The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services assigned Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Theresa Long, who is skeptical of Kovid-19 vaccines and has no specialist training, to investigate the claim that more than 2 thousand 500 American service members who received the vaccine had died. In her sworn testimony on August 14, Long said she would examine 55 thousand adverse event reports and 2 thousand 544 deaths recorded in VAERS. Long, who stated that she was unvaccinated, drew a link between vaccines, autism and miscarriage; she claimed that Kovid vaccines caused miscarriages at rates of up to 82% and that she knew of the deaths of 28 service members. The New York Times reported that the evidence was limited. Pentagon reports emphasized that no vaccine-related deaths had been identified and that experts had not verified the VAERS data.
Why it matters
The focus of the investigation is how to assess the difference between events reported to VAERS and confirmed deaths caused by vaccines. This distinction is important for how health data, in which a report alone is not considered evidence of causation, are interpreted by the public. The fact that Long has no specialist training, along with her anti-vaccine views and the claims in her sworn testimony, raises questions about the extent to which the review will be reliable in terms of scientific methodology and independent verification. The absence of vaccine-related deaths in Pentagon reports and experts’ statements that the records had not been verified leave open the question of what evidence the investigation will use to test claims that contradict existing official findings.
Background
The U.S. is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: in the past 90 days, we have published 12 reports mentioning this name; the latest was dated September 4, 2026.