Vaccine Death Reports Are Not What They Seem
The US government maintains a VAERS database that anyone can report to if they think something happened to them after being vaccinated. It’s an important tool for tracking vaccine safety, but it’s also used by vaccine activists to make vaccines seem scarier than they really are.
VAERS is short for Vaccine Side Effect Reporting System. “Adverse events” are literally occurring events (events) that are bad (adverse). Scientists and doctors tend to prefer this term to something like “side effects,” which implies a causal relationship that is often impossible to establish. For example, if you have a headache after vaccination, this is an adverse event. Was it caused by a vaccine? Maybe, but this is a separate question, and it can be difficult to answer it unambiguously.
How VAERS is actually used
The VAERS database was created in 1990 as part of a vaccine safety reform package, the CDC explains . (The same law established the No- Fault Vaccine Court to compensate people for vaccine-related injuries without having to sue pharmaceutical companies.)
Anyone can report to VAERS — you, your doctor, your family member, even your lawyer. (Doctors are required to report certain side effects, but for the most part this is a voluntary statement.) In some ways, this is a bit like Wikipedia: not all of them are true, but probably many of them are true, and you can still learn a lot from what it contains.
The idea is that if there is a problem with a vaccine, reports will start appearing in VAERS. Investigators will look into events that appear to be serious, common, or interrelated. This is how HHS describes the objectives of the program:
- Identification of new, unusual or rare side effects of the vaccine;
- Monitor increases in known side effects;
- Identification of potential risk factors for patients for certain types of adverse events;
- Assess the safety of newly licensed vaccines;
- Identification and elimination of possible clusters of messages ( for example, reports of suspected local [temporal or geographic] adverse events or adverse events specific to the product / batch / batch );
- Recognize persistent security problems and administration errors;
- Provide a national safety monitoring system covering the entire population to respond to public health emergencies such as a large-scale pandemic influenza vaccination program.
VAERS reports can be the first sign if there are problems with the vaccine or even with a particular batch of vaccine. This is one of the many ways that regulators have said they will be looking after the safety of new COVID vaccines.
How VAERS is misused
Anti-vaccination activists have misused and misrepresented VAERS since its inception. The reports are publicly available, so anyone can search the database, and they do it.
Before searching the database, you should click the big disclaimer screen explaining that the reports are not verified and listing other important restrictions. ( Vice recently reported that a group of activists created a search portal for VAERS that allows you to view reports without seeing this screen.)
You can probably see the problem here. Getting a bunch of reports that say “death” and mention a specific vaccine does not mean that the vaccine killed these people. It simply means that the person died some time after being vaccinated. In fact, a recent analysis of the side effects of the COVID vaccine, both from VAERS reports and from another monitoring system called V-SAFE, found that most deaths after vaccination were in older residents of long-term care facilities and were unlikely to be caused by the vaccine .
So if you see any information circulated claiming to be the cause of death, miscarriages, or other frightening reactions to the new COVID vaccines, apply your critical thinking skills with common sense and find out where the data is coming from. It is possible that there could be safety issues with these or any vaccines , but if there are any major issues will show up on the front pages of the news, so be suspicious if you only hear about them from a viral Facebook post.