“Originally published in The California Globe and reprinted with permission.”

On November 29, 2025, a leaked internal FDA memo written by Vinay Prasad — the new director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) — confirmed what many parents had warned and what California officials aggressively denied: American children died because of the COVID vaccines.

The memo summarizes an FDA review of 96 pediatric deaths reported between 2021 and 2024, cases drawn from VAERS and cross-checked against records, timelines, hospitalization notes, and autopsies where available. After this review, analysts concluded that “no fewer than 10” children likely died because of the vaccine. In regulatory terms, that is a finding of causation — not correlation — and it is seismic.

Prasad — a Bay Area liberal who spent a decade at UCSF and initially supported mRNA vaccination for high-risk adults — is precisely the kind of mainstream physician California officials once told the public to trust. Yet he wrote explicitly: “This is the first time the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.”

California — the only state to pursue a statewide K–12 COVID vaccine mandate — cannot escape what this acknowledgment means.

California Led the Nation in Coercive Mandates

In October 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that all students would be required to receive the shot to attend school in person — before sufficient pediatric safety data existed and after early myocarditis warnings had already been reported by Israel and Scandinavian regulators. Two bills soon followed: SB 871, which would have added the COVID vaccine to the mandatory K–12 schedule without personal or religious belief exemptions, and SB 866, which would have allowed minors 12 and up to receive vaccines without parental consent.

Meanwhile, school districts across California had already begun imposing their own mandates. LAUSD and SDUSD led the charge, followed by Piedmont Unified, Oakland Unified, Culver City Unified, and others. These local mandates triggered immediate litigation — California law clearly reserves school vaccine-mandate authority to the Legislature or the California Department of Public Health. Nevertheless, the Newsom administration encouraged districts to “move ahead,” creating unlawful requirements that forced children out of classrooms, athletics, arts programs, and special-education services. Thousands were pushed into homeschooling, private options, or out of the state entirely; more than 400,000 residents left California during this period, many of them families refusing to comply with mandates.

Higher education followed the same coercive path. The UC system, Cal State system, and most major private universities — including Stanford, USC, Loyola Marymount, Pepperdine, Santa Clara University, and more — required vaccination for enrollment, housing, athletics, or class attendance. These policies remained long after other states abandoned them and after international regulators signaled elevated cardiac risks in young males.

As an attorney litigating several mandate cases, I watched California officials ignore every warning sign now validated by the FDA. Our pleadings included myocarditis data from Israel and Sweden, European Medicine Agency concerns, Scandinavian pauses on Moderna, expert declarations from cardiologists, and VAERS hospitalization clusters. None of it mattered. Reputation mattered more than risk.

Warnings Were There — California Chose Suppression

The FDA memo makes clear that pediatric deaths occurred during the same period officials were declaring myocarditis “mild,” “rare,” and “self-resolving.” Yet the reviewed cases tell another story: severe cardiac injury, sudden collapse, and fatal outcomes.

Prasad’s memo cites then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky claiming that the CDC “had not seen a signal,” a statement he calls “dishonest and manipulative.” Internal federal data — including VSD findings, DMED spikes, and VAERS hospitalization clusters — shows myocarditis in young males was identified as early as spring 2021.

Despite this, Biden-era federal officials continued to promote school mandates, workplace mandates, and “no-exceptions” vaccination policies throughout 2021–2024 — even as the underlying data showed clear cardiac risks to adolescents. The FDA itself delayed acknowledging the safety signal entirely until after it expanded vaccine authorization to younger boys ages 12–15.

California cited these deceptive federal assurances to justify its own coercive policies.

California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly echoed the same message, assuring families that “vaccines are safe and effective,” and that pediatric trials were “rigorous in demonstrating that the vaccine is safe and effective for children ages 5–11.” Those assurances now stand in stark contrast to this FDA memo acknowledging that previously healthy children suffered catastrophic cardiac events after vaccination.

But California’s institutions did not merely make a mistake in following federal guidance; they built a culture of suppression that made it professionally impossible to acknowledge risk even as those risks became undeniable. Transparency was discouraged, dissent punished, and the public conditioned to defend the system even when evidence contradicted it.

AB 2098 codified that intolerance. Passed in 2022, it threatened physicians with discipline for offering COVID risk-benefit opinions that strayed from the state’s preferred narrative — including warnings about myocarditis, lack of pediatric safety data, or early treatment options. The purpose was not accuracy; it was message control.

Public health leaders like Ghaly, Barbara Ferrer, Clayton Chau, and Sara Cody enforced their ideological beliefs as if they were immutable truth, dismissing dissent as extremism and treating uncertainty as heresy. They imposed sweeping mandates with absolutism — masks, tests, vaccines, exclusion from society — without humility or caution.

Now the FDA has acknowledged that vaccine-caused pediatric deaths appeared in over ten percent of the cases reviewed—and Prasad indicates that “if anything, this represents conservative coding…the real number is higher.” California officials can no longer pretend they were following an infallible scientific consensus. The evidence they suppressed, ridiculed, or ignored is now affirmed by the very institution they invoked to justify coercion.

Doubling Down Instead of Accountability

During COVID, California demanded that we “trust the CDC” and “trust the FDA,” even as those agencies downplayed myocarditis and ignored mounting safety signals. State leaders built their entire pandemic authority on the premise that federal regulators were beyond question. But now that those same agencies — under new leadership — are finally acknowledging serious harms, including fatal pediatric cases, California rejects the very institutions it once insisted the public obey.

The reason is simple: the scientific narrative California enforced with absolute certainty is collapsing. Acknowledging the FDA memo would require admitting that the mandates, messaging, and suppression of dissent harmed children. Rather than show humility, state leadership is doubling down.

Governor Newsom’s administration is advancing the Governor’s Public Health Alliance — a parallel public-health infrastructure created to preserve California’s pandemic-era orthodoxy at the very moment national health agencies are moving toward transparency, higher safety standards, and a long-overdue overhaul of vaccine regulation.

And instead of engaging with the reformers now leading HHS, CDC, and FDA — physicians and scientists calling for open data, rigorous trials, and real risk-benefit analysis — Newsom and his political allies have returned to the only playbook they know: attack the messenger instead of confronting the evidence. They are portraying RFK Jr. and federal reformers as “anti-science quacks” not because the facts support that claim, but because California cannot afford for its residents to reconsider the evidence for themselves.

But a simple question cuts through the noise: Who benefits when regulators admit harm?

Certainly not pharmaceutical companies, political leaders who mandated these products, or public-health agencies whose reputations are at stake. The only beneficiaries of transparency are the public — children, parents, patients — and the principle of informed consent itself.

What California Owes Its Children

California mandated a product that federal regulators now acknowledge killed children. That truth cannot be softened with slogans or buried beneath partisan spin. If California wants to rebuild trust, it must begin by confronting the cost of its certainty — the children harmed, the families silenced, the evidence ignored. Transparency is not a threat to public health; it is its foundation. The FDA’s admission should mark the start of accountability: real hearings, real audits, real consequences. Anything less is another betrayal.