The president of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists blocked an email from CHD’s Reform Pharma initiative rather than explaining why the organization keeps pushing the COVID-19 shots for pregnant women.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.| 05/02/24 | The Defender – CHD
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) missed a May 1 deadline to explain why the organization recommends COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women despite growing evidence that they pose a serious risk.
Reform Pharma, a Children’s Health Defense (CHD) initiative, sent ACOG a letter on March 22 outlining the extensive and mounting scientific research documenting the risks of the vaccines to mothers and infants.
The letter also addressed grant money ACOG accepted from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The funding was contingent on the organization’s full compliance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) guidance endorsing the vaccine during pregnancy.
The grant also stipulated that ACOG admonish doctors who failed to follow CDC protocols and track women who declined the vaccine, then target them with follow-up pressure to get the shot.
Reform Pharma demanded ACOG end its practice of recommending COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women and explain why it has continued to push the shot until now.
The letter stated:
“It’s time for ACOG to reconcile and admit its mistake. … Our team demands that ACOG stop intimidating and misleading both physicians and pregnant women. …
“It is imperative that ACOG take proper action now to prevent needless further injury and death, as it is under a legal, ethical, and moral obligation to stop the shots!”
After ACOG didn’t respond, Reform Pharma sent a follow-up letter on April 22 via certified mail and email to the ACOG president and its chief legal officer.
The letter gave ACOG until May 1 to explain, in writing, why it continues to push the COVID-19 vaccines.
ACOG President Verda J. Hicks responded by blocking Reform Pharma’s email.
An automated out-of-office reply was the only response from the organization’s chief legal officer, Molly Meegan.
“The fact that the ACOG president blocked us shows that they are not even willing to have a conversation to explain why they continue to push COVID-19 shots on pregnant women despite mounting scientific evidence of the safety risks,” Reform Pharma co-director Amy Miller told The Defender.
Reform Pharma continues working to publicize what it says is ACOG’s corruption.
“The American people need to know that ACOG is using its authority and influence to push dangerous COVID-19 shots on pregnant women but failed to disclose its backdoor deal with the CDC,” Justine Tanguay, an attorney and Reform Pharma’s co-director, told The Defender.
“Sacrificing the lives and health of pregnant women and their unborn babies in exchange for money is unacceptable,” she added.
Reform Pharma’s mission is to systematically end corruption in Big Pharma and restore integrity to the U.S. healthcare system.
“Reform Pharma is doing critically important work shining a light on organizations like ACOG which purport to represent the interests of their member physicians and the patients those physicians treat,” Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel and a signatory to the letter, told The Defender.
“In reality, money talks, and it appears that payments and incentives from pharmaceutical companies may influence and capture such organizations.”
ACOG a ‘massively powerful’ organization that dominates maternal-fetal health
ACOG is a “massively powerful” organization with 60,000 members, maternal-fetal medicine expert Dr. James Thorp told The Defender.
The professional membership organization for obstetricians and gynecologists produces practice guidelines, educational materials and initiatives to improve women’s health, according to its website.
It is also — along with the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM) and American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ABOG) — a key gatekeeper organization for the field of obstetrics and gynecology, exercising tremendous power over the practices and norms among its members who are practitioners in women’s health, Thorp said.
According to Reform Pharma, ACOG takes its marching orders from Big Pharma and public health agencies.
“It functions primarily as a shill for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and, in particular, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — both lobbying arms for the pharmaceutical industry,” Reform Pharma wrote in its letter.
This became even more concerning once ACOG started promoting the COVID-19 vaccines, Reform Pharma said.
When the vaccines came on the market in December 2020, ACOG held a neutral position on vaccination during pregnancy, recommending pregnant women “be free to make their own decision regarding COVID-19 vaccination.”
That changed in July 2021, when the organization began encouraging its members to “enthusiastically recommend vaccination to their patients,” after accepting $11 million in grant money from HHS and CDC to adopt and promote the agencies’ positions on COVID-19 to its members.
“If ACOG should waver or fail to toe the line, ACOG would be required to return all the grant money it received,” according to Reform Pharma’s letter.
“ACOG made a deal with the devil and willingly sacrificed the health of pregnant women and their unborn babies in exchange for money,” Reform Pharma said.
