Each of the systems below supplies a different type of data for researchers to analyze. Together, they help provide a full picture of vaccine safety.
• Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS): VAERS is an early warning system managed by CDC and FDA that is designed to find possible vaccine safety issues. Patients, health care professionals, vaccine companies, and others can use VAERS to report side effects that happen after a patient received a vaccine. Some side effects might be related to vaccination while others might be a coincidence (happen by chance). VAERS helps track unusual or unexpected patterns of reporting that could mean there’s a possible vaccine safety issue that needs further evaluation.
• The Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD): VSD is a collaboration between CDC and several health care organizations across the nation. VSD uses databases of medical records to track vaccine safety and do research in large populations. By using medical records instead of self-reports, VSD can quickly study and compare data to find out if reported side effects are linked to a vaccine.
• Post-licensure Rapid Immunization Safety Monitoring System (PRISM): PRISM is part of the Sentinel Initiative, which is FDA’s national system for monitoring medical products after they’re licensed for use. PRISM focuses on vaccine safety—it uses a database of health insurance claims to identify and evaluate possible safety issues for licensed vaccines.
• Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Project (CISA): CISA is a collaboration between CDC and a national network of vaccine safety experts from medical research centers. CISA does clinical vaccine safety research and—at the request of providers—evaluates complex cases of possible vaccine side effects in specific patients.
• Biologics Effectiveness and Safety (BEST) System: A system that uses multiple data sources and rapid queries to detect or evaluate adverse events or study specific safety questions.
• Additional research and testing: The Department of Defense (DoD), the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the Indian Health Service (IHS) have systems to monitor vaccine safety and do vaccine safety research. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy (OIDP) also support ongoing research on vaccines and vaccine safety.
During emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, additional safety activities are utilized to help evaluate the data in quickly and with special populations. source
And scientists all only care about truth.
They never change their answers or testimonies or public statements with funding in mind.
Please rejoin us on planet Earth.
Lash wrote:
Quote:Please rejoin us on planet Earth.
What are you talking about?
This evening the House of Representatives passed a measure to fund the government for three months. The measure will fund the government at current levels halfway through March. It also appropriates $100 billion in disaster aid for regions hit by the storms and fires of the summer and fall, as well as $10 billion for farmers.
Getting to this agreement has exposed the power vacuum in the Republican Party and thus a crisis in the government of the United States.
This fight over funding has been brewing since Republicans took over the House of Representatives in January 2023. From their first weeks in office, when they launched the longest fight over a House speaker since 1860, the Republicans were bitterly divided. MAGA Republicans want to slash government so deeply that it will no longer be able to regulate business, provide a basic safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights. Establishment Republicans also want to cut the government, but they recognize that with Democrats in charge of the Senate and a Democratic president, they cannot get everything they want.
As Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post recounted, when the nation hit the debt ceiling in spring 2023, Republicans used it to demand that the Democrats cut the budget back to 2022 levels. Democrats objected that they had raised the debt ceiling without conditions three times under Trump and that Republicans had agreed to the budget to which the new Republicans were demanding cuts.
The debt ceiling is a holdover from World War I, when Congress stopped micromanaging the instruments the Treasury used to borrow money and instead simply set a debt limit. That procedure began to be a political weapon after the tax cuts first during President George W. Bush’s term and then under President Donald Trump reduced government revenues to 16.5% of the nation’s gross domestic product while spending has risen to nearly 23%. This gap means the country must borrow money to meet its budget appropriations, eventually hitting the ceiling.
The Treasury has never defaulted on the U.S. debt. A default would mean the government could not meet its obligations, and would, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned in 2023, “cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.”
As journalist Borage recalled, when then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to raise the debt ceiling in June 2023 in exchange for the Fiscal Responsibility Act that kept the 2024 and 2025 budgets at 2022 levels, House extremists turned on him. In September those extremists, led by then-representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) threw McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair—the only time in American history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. Weeks later, the Republicans finally voted to make Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaker, but Johnson had to rely on Democratic votes to fund the government for fiscal year 2024.
