The United States government maintains a database called VAERS, to which anyone can report if they think something bad happened to them after receiving a vaccine. It’s an important tool for monitoring vaccine safety, but it’s also been mined by anti-vaccine activists to make vaccines look scarier than they are.
VAERS stands for Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. “Side effects” are literally things that happen (events) that are bad (unfavorable). Scientists and doctors prefer this term to something like “ side effects, ” implying a cause-and-effect relationship that often cannot be determined. For example, if you have a headache after getting an injection, that’s a side effect. Was it caused by the vaccine? Maybe, but that’s a separate question and it can be difficult to answer final
How VAERS is actually used
Like the CDC explains hereThe VAERS database was established in 1990 as part of a package of vaccine safety reforms. (The same law established one court without guilt vaccine to reimburse people for vaccine damage without suing drug companies.)
Everyone can submit a report to VAERS: you, your doctor, your family member, even your lawyer. (Doctors are required to report certain side effects, but for the most part submissions are voluntary.) It’s a bit like Wikipedia, in a way: TThe things in it may not all be true, but probably many are, and you can still learn a lot from what it contains.
The idea is that if there are is a problem with a vaccine, reports will appear in VAERS. Investigators will investigate events that are serious, general, or relatedHere’s how HHS describes the goals of the program:
- Detect new, unusual or rare side effects of vaccines;
- Monitor the increase in known side effects;
- Identify potential risk factors for the patient for certain types of adverse events;
- Assess the safety of newly licensed vaccines;
- Determine and address potential reporting clusters (eg presumably localized [temporally or geographically] or product / batch / lot specific adverse event reporting
- Recognize persistent problems with safe use and administrative errors;
- Have a national safety monitoring system that extends to the entire population in the context of public health emergencies, such as a large-scale pandemic flu vaccination program.
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The reports in VAERS can be an early tip if there are problems related to a vaccine, or even a particular batch vaccine. Her one of the many ways regulators said they would monitor security as the new COVID vaccines roll out.
How VAERS is being abused
Anti-vaccine activists have been abusing and misrepresenting VAERS for as long as it has been around. The reports are publicly accessible so that anyone can search the database, and they do.
Before searching the database, you have to click through a huge disclaimer screen explaining that the reports have not been verified and mention other important entries restrictionsVice recently reported an activist group has created a VAERS search portal that allows you to view reports without seeing this screen.)
Yor can probably see the problem here. Bringing out a lot of reports saying “dead” and mentioning a particular vaccine doesn’t mean the vaccine killed those people. It just means that the person died sometime after they received the vaccine. In fact, a recent analysis of COVID vaccine side effects, both from VAERS reports and another control system called V-SAFE, found that most post-vaccination deaths were in elderly residents of long-term care facilities and were probably not caused by the vaccines
So when you see information being shared claiming to attribute deaths, miscarriages, or other scary reactions to the new COVID vaccines, use common sense and critical thinking skills and find out where the data comes from. There may very likely be safety concerns with these or other vaccines, but if there were, serious issues would be front-page news – so be suspicious if you only hear about it from a viral Facebook post.