New York says 'physical activity' increases risk from COVID in health guidance to circumvent FDA

Five years after COVID-19 lockdowns punished physical activity outside the home, possibly facilitating adverse events mistaken for biologically elusive "long COVID," the Empire State is explicitly warning residents that exercise is a threat to their health.

The claim that "physical activity" is an "underlying medical condition" that increases a person's risk of "severe COVID" showed up in the New York State Department of Health's guidance to pharmacists and physicians on how to circumvent Trump administration policies so that all New Yorkers ages 3 and up, regardless of health, can get COVID vaccines.

A physician who works in New York and New Jersey sent the Sept. 5 guidance to former Senate pharma corruption investigator Paul Thacker, he said in his newsletter Sunday. 

In six steps, the guidance explains how to prescribe "patient-specific orders" for COVID vaccines "off-label," meaning for purposes the Food and Drug Administration hasn't expressly authorized and lists the conditions that trigger the state's strongest recommendation that a given group "should" be vaccinated, one of which is "physical activity."

Vaccine boosters were less friendly to off-label uses during the Biden administration, with his FDA allegedly interfering with doctors' attempts to prescribe ivermectin as a COVID treatment and securing legislative authority to ban off-label uses at will.

"I have never seen any Dept of Health encourage off label prescriptions ever," the physician identified as "Michelle" told Thacker. She's baffled by the physical activity warning: "Your moderate activity that keeps you healthy, keeps your cholesterol down, your blood pressure down, is what they actually say is putting you at risk for severe COVID."

"Who’s responsible if something happens to these people?" Kim Witczak, consumer representative on the FDA's advisory committee for new drugs, asked on X.

She unsuccessfully petitioned the previous FDA for COVID vaccines to be relabeled to make clear they can't stop infection or transmission and weren't even tested for efficacy against death. Her fellow signatories included current FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and his top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad.

New York's DOH did not answer Just the News queries about the guidance, including whether the warning about physical activity was a mistake. Georgia COVID analyst Kelly Krohnert, who flagged dozens of basic data errors on COVID by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, believes it's a typo and should read "inactivity."

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rescinded emergency use authorizations for COVID vaccines last month, emphasizing they remain "available for all patients who choose them after consulting with their doctors."

The FDA approved them for ages 65 and up with no qualifications, and for younger groups with medical conditions that put them at high risk from SARS-CoV-2. Makary said the U.S. is simply joining the "risk-tiered approach" used by authorities in Europe, the U.K. and Canada.

Nothing is stopping doctors from approving patients for COVID vaccines, Makary wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week laying out new clinical-trial requirements to show that COVID shots improve outcomes in healthy groups. 

"The FDA can’t regulate the practice of medicine," just "marketing authorizations," he said.

New York's guidance, by contrast, recommends everyone 19 and up get this upcoming season's COVID vaccines. Four categories "should" be vaccinated: ages 65 and up and ages 19-64 with risk factors for "severe" COVID, "at higher risk of exposure" such as healthcare workers, or "household contacts" of high-risk people.

Adults without "underlying conditions" are "recommended" for vaccination, "as it reduces the risk of symptomatic infection, severe illness, and death," the guidance says without evidence. It does not acknowledge COVID vaccines cannot stop transmission or infection, a fact known to Biden administration officials from the first month of his presidency.

The guidance also says "pregnant people" should be vaccinated "in any trimester" despite evidence of birth defects and lost pregnancies in the original Pfizer and Moderna vaccine trials. FDA and CDC advisers this year warned that lost pregnancies were higher than expected following early mRNA vaccination in Israel.

Vaccines stop transmission, 'especially for children'

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose daughter-in-law has been a lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies since the Democrat took office, declared an emergency in an executive order "expanding access to vaccines amid uncertainty" about federal vaccine policy, which she claims will "allow pharmacists to administer COVID vaccines" for "at least 30 days." 

The goal is to develop "a long-term legislative solution … to combat the Trump Administration’s misguided attack on immunization and healthcare," Hochul said.

Without updated federal guidance from the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, "many pharmacies in New York began restricting access to the COVID vaccine," especially for children 3-17, pregnant people and adults under 65 without underlying conditions, Hochul said.

The executive order is thin on evidence for its claims and makes at least one objectively false statement. It vaguely asserts that COVID "continues to cause significant morbidity and mortality in children and adults" and that it increases "absenteeism from school and the workforce" and "utilization of the hospital system" in the fall and winter, with no citations.

Hochul claims vaccination "remains the most effective defense to prevent severe COVID-19 disease outcomes" without distinguishing between high-risk groups and those who can safely recover from natural infection and gain robust protection from severe outcomes.

The order says "vaccination remains a critical tool to prevent severe illness and transmission, especially among children," not only falsely stating vaccines can stop transmission but that this ability is somehow heightened in children. 

It claims without evidence "the vast majority of child and adolescent hospitalizations due to COVID-19 occur in individuals who have not received an up-to-date COVID-19 vaccine," meaning the latest authorized formulation.

One study is mentioned in the entire order, from a Journal of the American Medical Association publication in January 2023. 

The "systematic review and metanalysis [sic]" of 17 studies with 10 million vaccinated and 2.6 million unvaccinated children 5-11 found "lower risks of infection, symptomatic infection, hospitalizations, and Multi-system Inflammatory Syndrome" in the kids who received a two-dose vaccine compared to no doses, Hochul's order claims.

Epidemiologists Tracy Beth Hoeg, now Makary's senior adviser for clinical sciences, and pre-FDA Prasad published a rebuttal to the study in the Cambridge University Press journal Epidemiology and Infection in February 2024 after JAMA Pediatrics rejected their letter to the editor and a preprint server refused to host it, according to Hoeg.

By omitting "falsification endpoints" from the review, the JAMA Pediatrics study failed to detect the well-known epidemiological phenomenon of "healthy vaccinee bias," in which already healthier people are more likely to get vaccinated, their paper said. 

"All five [observational] studies failed to adequately assess differences in underlying health between vaccination groups. In terms of vaccination harms, looking only at the randomized studies, a significantly higher odds of adverse events was identified among the vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated," their paper also said.