Throughout 2021, misinformation based on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System has cycled persistently throughout social media. A new claim has popped up via Instagram: that thousands of COVID-19 vaccine deaths reported in VAERS are an undercount of an actual number of deaths.
The Dec. 6 Instagram post shared a screenshot, showing a number of deaths it attributed to vaccines: 1,621 deaths from Johnson & Johnson, 4,799 deaths from Moderna, 13,039 deaths from Pfizer and 73 from unknown vaccines. Those numbers were from the United States only, the Instagram user wrote in the caption.
"Only 1% of deaths are reported according to Harvard study," the user wrote.
We reached out to the Instagram user for more information but did not receive a response. We searched for the Harvard study that they referenced, but were not able to find one which stated 1% of deaths are reported. We did note in a separate fact-check that a well-known anti-vaccine advocate made a similar claim and cited a study that evaluated an automated system other than VAERS that tracked a patient’s health changes following a vaccination. But the study did not explain how it calculated 1%. The Department of Health and Human Services has said on its website that the degree of underreporting in VAERS varies widely depending on the symptom being reported.
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