaccine safety sparks an online tempest” under the web title “Post vaccination syndrome: Science weaponized for political ends?” The piece cast the researchers’ dilemma as how to report possible risks that critics could weaponize. This week the patient group React19 answered in the title of an essay for the Brownstone Institute: “When Vaccine Injury Research Becomes Political, Patients Disappear.”
A phone number and a year to file
Here is who has the data, and here is who does not. The NIH holds the 2021 clinical files and will hold the new cohort’s. Clinical Center CEO Jonathan Green said the clinic needs no new resources and that its work will undergo the same scientific and ethical review as other NIH studies. The October 19 statement gives no budget and leaves eligibility rules to the protocol that has not been finished.
The government also holds the claims files, and they show how people alleging COVID-19 vaccine injury have been handled in the meantime. Those claims go to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, run by HRSA, rather than the childhood-vaccine court. The Congressional Research Service’s April 2025 accounting counted 13,764 COVID-19 countermeasure claims, 10,651 of them alleging vaccine injury or death. Across all countermeasures, HRSA had decided 4,111 claims, denied 4,044 of them, or 98.4 percent, and found 67 eligible for compensation. Claimants generally must file within one year of the shot. The program pays no attorneys’ fees and no pain and suffering, and the PREP Act precludes judicial review of the government’s eligibility and compensation decisions. A claimant whose injury is not on the program’s table has to prove causation with “compelling, reliable, [and] valid” medical and scientific evidence, and timing alone is not enough. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has special masters and appeal rights, had compensated 11,659 of the 24,602 petitions it adjudicated, about 47 percent.
| Measure | Share |
|---|---|
| of decided claims across all countermeasures | 98.4 percent |
These documents do not show that the denials were political, and they cannot show that every denied claim was a vaccine injury. What they show is a program in which claimants get a year to file and no court to appeal to, and in which 67 of 4,111 decided claims were found eligible.
The patients have a phone number. While the protocol is being finished, the NIH statement directs prospective participants to the Clinical Center’s Office of Patient Recruitment at 800-411-1222. As of the April 2025 accounting, another 9,653 countermeasure claims were still waiting on a decision at HRSA. Collins, Fauci and Nath did not respond to Stieber’s requests for comment in July, and Tabak could not be reached. The protocol sits unfinished with the Clinical Center and the undecided claims sit with HRSA, while the question of how 32 patients in a 2021 draft became 23 in a 2022 preprint remains with the agency whose director read the draft first and wrote back about hesitancy.
Sources
- The Epoch Times (Zachary Stieber): NIH leadership emails on the Nath manuscript, republished July 2026
- Congressional Research Service, report R46982 (updated April 16, 2025)
- NIH: Statement from Jay Bhattacharya and John H. Powers III on the new Vaccinology and Immunology Center (Oct. 19, 2026)
- medRxiv: Safavi, Nath et al., Neuropathic symptoms with SARS-CoV-2 vaccination (May 2022)
- Arkansas Democrat-Gazette / The New York Times: Board for NIH hospital rebukes health secretary (Oct. 18, 2026)
- Genetic Literacy Project: excerpt of The New York Times on the Clinical Center board statement (Oct. 20, 2026)
- NPR via TPR: Health Secretary Kennedy touts an initiative to study vaccine safety (Oct. 8, 2026)
- CIDRAP: HHS launches new major vaccine injury initiative (October 2026)
- STAT: A small study on Covid vaccine safety sparks an online tempest (Feb. 24, 2025)
- Brownstone Institute (React19): When Vaccine Injury Research Becomes Political, Patients Disappear (Oct. 25, 2026)