For 2025, Johnson and the Republicans said they wanted more cuts than the Fiscal Responsibility Act set out, and even still, the extremists filled the appropriations bills with culture-wars poison pills. Johnson couldn’t get any measures through the House, and instead kept the government operating with Democratic votes for continuing resolutions that funded the government first through September 30, and then through today, December 20.
At the same time, a farm bill, which Congress usually passes every five years and which outlines the country’s agriculture and food policies including supplemental nutrition (formerly known as food stamps), expired in 2023 and has also been continued through temporary extensions.
On Tuesday, December 17, Johnson announced that Republican and Democratic congressional leaders had hashed out another bipartisan continuing resolution that kept spending at current levels through March 14 while also providing about $100 billion in disaster relief and about $10 billion in assistance for farmers. It also raised congressional salaries and kicked the government funding deadline through March 14. With bipartisan backing, it seemed like a last-minute reprieve from a holiday government shutdown.
Extremist Republicans immediately opposed the measure, but this was not a surprise. There were likely enough Democratic votes to pass it without them.
What WAS a surprise was that on Wednesday, billionaire Elon Musk, who holds billions in federal contracts, frightened Republican lawmakers into killing the continuing resolution by appearing to threaten to fund primary challengers against those who voted for the resolution. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he tweeted. Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”
Musk’s opposition appeared to shock President-elect Donald Trump into speaking up against the bill about thirteen hours after Musk’s first stand, when he and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance also came out against the measure. But, perhaps not wanting to seem to be following in Musk’s wake, Trump then added a new and unexpected demand. He insisted that any continuing resolution raise or get rid of the debt ceiling throughout his term, although the debt ceiling isn’t currently an issue. Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for a measure that did not suspend the debt ceiling.
Trump’s demand highlighted that his top priority is not the budget deficit he promised during the campaign to cut by 33%, but rather freeing himself up to spend whatever he wishes: after all, he added about a quarter of the current national debt during his first term. He intends to extend his 2017 tax cuts after they expire in 2025, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that those cuts will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. He has also called for the deportation of 11 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants and possibly others, at a cost estimate of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
House Republicans killed the bipartisan bill and, yesterday afternoon, introduced a new bill, rewritten along the lines Musk and Trump had demanded. They had not shown it to Democrats. It cut out a number of programs, including $190 million designated for pediatric cancer research, but it included the $110 billion in disaster aid and aid to farmers. It also raised the debt ceiling for the next two years, during which Republicans will control Congress.
"All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country and vote 'YES' for this Bill, TONIGHT!" Trump wrote.
But extremist Republicans said no straight out of the box, and Democrats, who had not been consulted on the bill, wanted no part of it. Republicans immediately tried to blame the Democrats for the looming government shutdown. Ignoring that Musk had manufactured the entire crisis and that members of his own party refused to support the measure, Trump posted, “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will.”
Then, as Johnson went back to the drawing board, Musk posted on X his support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) neo-Nazi party. This raised back to prominence Trump’s having spent November 5, Election Day, at Mar-a-Lago with members of AfD, who said they are hoping to be close with the incoming Trump administration.
Today, social media exploded with the realization that an unelected billionaire from South Africa who apparently supports fascism was able to intimidate Republican legislators into doing his bidding. In this last week, Trump has threatened former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) with prosecution for her work as a member of Congress and has sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that was unfavorable to him before the November election. Those actions are classic authoritarian moves to consolidate power, but to those not paying close attention they were perhaps less striking than the reality that Musk appears to have taken over for Trump as the incoming president.
As CNN’s Erin Burnett pointed out “the world’s richest man, right now, holding the country hostage,” Democrats worked to call attention to this crisis. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA) said: “We reached an agreement…and a tweet changed all of it? Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like if every time the Congress works its will and then there's a tweet…from an individual who has no official portfolio who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary, and they succumb?”
The chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray (D-WA), said she would stay in Washington, D.C., through Christmas “because we’re not going to let Elon Musk run the government. Put simply, we should not let an unelected billionaire rip away research for pediatric cancer so he can get a tax cut or tear down policies that help America outcompete China because it could hurt his bottom line. We had a bipartisan deal—we should stick to it…. The American people do not want chaos or a costly government shutdown all because an unelected billionaire wants to call the shots.”
Republicans, too, seemed dismayed at Musk’s power. Representative Rich McCormick (R-GA) told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “Last time I checked, Elon Musk doesn’t have a vote in Congress. Now, he has influence and he’ll put pressure on us to do whatever he thinks the right thing is for him, but I have 760,000 people that voted for me to do the right thing for them. And that’s what matters to me.”
Tonight the House passed a measure much like the one Musk and Trump had undermined, funding the government and providing the big-ticket disaster and farm relief but not raising or getting rid of the debt ceiling. According to Jennifer Scholtes of Politico, Republican leadership tried to get party members on board by promising to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion early in 2025 while also cutting $2.5 trillion in “mandatory” spending, which covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP nutrition assistance.
The vote in the House was 366 to 34, with one abstention. The measure passed thanks to Democratic votes, with 196 Democrats voting yes in addition to the 170 Republicans who voted yes (because of the circumstances of its passage, the measure needed two thirds of the House to vote yes). No Democrats voted against the measure, while 34 Republicans abandoned their speaker to vote no. As Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News wrote: “Dem[ocrat]s saved Republicans here.” Democrats also kept the government functioning to help ordinary Americans.
The fiasco of the past few days is a political blow to Trump. Musk overshadowed him, and when Trump demanded that Republicans free him from the debt ceiling, they ignored him. Meanwhile, extremist Republicans are calling for Johnson’s removal, but it is unclear who could earn the votes to take his place. And, since the continuing resolution extends only until mid-March, and the first two months of Trump’s term will undoubtedly be consumed with the Senate confirmation hearings for his appointees—some of whom are highly questionable—it looks like this chaos will continue into 2025.
The Senate passed the measure as expected just after midnight. Nonetheless, it appears that that chaos, and the extraordinary problem of an unelected billionaire who hails from South Africa calling the shots in the Republican Congress, will loom over the new year.
Re: blatham (Post 7386755)
Yes, there are very, very few who know the truth.
And even fewer dare to tell it.
We should actually be grateful that she posts the truth here. Shouldn't we? Wink
Re: blatham (Post 7386755)
Not to be difficult, but I believe what she's saying is that you (and hightor) are saying things that you quite demonstrably never said... In a continuing crusade presenting cynicism in skeptic's clothing, both times she ignored an argument, and proceeded instead to argue against ridiculous, absolutist statements that neither of you made. It's bush league Tucker Carlson bullshit; gaslighting + comically transparent strawmanning
Shortly after midnight last night, the Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund the government through March 14, 2025. The previous continuing resolution ran out at midnight, but as Bloomberg’s congressional budget reporter Steven Dennis explained, “midnight is NOT a hard deadline for a government shutdown. A shutdown occurs only when [the Office of Management and Budget] issues a shutdown order, which they traditionally will NOT issue if a bill is moving toward completion.”
President Joe Biden signed the bill this morning, praising the agreement for keeping the government open, providing urgently needed disaster relief, and providing the money to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after a container ship hit it in March 2024, causing it to collapse.
“This agreement represents a compromise, which means neither side got everything it wanted. But it rejects the accelerated pathway to a tax cut for billionaires that Republicans sought, and it ensures the government can continue to operate at full capacity,” Biden said in a statement. “That’s good news for the American people, especially as families gather to celebrate this holiday season.”
Passing continuing resolutions to fund the government is usually unremarkable, but this fight showed some lines that will stretch into the future.
First of all, it showed the unprecedented influence of billionaire private individual Elon Musk over the Republicans who in 2025 will control the United States government. Musk has a strong financial interest in the outcome of discussions, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he had included Musk as well as President-elect Trump in the negotiation of the original bipartisan funding bill.
