The federal agency that oversees workplace safety exempted healthcare employers from reporting workers’ adverse reactions to mandated Covid-19 vaccines, according to a healthcare industry whistle-blower who alerted The Defender

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued the directive on June 28, 2021, to encourage vaccination during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The directive also stated that OSHA, a division of the US Department of Labour, would not track workers’ Covid-19 vaccine adverse events – even though it acknowledged that the vaccines may cause injuries that would require employees to take time off work.

A Labour Department official confirmed for The Defender that OSHA didn’t track Covid-19 vaccine injuries and said those policies remained in place until February 2025.

OSHA also outlined its Covid-19 reporting policy on its website’s frequently asked questions page for Covid-19, which stated: “OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving Covid-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivise employers’ vaccination efforts. As a result, OSHA does not intend to enforce … recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side-effects from Covid-19 vaccination.”

The policy was removed from the website after The Defender contacted OSHA earlier this month. However, it is visible on an archived version of the webpage from September 1, under the heading, “Vaccine Related.”

Zowe Smith, a former medical coder for an Arizona hospital, called OSHA’s policy “especially inflammatory” and “an admission they know the vaccine is not safe and carries a risk of injury serious enough to affect one’s ability to work.”

Legal and medical experts suggested OSHA’s policies may have concealed the true extent of Covid-19 vaccine-related injuries in the US, denied American healthcare workers informed consent and violated federal law.

Policies implemented under the Biden administration forced millions of US healthcare workers to choose between getting the experimental Covid-19 vaccine or losing their jobs. Under OSHA’s 2021 directive, healthcare employers and OSHA’s compliance safety and health officers were not obliged to keep track of employees’ adverse events related to the Covid-19 shots.

“So as not to discourage vaccination, employers are not required to record instances of adverse events to vaccinations on the OSHA 300 log effective through May 2022,” the directive stated. The OSHA 300 log is a form for employers to report workplace-related injuries.

According to the same directive, OSHA would not cite healthcare employers for failure to comply with workplace injury recordkeeping requirements regarding “worker side effects from a Covid-19 vaccination through May 2022.”

“To require employers to report non-symptomatic Covid-19 cases but not severe adverse vaccine reactions diametrically contradicts OSHA’s most basic purpose,” said Christopher Dreisbach, legal affairs director for React19, a group advocating on behalf of Covid-19 vaccine injury victims.

“This uncovered directive is just another example of the systemic willful blindness that pervaded the prior administration,” he said.

Attorney Greg Glaser said the directive was not “a passive oversight, but an active, deliberate policy to manipulate public perception by withholding safety data.” He added: “This alone is a scandal – a federal agency prioritising vaccination propaganda over workplace safety and transparency. OSHA’s mission is to ensure safe workplaces. By directing employers not to record vaccine injuries, they violated their own mandate and betrayed public trust.”

Charlene Delfico, New Jersey state chair of the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group for people adversely affected by Covid-19-related policies, said the directive is “proof of a cover-up.”

“By silencing injury reports, OSHA denied workers their rights, erased their suffering from the record and shielded corporations from liability. … This was institutionalised gaslighting. This was not about safety – it was about hiding the truth,” Delfico said.

SHA’s policy for reporting Covid-19 vaccine reactions differs from its policies for reporting adverse events related to other shots, such as the smallpox vaccine.

“Why was Covid-19 given special exemption? This double standard proves the policy was political, not scientific,” Glaser said.

Danielle Baker, formerly a certified hospice and palliative care registered nurse, was injured after her employer coerced her into getting the Covid-19 vaccine in 2021. Baker is now permanently disabled.

Baker said OSHA’s policies show a “blatant disregard to uphold its duty and function to workplace safety.”

Some health and medical experts said OSHA’s policies denied healthcare workers the right to informed consent.

“OSHA substantially encouraged Covid-19 vaccination, thus vaccine victims did not feel free to make a choice over vaccination,” said Dr Peter McCullough, a cardiologist.

Scott C. Tips, president of the National Health Federation, agreed. “There can be no informed consent in such a data-blocked environment and, as such, OSHA’s actions in withholding this data were criminal,” he said.

In a September 15 email, a Labour Department spokesperson told The Defender that OSHA developed its Covid-19 Healthcare ETS in accordance with a January 2021 executive order by former President Joe Biden on protecting the health and safety of workers.

