VAERS- Is is reliable? Is Florida an anomaly?
Today I noticed that the Florida Surgeon General has sent a letter US FDA & CDC to highlight the huge increase in reports to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) during 2021 & 2022.
This is not a new topic, as many folks who are concerned about the safety of the COVID vaccines have pointed out the unprecedented reports in VAERS over the last couple years. Nevertheless, these concerns have consistently been ignored or ridiculed by the public health authorities & various “experts”. We have been told that we can’t rely on VAERS, as it is a voluntary reporting system and therefore can be filled with any number of reports that are fraudulent or have nothing to do with the vaccines.
First, let me address how ridiculous it is that the public health folks have dismissed reports in VAERS about COVID vaccines as unreliable. Hey folks, IT’S YOUR FRICKIN SYSTEM! If it is unreliable, what are you doing to fix it? If it’s not useful, why are we maintaining it (certainly at a high taxpayer cost)? Surely we should have some system to track possible adverse effects, no? If not this, then what?
Ok, with that out of my system, it seems to me that in order to argue that the signals in VAERS over the last couple years are not worrying and at least worth investigating, you would need to argue that you are confident that people are intentionally entering false or misleading reports in order to damage the reputations of the vaccines. If this were the case, then we should see an anomalous level of reporting from “anti-vaxxers”. In other words, people who want to ignore VAERS must be thinking that there are a lot of “anti-vaxxers” out there who seek to make the vaccines look bad & therefore enter reports into VAERS that aren’t true in order to make the vaccines appear dangerous.
Luckily for us, we know that “anti-vaxxers” tend to congregate in certain geographies more than others. So, if the premise above were true, then we should see more reports per dose of vaccine given in geographies with more “anti-vaxxers” (i.e. red states) than we do in the vax-loving blue states. Let’s let the data talk.
Data used:
2021 VAERS data from: https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/datasets.html
Total doses administered by state as of 12/31/21 from CDC Vaccination Data
My data captures 2021. I’m highly confident 2022 would be largely the same, I have limited to 2021 as matter of convenience (VAERS reports years in different tables, 2022 doses get confusing with all the different types of boosters).
First, let’s look at the number of VAERS reports per 1,000 doses by state:
Aha! Red Indiana had the highest number of reports per 1,000 doses, and Blue California had one of the lowest! Those knuckle-dragging anti-vax folks are gaming the system by submitting false reports! Er, uh wait a minute however, the 3rd highest level of reports come from Vermont? And the 3 lowest levels of reports are Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas? Well, that doesn’t exactly fit the narrative, does it?
Here is all the data in tabular format. Note that Florida, where we began the post, is not some sort of anomaly. In fact, they ranked 32nd of the 48 states we have data for in terms of reports/1,000 doses:
***Note: It does look like Indiana is an outlier. This would not be enough to change the overall picture, but it is a very high level of reporting, in comparison to other states. Would like to understand this more. Perhaps there was a group of doctors or medical system that was extra diligent or aggressive in submitting to VAERS? Anyone with other ideas?
Many vaccine related injuries aren’t even recorded in VAERS by doctors. Not all doctors are nefarious but I’ve heard it’s tedious along with all the other paperwork.
The first place the mind goes is "bad batch".
But I also wonder if maybe there's something different about state attitudes and guidelines for AE reporting in Indiana. It seems like in a lot of places it's a sad case of "the first rule of adverse events is, don't report adverse events..." and that has been true since long before covid. A young relative had some fairly scary problems with the ordinary round of childhood immunizations, and the parents were repeatedly gaslit by pediatricians and hospital ER staff about it, so definitely it was never reported to VAERS. That was a decade ago, seemed to be standard practice, and definitely made me wonder how many of these things go under the radar.
So... assuming that general guidance for medical professionals is something like "adverse events don't happen and if you report them you'll be targeted for retaliation" There may be some room for variation across jurisdictions when it comes to how stringently the unwritten rule is enforced. Would love to hear from some doctors in Indiana about this.