Reform Pharma also accused ACOG of pressuring and intimidating doctors into strongly recommending the vaccine to their patients and directing them to “harass” women who refused until they capitulated.
Attorney Maggie Thorp, who last year identified the HHS grant funding — which she told The Defender is now up to $17 million since the COVID-19 pandemic period began — said she believes the CDC is just using ACOG as its mouthpiece.
Based on her analysis of the documents acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request, Maggie Thorp said the collaboration between the public health agency and the private organization is so tight that it was “hard to identify where CDC ended and where ACOG began.”
She said HHS is using ACOG to do what it cannot — “dictate the content of private conversations that happen between doctors and their pregnant patients.”
In that sense, Maggie Thorp said, HHS is “using ACOG to quell doctors’ free speech and their ability to express dissent.”
As a result, she said, patients don’t get access to the information they need to give “true, valid informed consent.”
James Thorp said that ACOG then collaborates with its partner organizations, SMFM, ABOG, and the Federation of State Medical Boards, which can take away doctors’ medical licenses or accreditation if they don’t comply, as the federation openly said it would in a July 2021 letter.
“They have the power to fire doctors or remove their accreditation from the medical board. That destroys an obstetrician,” he said. “So it’s extraordinarily intimidating.”
‘Sad’ that ACOG ‘ignores the science’
Reform Pharma provided ACOG with an extensively footnoted overview of current science showing the risks COVID-19 shots pose to pregnant women and the general population.
For example, studies have shown that the vaccine can pass through the blood-brain barrier and the placenta.
Early reporting in 2021 by the CDC’s Dr. Tom Shimabukuro in the New England Journal of Medicine claiming the shots were safe based on the CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and Vaccine Safety Monitoring System (V-safe) data was statistically flawed, the letter stated.
Shimabukuro concluded there were no “obvious safety signals” among pregnant women who received the vaccine. However, he presented the numbers in a misleading manner that obscured the actual rate of spontaneous abortions.
According to Reform Pharma’s letter:
“Failure to disclose the true incidence of spontaneous abortion is at best gross incompetence and at worst malfeasance. The true incidence of spontaneous abortion [in his statistics, among first- and second-trimester pregnancies] is alarming, ranging between 82% to 91%.”
Early research also linked the shot to “autism-like behaviors” in newborn rats, indicating the shot could complicate neurodevelopment and underscoring the need for more studies.
Several studies in top journals have shown that nursing mothers shed the spike protein in their breast milk, causing potentially serious adverse reactions in their newborn babies.
And, according to the letter, the COVID-19 shots pose safety risks for all people that also extend beyond complications associated with pregnancy. That data has been published extensively in places ranging from VAERS to peer-reviewed studies and beyond — sources readily available to anyone at ACOG who cares to investigate.
Given the extensive evidence summarized in the letter, “It is sad that ACOG appears not to be doing a deep dive into all the science concerning COVID-19 injections, instead taking the word of the pharmaceutical companies themselves and the FDA and CDC, which similarly rely on pharma science,” Mack Rosenberg said.
“Particularly tragic is the failure of ACOG to acknowledge and investigate the important evidence from patients themselves of the tragic impact these injections have had on pregnant women, their babies and their families,” she added.
“Pregnant women should never take this vaccine,” said James Thorp, who also has extensively documented the literature on the dangers of the COVID-19 shots for pregnant women.
“It isn’t even really a vaccine,” he said. “It’s an experimental genetic therapy with absolutely zero long-term follow-up. This is unprecedented. This is a complete violation of the golden rule of pregnancy.”
‘Wrongdoers will be held accountable’
The “public health emergency” has been officially over since May 11, 2023, and it has been demonstrated that vaccines don’t stop transmission and that there is extensive evidence regarding risks to pregnant women and all people, Reform Pharma wrote.
That means, “the only explanation for ACOG continuing to push this poison on pregnant women and their unborn children is that the organization is ‘bought off,’” the letter said. “Wrongdoers will be held accountable.”
Reform Pharma reiterated its concerns in the second letter, but aside from the blocked email and out-of-office notifications, ACOG has not responded.
Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.