it varies but in the past 4 weeks, about 0.9-1 per 100k *per day* pic.twitter.com/NVz2MXmFIx. Vaccine (1999) 17(4):327-329. This type of propaganda is so harmful to our County residents, with The Mountaineer reporting 84 people who have lost their lives and over 3600 who have contracted Covid-19 right here in Haywood. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. , has stirred controversy in recent days over his concerns about COVID-19 vaccine safety. Competing interests: It was the waiting that drew the attention of the Stockholm County Council. Exploring issues and controversies in the relationship between science and medicine. Re: Singh etal. Of the US primary reports received between 2012 and 2016, 0.4% reported death as the outcome; 5% reported a serious nonfatal adverse event (as defined above), and 94.6% reported non-serious events (CDC, unpublished data). During the same Exogenous exposures to wild type varicella have previously contributed a significant immunologic boosting effect that helps suppress the reactivation of herpes-zoster. The reason, to reiterate, is that VAERS is unique among US vaccine safety reporting systems in that it is a passive surveillance system. The phenomenon of molecular mimicry explains why some people's immune system will mistakenly respond to the measles antigen, for instance, in the vaccine because some of its amino acid groupings, its epitopes, are the same as those in the protein of a previously encountered viral antigen." VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning that reports about adverse events are not automatically collected, but require a report to be filed to VAERS. Box 847, Pearblossom, CA 93553 USA, Copyright 2023 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, Womens, childrens & adolescents health, Adverse Reactions to Varicella Vaccination are Grossly Under-Reported. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. In 2008, patients seeking a hip or knee replacement in Stockholm County faced wait times of up to two years of sometimes debilitating pain, intermittent missed work and income, and the trials of disability. Spoiler alert: Excess mortality during the pandemic has been VERY high. And yet, publicly hosted on a CDC web server are claims that COVID-19 vaccines have caused gunshot wounds, with the CDC helpfully listing shareable buttons at the top of the page for your vaccine misinformation platform of choice: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and email for those wanting to mass-email their office colleagues. Known as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, the database includes hundreds of thousands of reports of health events that occurred minutes, hours or days after vaccination.. During the 18-year period from 1990 through 2007 just 88 cases of Kawasaki Disease in children under 5 were reported to VAERS. As an amusing aside, whenever I discuss VAERS, I like to recount the tale of how in 2006 Jim Laidler infamously reported to VAERS that the flu vaccine had turned him into The Incredible Hulk and VAERS accepted the report. From your lips to QAnon's ears.. understand that minor side effects of vaccinations often include this kind of discomfort, as well as low fevers. With the rollout of safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 finally starting to result in tens of millions of people receiving the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, with newer vaccines likely to be introduced in the coming months, the predictions that I (and many others) made months ago are coming to pass. A quote from the in-question Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. study: "Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. RR-3. The research, which assessed the safety of the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine, is based on analysis of data from nearly 2 million individuals in Israel and represents one of the largest real-world assessments of COVID-19 vaccine safety to date. During the same period about 88 million U.S. children passed through the 0-5 age group; It is worth pointing out that Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc., has no affiliation with Harvard University. (1995) 13(4):340-342. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side Source information from U.S. Government VAERS data base, 1990-2003, http://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb There is another story being missed regarding that Harvard Pilgrim study, though. Links to VAERS are included. The problem is that the natural human tendency to seek patterns, coupled with the way antivaccine lawyers game VAERS by having their clients report all sorts of spurious adverse events to the database after vaccination, means that VAERS is a very noisy, distorted, and unreliable database. So lets get back to RFK Jr. and his deceptive article by the Childrens Health Defense Team. It is a near certainty that scurrilous and outlandish claims around the COVID-19 vaccines will be shared online in any case, but for now, malign actors transmit this information with a veneer of credibility offered by the CDC VAERS database. (2003) 135(3):415-417. She was admitted to a hospital for rehydration after losing 12 lbs or more than 10% of her previous healthy weight. As I will show, antivaxxers are playing an old game with new vaccines. VAERS is co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 2023;130: S0161-6420(22)00672-8. doi: 10.1016/j.ophtha.2022.08.027. It should therefore be no surprise that antivaxxers are now using VAERS to try to portray COVID-19 vaccines as harmful or even deadly. The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) is sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and by the Food and Drug Administration. The newly installed CDC Director urged Americans