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According to Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS) "Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported." (page 6).

Is that true? And how do they know that?

(A similarly low number is also mentioned for adverse drug events.)

A side question: how many confirmed or "highly likely" deaths caused by covid vaccines have been reported?

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  • Here is the conference paper they delivered.
    – Oddthinking
    Commented Dec 18, 2021 at 9:01
  • CDC says "7,000 coincidental, temporally associated deaths from all causes would be expected during the analytic period (7). In contrast, VAERS received 78 reports of death" and says "Expect 11,440 deaths among LTCF residents (= 286,000*4%) following vaccination … By comparison, VAERS received 129 reports of deaths" So 1.1% are reported, in both cases, which are 2021-01
    – endolith
    Commented Feb 16, 2022 at 2:31
  • @endolith: please make that an answer, not a comment
    – Oddthinking
    Commented Feb 18, 2022 at 0:58
  • @Oddthinking OK, but I'm not sure if it's strictly what the question is asking
    – endolith
    Commented Feb 18, 2022 at 4:09

1 Answer 1

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VAERS reports are things that meet criteria, not any random event in an EMR.

  1. 1% of the events their untested, unvalidated model which is not described from 13 years ago flagged matched clinical reports. There's no almost no modeling they could have done that could be causal, and no reason to think that they're not just flagging common and largely irrelevant things that correlate with vaccine administration.

A reporting protocol & corresponding algorithms were developed to detect potential adverse event cases using diagnostic codes, and methods were tested to identify prescriptions or abnormal laboratory values that might be suggestive of an adverse effect. These algorithms were designed to seek both expected and unexpected adverse effects.

We had initially planned to evaluate the system by comparing adverse event findings to those in the Vaccine Safety Datalink project [...] the components under this particular Aim were not achieved.

  1. There is no reason to even suspect that the criteria their model uses are more relevant than the peer reviewed criteria used to set criteria for reporting. Overwhelming reporting systems with noise is not useful. Their report lists these as possible reactions, and even that is a reach.

Of these doses, 35,570 possible reactions (2.6 percent of vaccinations) were identified.

  1. Based on a conference paper made public several years later, of 209 physician-reviewed events that were flagged by their algorithm (which may be different from the one referenced here), 193 were not vaccine related.

  2. This is a grant report. The authors do not have any reason to say that their modeling was a failure, as this is not peer reviewed. They have every incentive to say that there is open problem with how things are reported and their solution works. You will note exactly 0 peer reviewed publications listed in this grant report. This was not a successful project.

Some amount of adverse reactions will not be reported, of course - that is the nature of any reporting system. I don't think this kind of project is a bad idea, but the estimate referenced is entirely unsupported. It's no better then a random guess

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  • What is weird about this question is the claim is based on a side-report about "what we did with your money" rather than their scientific claims. In their conference paper they describe how they email physicians to get them to check on the model's predictions (but don't make the 1% claim there!)
    – Oddthinking
    Commented Dec 19, 2021 at 7:14
  • 5
    If you went through NIH progress reports I've written I'm sure you could pull out individual sentences that are meaningless or flat out wrong. They're written in a great deal of haste and nobody should take them as evidence for anything.
    – CJR
    Commented Dec 19, 2021 at 15:56

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