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The GOP-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic claims “there is little doubt that the rapid development and authorization of COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives.” Its only cited evidence is two modeling studies, not real-world data.

Subcommittee Democrats claim the GOP “and their witnesses echoed extreme and debunked claims about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, including by casting doubt on whether the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives.”

The tacit agreement on COVID vaccines’ ultimate value between the majority’s updated final report, the result of a nominal subcommittee markup Wednesday, and the minority’s counter-report received less attention in mainstream media than their dispute over SARS-CoV-2’s origin, pandemic policy response and federal officials’ liability.

Subcommittee GOP leaders also touted “new evidence” the Justice Department empaneled a criminal grand jury to investigate COVID origins and subpoenaed the EcoHealth Alliance, which passed through taxpayer funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab-leak suspect.

The majority report refers to internal EcoHealth communications that mention a secret “DOJ grand jury investigation” and DOJ subpoena for its emails with “at least” WIV senior virologist Zhengli Shi through her WIV and Hotmail addresses, drawing New York Post attention.

Virtually unnoticed was the underwhelming evidence the GOP offered for its claim about COVID vaccines saving millions of lives when the pre-markup report was released Tuesday afternoon. Just the News immediately asked GOP staff whether they had anything more substantial after nearly two years leading the panel, dubbed “Coronavirus Crisis” when Democrats led it.

Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, didn’t mention vaccines in his opening statement at the markup, which was limited to voting on the amended report introduced by Wenstrup. California Rep. Raul Ruiz, the subcommittee’s top Democrat, only mentioned vaccines in calling for their “rapid development” in response to future outbreaks.

The Democrats’ report makes its own curious claim, a qualified defense of six-foot social distancing guidance credited to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Though Fauci told the subcommittee in a transcribed interview the guidance “sort of just appeared, that 6 feet is going to be the distance,” Democrats seized on his hearing testimony that Republicans “distorted” what he said and that, in the report’s words, “the recommendation had a scientific basis” based on COVID knowledge at the time.

The GOP vaccine claim shows up in the report’s section praising the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed to quickly develop vaccines, quoting top officials who were initially skeptical, and criticizing then-Democratic White House candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for spreading mistrust of the project and suggesting they would avoid jabs.

The report also credits the fast development of vaccines – which Wenstrup’s introduction admits “are now probably better characterized as therapeutics” because they cannot stop infection or transmission – to the “unique structure” of Operation Warp Speed.

That includes “limiting liability” for vaccine manufacturers, a common criticism from vaccine-injury activists who have found some sympathy in Congress but little action apart from Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, introducing liability legislation this fall.

Even as the report faults U.S. injury-compensation programs for leaving COVID vaccine-injured people in the cold, it recognizes that “limiting the liability of manufacturers also promotes the expeditious development of new and innovative vaccine technology which saves lives.”

Federal officials have refused to turn over Freedom of Information Act records on their hidden, backend vaccine-injury database, separate from the public Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, until at least spring 2026, in response to Just the News FOIA litigation.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” Vaccine Safety Research Foundation Steve Kirsch, a philanthropist once courted by Democratic presidential hopefuls who now sponsors vaccine-skeptical research, wrote on X about the millions-saved claim after Just the News inquired to the subcommittee.

He supplied links to the sources that GOP leaders left out and failed to identify as modeling studies: a two-year-old Commonwealth Fund study, not peer-reviewed, that Democrats were fond of citing in subcommittee hearings, and a peer-reviewed National Institutes of Health-funded study in Health Affairs.

The Commonwealth study speculates COVID vaccines saved 3.2 million lives and prevented 120 million infections between December 2020 and November 2022, using “a computer model of disease transmission to estimate hospitalizations and deaths averted.” (Fact-checkers rebutted President Biden’s claim that COVID vaccines stop infection a year earlier.)

The NIH-funded study, published a year earlier, used state-level vaccination data “to create a statistical model” that found vaccines prevented more than 139,000 deaths in the first five months of the jabs’ availability.

But the researchers acknowledged they could not “separately identify the roles of vaccination, natural immunity, and changes in mobility in determining the overall number of COVID-19 deaths,” only considered “population-level associations” rather than individual vaccine effectiveness, and didn’t even verify whether each mRNA jab was the first or second dose.

Subcommittee Republican staff have not answered Tuesday and Friday queries on why their cited studies are any more reliable than the Imperial College London modeling study in March 2020 that was quickly invoked worldwide to justify sweeping lockdowns.

The de facto COVID-19 policy architect Neil Ferguson predicted 550,000 U.K. deaths and 2.2 million in the U.S. “in the absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour,” but violated social distancing laws he inspired to further an affair.

The methodology of his report, which was not peer-reviewed, quickly set off alarm bells outside obeisant mainstream media coverage, with the epidemiologist admitting he relied on a 15-year-old model created to plot the spread of an influenza outbreak in Thailand and that he himself wrote its “thousands of lines of undocumented” code to model flu pandemics. 

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rebutted the estimated COVID mortality rate of 1% by Ferguson’s so-called gold standard research, estimating a 0.26% infection fatality rate as its “best estimate” scenario due to the prevalence of asymptomatic infections. 

A meta-research study by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis, a pioneer of the field and one of the first to question the quality of data informing the early COVID response, in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization estimated the IFR was “probably” under 0.20% in “most locations” as of Sept. 9, 2020, the cutoff for his reviewed studies.

A Lancet Infectious Diseases peer-reviewed paper in December 2020 emphasized the difficulty of calculating an accurate IFR because the “denominator” – total cases of a virus notable for frequently mild or nonexistent symptoms – was so evasive. 

The National University of Singapore researchers credited the early COVID outbreak on the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship as providing “quite an accurate estimate” of the case fatality rate – which excludes undiagnosed illness – of just under 1%, while acknowledging the overwhelmingly elderly passenger population on the ship would skew the CFR.