The White House task force COVID-19 asked the Centers for Disease Control to conduct a comprehensive study of how many Americans have died since receiving the vaccine and the circumstances that led to their death, according to two officials familiar with the matter.
The authorities are not concerned that the vaccine is having adverse effects on a large number of recipients. Instead, they are pushing for the study to ensure that the federal government has a more complete picture of mortality in the COVID-19 pandemic era. The goal is to gather more data about the vaccine, its effectiveness and what happened to the recipients after they received the vaccine.
It is an especially urgent matter, given the vulnerable and aging populations that receive the vaccine. According to the CDC, about 3% of people aged 75 die in the next year of life. With millions of people receiving the vaccine, some are likely to die in a matter of weeks or months, for reasons that may or may not be related to COVID-19. Some individuals who receive it are also expected to die between the first and the second dose or after the regiment is completed, officials said, especially if they have a pre-existing disease that is advanced.
The White House coronavirus task force wants to know whether the individuals who received the injection died as a result of a vaccination-related adverse event, such as anaphylaxis, a coronavirus-related disease, such as pneumonia, or something else entirely.
Currently, the CDC does not have a good way to track deaths that occur after vaccination in real time, officials said. The study would have to come from state health departments, many of which are already overwhelmed with other data collection efforts related to COVID-19, including testing, case positivity, hospitalizations and vaccine distribution.
The CDC has worked over the past year to reduce gaps in COVID-19 data reports, but has had difficulty in collecting timely information from some state health departments. The agency’s COVID mortality data set – its information on how many coronavirus-related deaths have suffered – is currently about five weeks late, officials said. Its system for tracking vaccine complications is far from comprehensive. With 4,000 people dying each day and another million receiving the COVID vaccine, these deficiencies and data delays can be particularly blurred. The agency is working on a 2020 mortality report analyzing coronavirus-related deaths in the first year of the pandemic. The launch is scheduled for spring, officials said, adding that there are no current plans to include vaccination data in the current CDC’s COVID-19 mortality analysis.
The struggle to find a way to complete the key vaccination mortality study highlights growing frustration among officials working to respond to the pandemic that the federal government is still failing to collect, analyze and disseminate COVID-19 data. It also highlights the extent to which the federal government depends on state health departments, often underfunded, to accurately portray the local reality.
The study’s request comes amid an impulse by the Biden government to update and reform the way the federal government collects data on COVID-19 and how it transmits that data to the public. The president signed an executive order on 21 January ensuring that the government’s response to the pandemic is “guided by the best science and data available”.
Authorities have been discussing in recent days whether to maintain the existing HHS Protect system, a platform through which the Department of Health and Human Services tracks how hospitals across the country were handling the rise in COVID-19 cases. The system, which can be accessed by state and federal officials, tracks hospital supplies, cases and tests, among other things. Officials within the CDC are also in the process of understanding and clarifying discrepancies between the agency’s vaccination tracker and state vaccine distribution panels. The lack of accurate data has frustrated authorities trying to improve the distribution process.
In addition, the White House released previously hidden COVID-19 reports this week describing, among other things, the outbreak, hospitalizations and the provision of personal protective equipment in each state. The data in these reports appears to be similar to the data collected by HHS Protect.
Health professionals are already sending information to the CDC about patients who died after vaccination through the Vaccine Adverse Event Notification System (VAERS), a platform administered by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration that detects possible health safety problems. vaccine. VAERS data is based on presentations by healthcare professionals who report “any significant health problems that occur after vaccination.” Officials familiar with the system say that VAERS mortality data in these cases are usually linked to vaccination, although the CDC says that an “adverse event can be reported even if it is uncertain or unlikely that the vaccine caused it”.
At a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on Wednesday, officials from the CDC Vaccine Safety Task Force COVID-19 presented preliminary data they collected through the VAERS system. (ACIP is a group of medical and public health experts who provide public health recommendations and guidelines on the safe use of vaccines).
Slides posted on the CDC website show that the federal government has collected a total of more than 9,000 reports through the VAERS system since the launch of the COVID-19 vaccine – an incredibly small percentage of the total vaccines administered. Many of the reports indicate that individuals who received the vaccine had symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, fatigue and chills. The data also shows that VAERS collected 196 death reports, although the slides indicate that the deaths reported to VAERS are not necessarily related to vaccination.