It would be a heck of a lot more convincing if rather than citing someone you "personally know", you had, say, a bioRxiv article to link to. You might believe your friend, but we might not even believe you have such a friend and think you are just stating you do to make it seem more real (but it's actually something you've heard and passed on). We might also think that if you had such a friend, it's quite unlikely that there was even the mechanism to pull funding in that way, and that it's more likely that if they lost funding it was for inadequate productivity or insufficiently compelling results. But, happily, in science this is all easily addressed: link to a publication or pre-publication, and we can evaluate the quality of the data and see whether your characterization might be plausible.

Same deal with the data scientist. No reason not to have the article up on bioRxiv or medRxiv.

Note--I have analyzed the VAERS data myself, so I'm quite familiar with what it illustrates regarding likely side effects.