Vaccine Safety:By Marjorie Taylor Greene(Part 2)

On November 13, 2023, Greene chaired a congressional hearing on vaccine safety.

On February 13, 2024, National Geographic Press will be publishing a book I wrote called, TELL ME WHEN IT’S OVER: AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO DECIPHERING COVID MYTHS AND NAVIGATING A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. In the next few months, I will be writing about various issues discussed in that book.

In the first part of this three-part series on the Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia) hearing on vaccine safety, I focused on the testimony of a lawyer named Thomas Renz. In this installment, I will describe the testimony of Dr. Kimberly Biss.

Kimberly Biss, MD, is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist practicing in Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Florida. She is a Fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and a member of the Florida Obstetrics and Gynecology Society. In January 2020, she was promoted to chief-of-staff at her hospital. Dr. Biss is a well-credentialed physician in her field, which makes her testimony all-the-more-difficult to understand.

Dr. Biss claimed that after receiving COVID vaccines, women in her practice suffered menstrual cycle irregularities including severe, persistent bleeding. The only way to determine whether COVID vaccines cause changes in menstruation is to compare symptoms in women who did or didn’t receive the vaccine. Personal observations often don’t include both groups. The good news is that careful comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated women have been done. For example, in a study of more than 1,100 women performed by the Boston School of Public Health who either did or didn’t receive COVID vaccines, researchers concluded, “We did not observe strong associations between COVID-19 vaccination and cycle irregularity, bleed length, heaviness of bleed, or menstrual pain.”  

Biss also testified, “My miscarriage rate went up 100 percent,” later likening COVID vaccination to thalidomide and diethylstilbesterol, known agents that caused prematurity and birth defects. However, in a retrospective study of 40,000 pregnant women, vaccination was not associated with an increased risk of premature births. In addition, studies have shown that COVID vaccination during pregnancy does not increase the risk of birth defects.

Biss also stated that she had never seen a pregnant woman die from COVID. Therefore, the CDC’s notion that pregnant women were at increased risk from COVID must be wrong. However, published studies had shown that pregnant women with COVID are twice as likely to die as women of the same age with COVID who weren’t pregnant. For this reason, the CDC has urgently recommended that pregnant women be vaccinated. Pregnancy is also a known risk factor for serious influenza infections. It shouldn’t have been surprising that this might also be true for COVID. Although Dr. Biss hadn’t experienced pregnant women dying in her practice from COVID, that didn’t mean that the problem didn’t exist.  

Biss further suggested that breastfeeding was unsafe for women who had received COVID vaccines because it caused myocarditis in babies in Scotland, failing to provide a source for her claim. Not only is breastfeeding safe in women who have received COVID vaccines, the infant benefits from antibodies in breast milk, which lowers their risk of COVID.

Perhaps most outrageous was Biss’s stance on vaccinating children. “Only 3 in one million children will die from COVID,” she said, “so why are we giving children these vaccines!?” A death rate this rare, according to Biss, did not justify vaccination. In fact, the death rate is much higher. As of January 2023, COVID was the leading cause of death in children due to an infectious disease and the eighth most common cause of death overall. Contrary to Biss’s claims, the death rate for children less than one year of age was 43 per million and, for those 1 to 4 years of age, it was 6 per million. Hundreds of young children have died from COVID. None of those deaths, not even at rates of 3 in one million, are acceptable.

In the final Substack installment of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee hearing, we’ll focus on a brilliant physician-scientist who made important contributions to our understanding of mRNA technology. Surely, this is the man who will counter the misinformation that had preceded him.