The US government maintains a database called VAERS, to which anyone can file a report if they think something bad has happened to them after receiving a vaccine. It is an important tool for maintaining control over vaccine safety, but it is also being exploited by anti-vaccine activists to make vaccines look scarier than they are.
VAERS is the abbreviation for Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. “Adverse events” are literally things that happen (events) that are bad (negative). Scientists and doctors tend to prefer this term to something like “side effects”, which implies a cause-effect relationship that often cannot be established. For example, if you have a headache after a blow, this is an adverse event. Was caused by the vaccine? Maybe, but this is a separate question and can be difficult to answer definitive.
How VAERS is actually used
As the The CDC explains here, the VAERS database was set up in 1990 as part of a vaccine safety reform package. (The same law established a no-fault vaccination court to compensate people for vaccine-induced lesions without the need to sue pharmaceutical companies.)
Anyone can send a report to VAERS: you, your doctor, a member of your family, even your lawyer. (Doctors are required to report certain adverse events, but for the most part, submissions are voluntary.) It’s a bit like Wikipedia, in a sense: TThe things in it may not be true, but many of them are probably true, and you can learn a lot from what they contain.
The point is that if there is It is a problem with a vaccine, reports will begin to appear in VAERS. Investigators will analyze events that appear to be serious, common or related. Here’s how HHS describes the program’s goals:
- Detect new, unusual or rare vaccine side effects;
- Monitor increases in known adverse events;
- Identify potential risk factors for patients for certain types of adverse events;
- Evaluate the safety of newly authorized vaccines;
- Identify and address possible reporting clusters (for example, localized suspect [temporally or geographically] or reporting product / batch / batch specific adverse events);
- Recognize persistent safe usage issues and administration errors;
- Provide a national safety monitoring system that extends to the entire general population for responding to public health emergencies, such as a large-scale pandemic influenza vaccination program.
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VAERS reports can be an early tip-off if there are problems associated with a vaccine or even a certain batch of vaccine. It is one of many ways regulators have said they will monitor safety as new COVID vaccines are launched.
How VAERS is used incorrectly
Vaccine activists have misused and distorted VAERS for as long as it exists. The reports are accessible to the public, so anyone can search the database and they do.
Before searching the database, you need to click through a massive disclaimer, explaining that the reports are not verified and listing other important items limitation. (Vice recently reported an activist group has created a search portal for VAERS that allows you to view reports without seeing this screen.)
Yesor maybe probable see the problem here. Getting out a bunch of reports that say “death” and mention a particular vaccine doesn’t mean the vaccine killed those people. It just means that the person died sometime after receiving the vaccine. In fact, a recent analysis of adverse events in the COVID vaccine, both in the VAERS reports and in another monitoring system called V-SAFE, found that most deaths after vaccination were in elderly residents of long-term care units and were not likely to be caused by vaccines.
So, if you see that information is being shared claiming to attribute death, miscarriage or other frightening reactions to the new COVID vaccines, apply your common sense critical thinking skills and find out where the data comes from. It is very possible that there may be safety issues with these or any vaccines, but if there are, any serious issues would be front-page news – so be suspicious if you only hear about them from a viral Facebook post.