Although Biden’s executive order did not specifically address vaccination, it called for a review of “the enforcement efforts of [OSHA] related to Covid-19” and the identification of “any short-, medium-, and long-term changes that could be made to better protect workers and ensure equity in enforcement.”

According to the spokesperson, publication of the ETS “served as a notice of proposed rulemaking, thus initiating the rulemaking process for a permanent rule on Covid-19.”

But on December 27, 2021, OSHA determined that “it could not complete a permanent rule in a timeframe approaching the one contemplated by the OSHA Act,” leading OSHA to stop enforcing the reporting requirement for Covid-19 vaccine injuries, the spokesperson said.

“OSHA subsequently terminated the rulemaking on January 15, 2025. On February 5, 2025, OSHA announced that it would no longer enforce the few reporting and recordkeeping provisions that remained in effect. The Covid-19 deregulatory proposed rule is open for public comment” in the Federal Register, the spokesperson stated.

Smith said aborted rulemaking procedures are common practice: “There is a trend in public health policymaking to post announcements in the Federal Register to make them appear as official laws. Announcements are worded in such a way as to sound as if the announcement has already been made official policy, subject to enforcement. However, there is a process for turning policy announcements into official regulations that is often not followed.

“The interim, public review process, is often not made public or impossibly short, followed by omitting the review and other final meetings before the policy can be adopted officially by the agency in question.”

The spokesperson acknowledged that OSHA did not keep track of Covid-19 vaccine-related adverse events, stating: “Detailed case reports are available for calendar years 2023 and 2024 that include a few records describing vaccine adverse events, primarily from flu vaccines.

“OSHA has not conducted analyses on vaccine adverse reactions in workers but makes these records accessible online for those interested in performing their own analyses.”

The spokesperson referred The Defender to OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application. The site provides downloadable spreadsheets of raw data from injury reports submitted to OSHA, but there was no immediately apparent way to search for reports about vaccine injuries in these datasets.

Glaser said the Labour Department’s response was “a masterclass in obfuscation.” He said OSHA “admitted they never analysed the data and redirected you to perform your own analysis, an impossible task when they ensured that data was never properly collected in the first place.”

McCullough agreed, calling the department’s response “evasive.” He said, “All US citizens should be concerned.”

Glaser said the information the department’s spokesperson shared reveals “a coordinated policy to suppress data on Covid-19 vaccine injuries.” He added: “For nearly three years after the original May 2022 cut-off, OSHA continued to enforce aspects of the ETS except for the requirement to log vaccine injuries. This wasn’t an oversight; it was a sustained effort to bury data.

“Why did OSHA continue non-enforcement until 2025? Was this because injury reports were mounting, and they wanted to avoid creating a paper trail? … Was there pressure from pharmaceutical lobbyists? Did political appointees orchestrate this to protect the vaccine narrative?”

Dr Mary Talley Bowden, an ear, nose and throat specialist, said, “OSHA’s directive to employers to ignore suspected injuries from the Covid-19 shots contradicts [Centres for Disease Control and Prevention] rules requiring providers to report most Covid-19 shot reactions to VAERS.” VAERS is the US government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

Bowden said it was “not surprising,” as none of her Covid-19 vaccine-injured patients “were reported to VAERS by other providers, much less OSHA.”

Smith said providers at the hospital where she worked during the Covid-19 pandemic “were unanimously in denial that any new conditions presenting after Covid-19 vaccination were adverse events related to the vaccine.” Instead, “they documented it was just Covid-19 symptoms.”

She added: “It was an officially supported and established trend during the pandemic to deny any causative relationship between new-onset medical condition and Covid-19 vaccination. No ICD-10 code existed specifically for reporting adverse events, injuries and death from Covid-19 vaccines. This had the effect of obscuring and hiding safety signals and data from the public.”

For Baker, OSHA’s policies resulted in real-world harm by hiding the extent of Covid-19 vaccine-related injuries from the public. “If they didn’t opt out of accepting reports, would we have had a clearer, real-time picture of the extent of damages done?” Baker asked.

“The effect it had on employees inevitably made it difficult or impossible to report injuries related to Covid-19 vaccines,” Smith said. “Even worse, [it] made it near impossible to receive workers’ compensation or disability for their work-related injuries.”

Tips and McCullough suggested that OSHA’s Covid-19 reporting policies violated state and federal law. They called upon the US Department of Justice to investigate.

Delfico agreed. “Transparency, accountability and reform are desperately needed. Otherwise, the same playbook will be used again,” she said.

• A Tell Media report / by Michael Nevradakis – A senior reporter for The Defender