The US government maintains a database called VAERS, to which anyone can file a report if he thinks something bad happened to them after receiving a vaccine. It is an important tool to monitor vaccine safety, but it is also being exploited by anti-vaccine activists to make vaccines look like they are.
VAERS is an abbreviation for the system of reporting on vaccines. ‘Adverse events’ are literally things that happen (events) that are bad (unfavorable). Scientists and doctors prefer this term over something like ‘side effects’, which implies a cause-and-effect relationship that can often not be determined. For example, if you have a headache after shooting, it is an adverse event. Was it caused by the vaccine? Maybe, but it’s a separate question, and it can be difficult to answer definitely.
How VAERS is actually used
Like the CDC explains here, the VAERS database was established in 1990 as part of a package of vaccine safety reforms. (The same law has a flawless vaccine court to compensate people for vaccine injuries without suing pharmaceutical companies.)
Anyone can submit a report to VAERS: you, your doctor, your family member, even your lawyer. (Doctors have to report certain side effects, but mostly submissions are voluntary.) It’s a bit like Wikipedia, in a sense: Tthings in it may not all be true, but probably a lot of them are, and you can still learn a lot from what they contain.
The idea is that if there is a problem with a vaccine, reports will start appearing in VAERS. Investigators will look at events that appear to be serious, common or linked. Here’s how HHS describes the objectives of the program:
- Discover new, unusual or rare side effects against vaccines;
- Monitor increase in known side effects;
- Identify potential risk factors for patients for specific types of side effects;
- Evaluate the safety of newly licensed vaccines;
- Determine and address possible reporting groups (e.g. suspect located [temporally or geographically] or product / journal / lot-specific adverse event reporting);
- Recognize persistent issues with safe use and administrative 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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The reports in VAERS can be an early tip if there are problems with a vaccine, or even a specific group vaccine. It is one of the many ways regulators have said they will monitor safety as the new COVID vaccines begin.
How VAERS is abused
Anti-vaccine activists have been abusing VAERS for as long as it has existed. The reports are publicly accessible so that everyone in the database can search and they do.
Before searching the database, click through a massive safeguard screen to explain that the reports have not been verified and contain other important list restrictions. (Vice recently reported an activist group has created a search portal for VAERS that allows you to view reports without seeing this screen.)
Yyou can probably see the problem here. Taking out a bunch of reports that say “dead” and that mention a certain vaccine does not mean that the vaccine killed those people. It only means that the person died after receiving the vaccine. In fact, a recent analysis of adverse events of COVID vaccine, both from VAERS reports and from another monitoring system called V-SAFE, found that most deaths after vaccination were in elderly residents of long-term care facilities and were unlikely to be caused by the vaccines.
So if you see information being shared that claims to attribute deaths, miscarriages or other narrow reactions to the new COVID vaccines, apply your common sense critical thinking skills and find out where the data is coming from. There may be safety issues with these or any vaccines, but if there are, there are serious issues on the front page, so be suspicious if you only hear it in a viral Facebook message.