Johnson is a whack job.
That post is garbage, and specifically it's garbage in a way worth unpacking because it mashes together two different numbers from two different things to make a third claim that nobody actually made.
Here's what's underneath it. In late November 2025, FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad wrote a memo claiming that "no fewer than 10" of 96 child deaths reported to VAERS between 2021 and 2024 were "related" to COVID vaccination. A subsequent FDA analysis dated December 5, 2025 reviewed those 96 pediatric VAERS death reports through Aug. 14, 2025, and
found no child deaths definitively linked to COVID vaccines. "No cases were classified as certain in relation to COVID-19 vaccination," and seven deaths were classified as "possibly" related, with the report noting "possible cases could also be explained by alternative etiology." Five of the seven possibly/probably cases involved myocarditis.
Johnson released that memo as part of his letter to RFK Jr. earlier this month.
NBC News + 3So the actual pediatric review is:
96 cases reviewed, 0 certain, 7 possibly or probably related. Not 39,000. Not a "study" of 39,000 child deaths.
Where does the 39,000 come from? Johnson's letter separately pointed out that there were 1,675,590 total VAERS adverse event reports following COVID vaccines, including 39,077 deaths, of which 9,329 occurred "within 2 days of vaccination." That's
all ages, not children 9,329 of 39,077 is roughly 24%, so the viral post grabbed that ratio, slapped the word "Child" on it, and pretended it was a finding from a "study." It isn't. The 39,077 is total VAERS death reports across the entire vaccinated U.S. population, hundreds of millions of people.
WorldNetDailyAnd that brings up the deeper problem the viral post is built on: VAERS is a passive, open-submission system. Anyone patient, doctor, family member, random person can submit a report, and the CDC/FDA disclaim on every page that a report does not mean the vaccine caused the event.
With hundreds of millions of doses administered, you would expect tens of thousands of deaths within 48 hours of vaccination by pure base rate alone heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, cancer progression, late-stage illness in the elderly. The "within 48 hours" framing only sounds damning if you don't know how many people die in any random 48-hour window in a population that large. That's why VAERS is described as hypothesis-generating, not causation-establishing and it's why the FDA's actual case-by-case medical review of the 96 pediatric files came back with 0 certain and 7 possibly, not "24% killed."The "media BLACKOUT" line is also just false on its face. NBC News, BioSpace, Endpoints News, and NBC New York all ran stories on it in the past week. They just didn't run the story the post wanted, because the FDA's own conclusion no child deaths definitively caused by COVID vaccination undercuts the headline. BioSpaceIf you want the steelman of Johnson's actual position (rather than the viral garbled version), it's narrower and more defensible: the December FDA memo classified some pediatric myocarditis deaths as "new safety information" under federal law, and that label arguably should have triggered a labeling update or public communication that didn't happen at the time. That's a legitimate transparency-and-process question. But it is a very different argument from "24% of 39,000 children died within 48 hours," which is what the post you got is claiming. The post took a real underlying document, ripped two unrelated numbers out of two different contexts, fused them, mislabeled the population, and added an all-caps conspiracy frame.
So yeah garbage, but in a specific and diagnosable way that's worth being able to point to line-by-line if you end up debating it.