Then Musk blew up the agreement by issuing what was an apparent threat to fund primary challengers to any Republican who voted for it. He apparently scuttled the measure on his own hook, since Trump took about thirteen hours to respond to his torpedoing it.
Musk expressed willingness to leave the government unfunded for a month, apparently unconcerned that a shutdown would send hundreds of thousands of government workers deemed nonessential into temporary leave without pay. This would include about 800,000 civilian employees of the Pentagon, about 17,000 people from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and those who staff the nation’s national parks, national monuments, and other federal sites.
Federal workers considered essential would have to continue to work without pay. These essential workers include air traffic controllers and federal law enforcement officers. Military personnel would also have to continue to work without pay.
Taking away paychecks is always wrenching, but to do it right before the winter holidays would devastate families. It would hurt the economy, too, since for many retailers the holiday season is when their sales are highest. Musk—who doesn’t answer to any constituents—seemed untroubled at the idea of hurting ordinary Americans. ″‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,” he tweeted.
In the end, Congress passed a bill much like the one Musk scuttled, but one of the provisions that Congress stripped out of the old bill was extraordinarily important to Musk. As David Dayen explained in The Prospect, the original agreement had an “outbound investment” provision that restricted the ability of Americans to invest in technology factories in China. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) had collaborated on the measure, hoping to keep cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, as well as the jobs they would create, in America rather than let companies move them to China.
As Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) explained, Musk is building big factories in China and wants to build an AI data center there, even though it could endanger U.S. security. McGovern charged that Musk’s complaints about the spending in the bill were cover for his determination to tank the provision that would limit his ability to move technology and business to China. And, he noted, it worked. The outbound investment provision was stripped out of the bill before it passed.
In The Prospect, Robert Kuttner explained this huge win for Musk, as well as other provisions that were stripped from the bill before it passed. After years of fighting, Tami Luhby of CNN explained, Congress agreed to reform the system in which pharmacy benefit managers act as middlemen between pharmaceutical companies and insurers, employers, and government officials. The original bill increased transparency and provided that pharmacy benefit managers would be compensated with flat fees rather than compensation tied to the price of drugs. The measures related to pharmacy benefit managers were stripped out of the measure that passed.
That lost reform shows another line that will stretch into the future: Trump’s team is working for big business. As Kuttner puts it, Trump, who is allegedly a populist leader, tanked a bipartisan spending bill in order to shield the Chinese investments of the richest man in the world and to protect the profits of second-largest pharmacy benefit manager UnitedHealth Group, the corporation for which murdered executive Brian Thompson worked.
Other measures stripped from the original bill were five different bills to combat childhood cancer. The idea that sick children were among the first victims of the funding showdown sparked widespread outrage. While the Senate did not return the entire $190 million worth of funding to the continuing resolution, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) pushed the chamber to pass the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0, devoting $63 million to extend the original measure that was passed in 2014 in honor of a Virginia girl who advocated for cancer funding until her death in 2013 at the age of ten. Representative Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) had shepherded the measure through the House in November, when it received only four no votes, all from Republicans.
The Senate also passed a measure repealing two laws that have curtailed Social Security benefits for teachers, firefighters, local police officers, and other public sector workers. The Social Security Fairness Act repeals the 1983 Windfall Elimination Provision, which cuts Social Security benefits for workers who receive government pensions, and the 1977 Government Pension Offset, which reduces Social Security benefits for spouses and survivors of people who themselves receive a government pension.
The House passed the Social Security Fairness Act in November by a vote of 327 to 75, with 72 Republicans and three Democrats voting no. In the Senate the vote was 76 to 20, with 27 Republicans voting yes and 20 voting no. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) proposed offsetting the cost of the measure by raising the age of eligibility for Social Security to 70 over 12 years. That proposal got just 3 votes. Even those Republicans who would like to cut Social Security told Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis that such cuts would have to be bipartisan “because the programs are too popular for Republicans to cut on their own.”
