The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System can detect possible safety issues in vaccines. Anyone can submit an unverified report, regardless of whether a vaccine is known to have caused the problem. Yet viral messages continue to misuse the VAERS data, and flawed calculations, to claim the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children is unsafe and will cause many more deaths than it will prevent.
As we’ve written several times before, social media posts and online claims have repeatedly misused and misrepresented the unverified data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to make false and misleading claims about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration use VAERS as an alert system to detect potential safety problems with vaccines. All reports are accepted into the database without determining whether the event was caused by a particular vaccine. When experts see an unusual pattern of reports that could be a safety signal, they can then investigate; all reports of serious adverse events are reviewed. And, the CDC says, if someone dies after a vaccination, health care providers are required to report the death by the FDA, even if it’s not clear the vaccine played a role.
A disclaimer on the VAERS website warns: “The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable.” The website continues: “One of the main limitations of...
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