‘Will Come Back To Bite You’: Top FDA Official Asked Fauci For Vaccine Side Effect Study, Email Shows

August 16, 2026 10:21 AM ET A newly released email suggests that the nation’s top vaccine regulator encouraged Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins to leverage billions in scientific research dollars to study COVID vaccine side effects — but they never followed through on her request. In the spring of 2021, Janet Woodcock, then head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), wrote to the leaders of the National Institutes of Health — the country’s leading funder of medical science — to encourage a study into reports she had received of adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination. Woodcock had received many of these reports from “healthcare professionals,” she wrote in the email released by Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and obtained from Fauci’s government email. “The symptoms do