VAERS myths busted

I invite any fact checker in the world to verify the data I collected or to collect their own.

The myth: “Nothing to see here folks… it’s just overreporting”

The CDC and FDA have always claimed that the high reporting rates in VAERS are simply due to the overreporting of background events that is caused by greater awareness of VAERS by the public and the healthcare industry.

They’ve made this claim for the COVID vaccines as noted in the Rosenblum paper, “Safety of mRNA vaccines administered during the initial 6 months of the US COVID-19 vaccination programme: an observational study of reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and v-safe”:

Heightened public awareness of the COVID-19 vaccination programme, outreach and education to health-care providers and hospitals about COVID-19 EUA reporting requirements for adverse events, and adherence to EUA reporting requirements by providers and health systems, probably all contributed to the high volume of VAERS reports received.

The CDC made a similar claim in 2009 in the Slade report in order to dismiss the huge rate of adverse events in VAERS for the Gardasil vaccine as noted on page 115 of Turtles All the Way Down:

Although the authors admit that VAERS does not provide reliable data to realistically assess safety, they willfully leap all methodological obstacles and conclude that Gardasil’s safety profile was generally similar to that of other vaccines. [27] This is certainly a noteworthy achievement, especially when one considers that they stated at the outset that “the VAERS reporting rate for [Gardasil] is triple the rate for all other vaccines combined.” [28] Did VAERS data and the research techniques at the authors’ disposal enable them to come up with a reasonable explanation for the abnormally high rate of reported adverse events for Gardasil? The answer seems to be no. The paper does not contain an evidence-based explanation, merely the speculation that the high reporting rate might simply “reflect greater public attention to HPV” that was purportedly “stimulated” by “widespread media coverage”.[29]

Isn’t it time to bust the myth with actual data?

In order to find out whether the CDC claim is true or not, I thought it might be helpful to gather some data from healthcare providers to gain insight as to whether the COVID vaccines are as safe as other vaccines.

I published an open call to fill out a survey for healthcare workers.

Here’s the summary for the first 281 records:

1. Avg years in field: 27
2. Avg years aware of VAERS: 9

For other vaccines combined

1. # of reportable AEs observed: 1085
2. # AEs actually reported to VAERS: 153
3. # vaccine-related deaths observed: 92

For COVID vaccines

1. # of reportable AEs observed: 7189
2. # AEs actually reported to VAERS: 187
3. # vaccine-related deaths observed: 1128
4. # vaccine-related deaths actually reported to VAERS: 8

Limitations

1. The survey was open to any healthcare worker, but the survey was distributed to my followers on Substack.
2. The people who responded could be not representative of all healthcare workers
3. In the analysis, I didn’t remove non-US reporters
4. People didn’t always fill out the survey correctly, e.g., instead of putting the number of years they’ve been reporting, they put in the year they started reporting. So the data had to be corrected.
5. I did not verify any of the submissions. Some submissions could be gamed.
6. I added the death observed statistics after recordID 28. I added the deaths reported field after recordID 172.
7. I calculated the underreporting factor after the first 267 records. There were 411 observed deaths but just 8 VAERS reports, giving an actual underreporting factor (URF)=51. This isn’t far from my original calculation of 41 (done a year ago) or the most recent estimate of 66 using the v-safe data.

The raw data

The survey is here.

The results can be found here.

Summary

Based on the number of vaccine-related deaths observed by just the first 281 healthcare workers in my survey, the vaccines are a disaster and should be stopped immediately.

If there is better data, the CDC needs to produce it. Now.

If the CDC cannot produce any data from healthcare providers who are polled by an independent polling company that this analysis is wrong, they need to immediately halt the COVID vaccines.