to not let down their guard, saying she is scared a fourth wave of the coronavirus may batter the country before vaccinations can reach a critical mass. Later in the article, CHD starts listing all the anecdotes and other reports that antivaxxers have been flogging. Unfortunately, it is that very open nature of the system that has allowed it to be used and abused by antivaxxers to promote their false claims that vaccines cause so many adverse events and medical conditions. Whoever wrote this article is clearly not an expert, and this article is clearly meant to be disinformation, not science. In that intervew Dr. Zelenko states a common refrain about VAERS reporting: If you look at the 2009 Harvard study on the VAERS system, they said only 1% of events are actually reported. This prevents researchers from determining "hot lots" since calculation of the number of adverse reactions per lot is not possible. The US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is "overwhelmed" with reports of vaccine adverse effects in the wake of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, cardiologist Dr. Peter. Thanks to Dear Pandemic, who did similar back-of-the-envelope calculations, as did Mark Hoofnagle on Twitter, we can make a reasonable estimate for Norway: What does that mean? An official website of the United States government. Prior research has shown that only a fraction of adverse events are. Vaccine. "'Underreporting' is one of the main limitations of passive surveillance systems, including VAERS," HHS says on its website. My topic here is not VAERS generally, but a number that recurs often in discussions about the vaccine injury reports VAERS contains. Im referring, of course, to antivaxxers resurrecting old antivaccine tropes, dusting them off, and updating them for the age of COVID. Acta. The answer is 0.000015. 57, No. Those of you whove been reading this blog and my not-so-super-secret other blog should be familiar with VAERS, as its been discussed many times on both. But thats Norway. What did their final report have to say about developing and implementing such a system? The site is secure. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, Steven P. Novella, MD Founder and Executive Editor, David H. Gorski, MD, PhD Managing Editor, unnecessary because COVID-19 is not deadly, 329 Deaths + 9,516 Other Injuries Reported Following COVID Vaccine, Latest CDC Data Show, Mark and David Geiers epically bad study, similar back-of-the-envelope calculations, Excess mortality during the pandemic has been VERY high, falling for an antivaccine conspiracy theory, against public health and any collective action, surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, American College of Surgeons Committee on Cancer Liaison Physician, Melanoma: A Pseudoepidemic of Skin Cancer Prompts New Screening Recommendations. officials rely on a system that reports fewer than 1% of adverse effects? VAERS accepts all reports of suspected adverse events, in all age groups. Hematol. No proof that the event was caused While the VAERS database numbers are sobering, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study, the actual number of adverse events is likely significantly higher. Immonol. VAERS is a passive surveillance system that relies on the willingness of individuals and professionals to submit reports voluntarily. Based on the law of large numbers, in which very small percentages translate into a large number of actual cases or people, we would expect a lot more deaths within a couple of weeks after vaccination by random chance alone. VAERS is a government database managed by the Centers for Disease. The credits awarded are as follows: CME, 2.0; CNE, 2.0; CEU, .20; CHES, 2.0; and CVE, 2.0. Pediatr Infect Dis J 29:483, 2010) Even for infants 3-6 The oft quoted Harvard Pilgrim Study put the reports at <1% of actual, but infants can't complain. Pediatr. It is bewildering, therefore, RAVKINA LI, MATSEVICH GR: Morphological changes in the central nervous system in post-vaccinal encephalomyelitis developing after chickenpox vaccination in children. He was treated again with Acyclovir. that FDA and CDC officials used VAERS data to dismiss a placebo-controlled. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report. The weaponization of VAERS by anti-vaccine activists serves as a reminder that having access to more information does not always lead to better decisions. Covid-19 was the eighth leading cause of death among children in recent months, according to a study published Monday. The second is: What is the baseline rate for such adverse events in the population studied? No competing interests, Copyright 2023 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, Womens, childrens & adolescents health. (1989) 160(3):535-537. I assume the claim from Kirsch is based on a 10 year old report from Harvard-Pilgrim insurance showing that only ~1% of drug related adverse effects are reported. vaccine-caused illness? Of course, that disclaimer is included, so that RFK Jr. and his merry band of antivax ideologues can claim to have been literally honest while following up their recounting of VAERS numbers with all sorts of statements implying that vaccines were causative for the adverse events listed before. 6/15/07. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), was to construct the below flow of data in order to support the first two Aims: Figure 1. Facebook and Instagram announced earlier this year they would take steps to ban the spreading of vaccine misinformation on their platforms. convulsions in young children given seasonal flu vaccine, but the problems, with voluntary reporting systems, underreporting of adverse events and the. ) Children's deaths of any kind are rare, researchers noted. 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