Both the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0 and the Social Security Fairness Act had strong bipartisan support. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) first introduced a measure in 2005 to address the “horrendous inequity” in Social Security benefits under the previous system. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), famous as a champion of workers, pointed out that the new law will benefit bus drivers and cafeteria workers in the public schools, as well as the teachers.
And that bipartisanship on issues about which lawmakers feel strong public pressure is another line that could stretch into the future.
Finally, the struggle over the continuing resolution shows, once again, that Trump is weaker than his team claims. While Musk got the Chinese investment restrictions stripped out of the final bill, Congress passed the measure without Trump’s demand for freedom from the debt ceiling in it. This failure comes after Senate Republicans rejected Trump’s choice for Senate majority leader and after his first nominee for attorney general, former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), had so little support he was forced to withdraw from consideration.
Trump has been angling to get Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Florida senatorship that will be vacated if Senator Marco Rubio becomes secretary of state, despite her lack of any previous experience in elected office. But that plan, too, seems to have gone awry.
Today, Lara Trump announced: “After an incredible amount of thought, contemplation, and encouragement from so many, I have decided to remove my name from consideration for the United States Senate.”
The recurring theme of my writing the past few weeks is that Donald Trump is not invulnerable. His win did not upend the rules of American politics or render him immune to political misfortune. Like everything we experience, his victory was contingent — a function of specific people in specific circumstances making specific choices. To change any of these variables is to change the ultimate destination.
To put this a little differently, whatever you think of the nature of his win, Donald Trump is still Donald Trump. He is overwhelmingly strong in some areas and ruinously deficient in others. He holds so much sway over his supporters that, as he famously put it nearly 10 years ago, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose “any voters.” He’s almost incapable of managing himself or the people around him. His White House was notoriously chaotic and he remains as impulsive, dysfunctional and undisciplined as he was during his first term.
There was, in the first weeks after the election, some notion that this had changed, that we were looking at a new Trump, ready to lead a united Republican Party. But as we’ve seen over the past few days, this was premature. First, the Republican Party is far from unified, as their struggle to pass a bill to continue to fund the government showed. It took days. What’s more, Trump is not alone as a figure of influence among congressional Republicans; Elon Musk has imposed himself onto the president-elect as a consigliere of sorts and is trying to build a political empire for himself via X, the social media platform he essentially bought for this purpose.
It was from X, in fact, that Musk urged Republicans to kill the continuing resolution, throwing the House into chaos and prompting Trump to escalate the confrontation to save face, demanding a new resolution that suspended or raised the debt limit. On Thursday evening, Speaker Mike Johnson tried to pass that bill. But a number of Republicans broke ranks, and unified Democratic opposition meant it was dead on arrival.
Together, Trump and Musk have not only walked the Republican Party into an otherwise needless defeat; they also have given Democrats the jump start they apparently needed to behave like a real opposition. According to Axios, House Democrats even broke into chants of “Hell no” when confronted with proposed Republican spending cuts.
That’s more like it.
The absurd battle over the continuing resolution should stand as a vivid reminder that Trump is in a much more precarious position than he may have appeared to be in immediately after the election. With a 41 percent favorability rating, he remains unpopular. He cannot count on a functional majority in the House. He has no plan to deliver the main thing, lower prices, that voters want. And one of his most important allies, Musk, is an agent of chaos he can’t seem to control.
There have been enough presidents that there are a few models for what a well-run administration might look like. This is not one of them.
It will be interesting to see the public and political reactions to Trump's initial actions after he takes office.
The contrast with his predecessor will likely be refreshing and stark.
The election results and now awakened public understanding suggest this might be a poor strategy.
So far the sighs appear to be very favorable.
Now angry and thrashing about, perhaps in an effort to restore the illusion of autonomy.
That said he has done a good job diluting the effects of his pardons for son...
Meanwhile our friend and neighbor, Canada appears to be approaching a similar transition.
Musk/Trump
