The US government maintains a database called VAERS, for what anyone can file a report if they think something bad happened to them after receiving the vaccine. It is an important tool for controlling vaccine safety, but it is also being exploited by anti-vaccine activists to make vaccines look more frightening than they really are.
VAERS is short for Adverse Vaccine Notification System. “Adverse events” are literally things that happen (events) that are bad (adverse). Scientists and doctors tend to prefer this term to something like “side effects”, which implies a cause and effect relationship that often cannot be established. If you have a headache after having an injection, for example, this is an adverse event. That’s it caused by the vaccine? Perhaps, but this is a separate question and difficult to answer. definitively.
How VAERS is actually used
While the CDC explains here, the VAERS database was established in 1990 as part of a vaccine safety reform package. (The same law established a guiltless vaccine court to compensate people for vaccine accidents without having to sue pharmaceutical companies.)
Anyone can send a report to VAERS: you, your doctor, your family member, even your lawyer. (Doctors are required to report certain adverse events, but for the most part, entries are voluntary.) It’s a bit like Wikipedia, in a sense: TThe things in it may not all be true, but probably many of them are, and you can still learn a lot from what it contains.
The idea is that if there is It is a problem with a vaccine, reports will start appearing on VAERS. Investigators will analyze events that appear to be serious, common or linked. See how the HHS describes the program’s objectives:
- Detect new, unusual or rare adverse vaccine events;
- Monitor increases in known adverse events;
- Identify potential patient risk factors for certain types of adverse events;
- Assess the safety of newly licensed vaccines;
- Determine and address possible report clusters (for example, localized suspicion [temporally or geographically] or report of specific adverse events of the product / lot / lot);
- Recognize persistent problems of safe use and administration errors;
- Provide a national security monitoring system that extends to the entire general population to respond to public health emergencies, such as a large-scale influenza pandemic vaccination program.
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VAERS reports can be an initial tip if there are problems associated with a vaccine, or even a particular batch of vaccine. That is one of the many ways in which regulators said they would keep an eye on security as new COVID vaccines are launched.
How VAERS is misused
Anti-vaccine activists have been using and misrepresenting VAERS since it existed. The reports are accessible to the public, so that anyone can search the database and They do.
Before searching the database, you must click on a huge disclaimer explaining that the reports are not verified and listing others limitations. (Vice recently reported a group of activists created a research portal for VAERS that allows you to view reports without seeing this screen.)
Yyou may probably see the problem here. Removing a lot of reports that say “death” and that mention a particular vaccine does not mean that the vaccine killed those people. It just means that the person died some time after receiving the vaccine. In fact, a recent analysis of adverse events from the COVID vaccine, both from VAERS reports and from another monitoring system called V-SAFE, found that most deaths after vaccination were in elderly people residing in long-term care facilities and were probably not caused by vaccines.
So if you see shared information that claims to attribute deaths, miscarriages or other frightening reactions to the new COVID vaccines, apply your common sense critical thinking skills and find out where the data comes from. There may be safety problems with these or any vaccines, but if there are, any serious problems would be front page news – so be suspicious if you just hear about them in a viral Facebook post.