Judge’s Ruling Shuts Down Testimony of People Injured by COVID Vaccines
“We keep getting pushed aside.”
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D.
The CDC’s vaccine advisory committee planned to hear accounts of COVID-19 vaccine injuries and make recommendations on how to help the injured. After a federal judge put the meeting on hold indefinitely, the mother of a 34-year-old man who died from the vaccine said, “We keep getting pushed aside.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee planned to hear accounts of COVID-19 vaccine injury at its meeting this month — but those accounts are now going unheard after a federal judge indefinitely halted the committee’s actions.
“It’s really heartbreaking,” Kirk Milhoan, M.D., Ph.D., who chaired the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) committee, said on the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?”
“We were hoping to be able to discuss the real harms that have happened to people post-vaccine, and we really wanted to be able to say that, look, there are real harms, and how can we help these people?”
ACIP had planned to discuss and vote on recommendations for COVID-19 vaccine injuries at its two-day meeting on March 18 and 19, according to a notice in the Federal Register.
But on March 16, a federal judge blocked ACIP from holding the meeting.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy also paused changes the committee made to vaccine recommendations under U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and disbanded the ACIP committee convened by Kennedy.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is appealing the ruling.
Leading up to ACIP’s March meeting, the public submitted nearly 1,170 comments to the committee about vaccine injury, mostly tied to the COVID-19 vaccine. Comments included personal accounts of injury and comments from people whose family members were injured or died after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
One of those was Dr. Sheri Weinstein, an internist and regenerative medicine doctor who serves roughly 300 patients. She wrote in a comment that she has filed over 50 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports for her patients who received the COVID-19 vaccine.
According to Weinstein, more of her patients have died from the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines than from any other disease over the last five years.
“These shots are biotechno weapons and do not qualify as vaccines,” Weinstein wrote. “They must be taken off the market immediately, and mRNA technology halted until much more research is conducted to show how to control this technology.”
Weinstein said she has documented acute onset of a range of medical conditions following COVID-19 vaccination, including Parkinsonism, atherosclerotic disease in which the arteries become hardened, turbo cancers, cognitive impairment, autoimmune disorders, mitochondria dysfunction, chronic fatigue syndrome, blood clotting issues, bulbar dysfunction and cardiomyopathy.
Another commenter, Jordan Bain, wrote:
“I cannot count how many friends and colleagues of mine either died of cardiac/stroke events at young ages (30s-40s) within days or weeks after receiving their COVID ‘vaccines’ AKA mRNA shots; and how many friends and clients have developed aggressive ‘turbo cancers’ in the subsequent years.”
In an anonymous comment, a nurse wrote that she had to get the COVID-19 vaccine or lose her job. “I could not afford to lose my job so I took the first and second dose and the first booster,” she said.
Since then, she said she has had recurrent upper respiratory infections and difficulty walking upstairs without becoming short of breath. “All of this happened after taking the vaccine.”
In February, five organizations led by CHD launched the COVID Justice campaign to demand accountability and ensure the government never again uses a public health emergency to violate Americans’ constitutional rights, including mandating vaccination as a condition of employment. Over 34,000 people have so far signed the resolution.
ACIP had ‘wanted to do right by the COVID-19 injured community’
React19 co-Chair Brianne Dressen, who was injured by the AstraZeneca vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial, told The Defender it was “pretty brutal” to hear that ACIP’s meeting had been cancelled.
The committee had “wanted to do right by the COVID-19 injured community, which usually doesn’t happen,” she said. “It was a wonderful opportunity that evaporated in an instant,” when the meeting was canceled.
Dr. Ryan Cole, head of medical and scientific affairs for the Independent Medical Alliance, a national coalition representing more than 12,000 independent physicians and clinicians, said in a statement about Murphy’s ruling:
“This is what happens when Big Pharma’s business model is threatened. They lawyer up. A coalition of industry-funded organizations went judge-shopping and found a willing partner to shut down the first ACIP in decades that dared to ask hard questions about vaccine safety, efficacy, and the conflicts of interest that have plagued this process for years.”
A national survey conducted in November 2025 found that 1 in 10 U.S. adults suffered a “major” side effect following COVID-19 vaccination.
Murphy’s ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and several other medical organizations against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The lawsuit, filed in July 2025, sought to overturn changes HHS made, under Kennedy, over changes to COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant women.
The groups amended their complaint several times in response to new HHS policies and recommendations. As part of the lawsuit, the groups sought an injunction to halt ACIP’s activities and pause changes to the childhood vaccine schedule.
In February, CHD motioned to intervene in the case. After Murphy denied the motion, CHD appealed.
‘We keep getting pushed aside’
In her comment to ACIP, Henrietta Simoes wrote of how her previously healthy 34-year-old son Victor died 16 days after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
“My son’s case is peer-reviewed and published, establishing a direct association with the Covid-19 vaccine,” she wrote.
The CDC refused to investigate Victor’s death, despite multiple attempts by Simoes to get them to look into it, she told The Defender.
Simoes said ACIP needs to investigate injuries and deaths linked to COVID-19 vaccination so that it can make recommendations to the CDC that reflect the vaccine’s dangers.
“When are people like myself and people who are injured going to be heard by the government? We keep getting pushed aside.”
She added, “People have died … people have been injured, their lives are upside down, and we keep just trotting along that it’s ‘safe and effective.’”
‘My son needs help’
Heather Hudson, whose son Cody has suffered five strokes due to an autoimmune blood-clotting disorder he developed after receiving two doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, told The Defender that ACIP members had hoped to discuss Cody’s case at its meeting.
“A great deal of critical research, testing, and also treatments would have been available publicly, which are now, I call it, held for ransom by this judge,” Hudson said.
Cody, a previously healthy college student, is the inspiration for a 2025 Florida bill dubbed “Cody’s Law.” If passed, the measure would expedite the review and payment process for vaccine injury claims under Florida’s Medicare, Medicaid and Medicaid Medically Needy Programs.
Cody’s family faces huge medical bills due to his vaccine injury. He was hospitalized for most of this month due to having blood clots in all four limbs and two blood clots in the heart.
Cody needs open-heart surgery and a valve replacement. But his blood-clotting disorder needs to go into remission before he is stable enough to undergo surgery, Hudson said.
“No mother should have to watch her child’s life slip away like this,” Hudson wrote in her comment to ACIP. “My son needs help.”
HHS did not immediately respond when asked for the latest update on whether Kennedy will name new ACIP members and resume meeting, or if HHS will appeal Murphy’s ruling.
Related articles in The Defender
‘Cody’s Law’: Florida Lawmakers Weigh First State Law to Compensate Vaccine Injury Victims
Case Report: Pfizer COVID Vaccine ‘Catalyst’ in Death of 34-Year-Old Man
Breaking: Federal Court Blocks ACIP Meeting, Changes to Childhood Vaccine Schedule
COVID Vaccine Injuries to Take Center Stage at Upcoming ACIP Meeting
Pediatrician Fired for Role as CDC Vaccine Adviser Is ‘Un-Fired’ Next Day, Wife Says
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