The government’s method of tracking vaccine injuries could be missing as many as 99 percent of injuries. This is unacceptable. Action Alert!
The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is completely broken, with a report showing that VAERS misses 99 percent of vaccine injuries. A project funded by the Department of Health and Human Services found a better way of detecting vaccine reactions, but the government health authorities completely ignored it. Important decisions about medical procedures, including which vaccines and drugs to take, cannot be made without access to reliable and accurate information about their potential for side effects. How can doctors and patients make informed decisions when vaccine reactions are so poorly understood? We need immediate reforms to improve this system.
Astoundingly, the study finding that fewer than 1 percent of vaccine injuries are detected by VAERS came from HHS. HHS gave a grant to Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare to create an automated system for reporting vaccine injuries. Patients who received a vaccine were followed for 30 days, during which time algorithms and electronic health records were used to identify possible vaccine-related injuries. Data was collected for three years. Out of 376,452 patients who received a vaccine during that time, 35,570 reactions were detected.
To put this in context, during roughly that same three-year period, VAERS detected just 88,919 total events for the entire US population.
Apparently, the CDC was not interested in pursuing a system that detected far more vaccine injuries than their current system, which relies on voluntary reporting by doctors, nurses, and patients. The Harvard Pilgrim report notes that,
Unfortunately, there was never an opportunity to perform system performance
assessments because the necessary CDC contacts were no longer available and the CDC consultants responsible for receiving data were no longer responsive to our multiple requests to proceed with testing and evaluation.
That’s right: when a better system was found, a system that detected far more vaccine injuries than VAERS, it was met with complete silence from the government, which spent $1 million on the project. Why let patient safety and informed consent get in the way of the government’s vaccination program?
There are federal bills to improve transparency about vaccine adverse events, but they do not address the underlying problem: that the entire VAERS system is a failure and needs to be replaced by something that gives us a more accurate picture of vaccine safety.
The government seems to adhere to the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach. This applies to scientific knowledge regarding vaccine injuries as well. As noted by a Congressional report from the Committee on Government Reform, the government’s own National Academy of Medicine (then known as the Institute of Medicine) has, for years, noted severe limitations in our knowledge about vaccine safety. When asked to assess 76 vaccine adverse events for a causal relationship to vaccines, the National Academy of Medicine concluded that 50 had no or inadequate research, noting that there is a general lack of understanding on the biological mechanisms underlying adverse events, few published epidemiological studies, insufficient information from case reports, limitations of existing surveillance systems (i.e., VAERS), and more.
Government health authorities are aware of both the severe limitations of its systems to identify and track adverse events from vaccines and the stunning lack of research on vaccine safety. If you don’t see the injuries, and you can claim not to know about injuries, then business can continue unabated.
There is such a pressing need for this information. COVID vaccines are being recommended for almost the entire US population; childhood vaccines are recommended to virtually every child. We should have piles and piles of data demonstrating their safety; we should have up-to-date systems for tracking their dangers. Instead, we have the opposite, and it is completely unacceptable.
Action Alert! Write to Congress, urging them to update VAERS to give patients more information on vaccine safety. Please send your message immediately.
