‘Absolutely Criminal’: Mary Holland Slams FDA Failures After Leaked Memo Links COVID Shots to Child Deaths – childrenshealthdefense.org

 

The FDA’s leaked internal memo announcing that “no fewer than 10” children died because of the COVID-19 vaccine is “absolutely criminal stuff,” Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said this week on “The Jimmy Dore Show.”

The memo — attributed to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Dr. Vinay Prasad and leaked late last week — concluded that among the 96 deaths of 7- to 16-year-olds reviewed by agency staff, at least some were caused by the shot.

Holland told Dore that Prasad “wrings his hands” in the document, then essentially asks how the agency could be recommending something that killed people. “This may be news for him to be dealing with,” Holland said. “It’s not news overall.”

Dore agreed, referencing the 2022 book “Cause Unknown,” which documented a sharp rise in deaths among working-age adults in late 2021 — most of which were not attributed to COVID-19.

Holland noted a U.S. Senate investigation in May that concluded federal officials downplayed the risk of myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccines.

Holland and Dore also cited additional research — including a 2022 peer-reviewed report on the risks of COVID-19 boosters to young men — indicating that concerns about vaccine benefits and harms have been building for years.

“It’s pretty clear that having not come forward with this evidence until now, at the end of 2025, they were going out of their way at the FDA not to see this information,” Holland said.

“This is absolutely criminal stuff,” she added. “This is stuff that killed children.”

Parents ‘were lied to … again and again by every major social institution’

Dore suggested that parents bear some responsibility for allowing their kids to receive a shot now implicated in fatal outcomes.

Holland pushed back:

“They were lied to … again and again by every major social institution …

“People are going to assume that these institutions of trust are telling them the truth — the church, the media, the government, the doctors, the universities. It’s hard for people to believe that all of these groups could be conspiring to lie to them.”

Holland said the memo is powerful precisely because it comes from an agency people have long trusted. As institutions like the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services start to change course — and outlets like The New York Times report on it — people will finally realize they weren’t being told the full truth, she said.

She predicted that this shift could mark a tipping point in public opinion, particularly around children’s vaccines.

Memo calls for ‘real science’

According to the FDA internal memo, future vaccine approvals must be directed toward “evidence-based medicine.”

Prasad wrote that authorizations for pregnant women must rely on trials that actually include pregnant women, that pneumonia vaccines must show a reduction in pneumonia rather than just antibody levels, and that the flu shot update process is an “evidence-based catastrophe” in need of overhaul.

He also called for better data on giving multiple vaccines simultaneously.

“They’re basically saying we’re going to have to do real science,” Holland said.

This means “randomized trials … with real controls,” she added, noting that many vaccine trials give the control group another vaccine rather than a neutral saline placebo. Using a control shot that can also produce side effects, she argued, makes it harder to see safety signals unique to the vaccine being tested.

“They made real science impossible,” Holland said.

Holland said that board-certified internist Dr. Meryl Nass told The Defender that the leaked memo was merely calling for “what the FDA’s rules and regs already call for: honest science.”

Memo: ‘We do not know’ if shots saved more children than they harmed

“For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children,” the memo stated. It also conceded the central unanswered question of the pandemic vaccine campaign: “We do not know if we saved lives on balance.”

Holland called that admission “outrageous.”

“We don’t have the science,” she told Dore. When it comes to the data on COVID-19 vaccines, “we don’t really know whether these … saved more lives or killed more lives.”

Holland sees the memo as “a beginning, not an end.” She said the FDA’s problems extend beyond COVID-19. She and Dore both blamed a system they view as captured by pharmaceutical funding and conflicted regulators who routinely enter industry jobs.

The conversation also shifted to aluminum adjuvants, autoimmune conditions and the growing childhood vaccine schedule — issues Holland and Dore framed as part of a broader “racket” benefiting drugmakers.

“We now have an explosion of the vaccine schedule,” Holland said. “At the exact same time, we have an explosion of allergies and autoimmune disorders in children and very profitable drugs to treat allergies and immunity,” Holland said.

The leaked memo surfaced just days before the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meetings on Dec. 4-5. Holland suggested it may have been intended to “prime the pump” inside public health circles by signaling that the shots cause harm, though she noted COVID-19 vaccines are not on ACIP’s agenda.

What truly matters is what happens next, Holland said, “I’m happy to see this memo, but … can they push through the changes that need to be pushed through?”

Watch ‘The Jimmy Dore Show’ episode here: