It is a common anti-vaccine argument that fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries are reported to VAERS.
They even think that they have evidence from Harvard to support their claim!
Are Fewer Than 1% of Vaccine Injuries Reported to VAERS?
Do they?
Are fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries reported to VAERS?
It has long been suspected that reports to VAERS are under-reported, as it is a passive reporting system.
The original claims for under-reporting to VAERS were based on an old study about drug reactions and were not specific to vaccines though.
Is that the Harvard study?
Nope.
“Restructuring at CDC and consequent delays in terms of decision making have made it challenging despite best efforts to move forward with discussions regarding the evaluation of ESP:VAERS performance in a randomized trial and comparison of ESP:VAERS performance to existing VAERS and Vaccine Safety Datalink data. However, Preliminary data were collected and analyzed and this initiative has been presented at a number of national symposia.”
Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS)
They are talking about a report, Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS), that was conducted at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc.
“Preliminary data were collected from June 2006 through October 2009 on 715,000 patients, and 1.4 million doses (of 45 different vaccines) were given to 376,452 individuals. Of these doses, 35,570 possible reactions (2.6 percent of vaccinations) were identified.”
Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS)
It is very important to note that all the study found is that all possible reactions, including minor reactions, like pain and fever, are not common.
They didn’t actually finish the report to see how commonly those reactions were reported to VAERS.
But we already know that more serious reactions are reported to VAERS much more routinely.
“Sensitivities ranged from 72% for poliomyelitis after the oral poliovirus vaccine to less than 1% for rash and thrombocytopenia after the MMR vaccine.”
Rosenthal et al on The reporting sensitivities of two passive surveillance systems for vaccine adverse events
And there has even been a more recent report, Advanced Clinical Decision Support for Vaccine Adverse Event Detection and Reporting, which also used an ESP-VAERS system, that found great improvements in reporting of adverse events to VAERS.
Even more importantly, even with it’s limitations, VAERS works!
“Despite its limitations, VAERS effectively detected a possible problem soon after introduction of RRV-TV in the United States.”
Lynn R. Zanardi, et al on Intussusception Among Recipients of Rotavirus Vaccine: Reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
Although it would be ideal to have even more reports sent to VAERS, time and again, we have seen that VAERS works.
“On November 23, 2010, the combination of the coding term “febrile convulsion” and the Fluzone(®) TIV product exceeded a predetermined threshold in the VAERS database. By December 10, we confirmed 43 reports of febrile seizure following TIV in children aged 6-23 months. Clinical features of most reports were consistent with typical uncomplicated febrile seizures, and all children recovered. Further epidemiologic assessment of a possible association between TIV and febrile seizures was undertaken in a separate, population-based vaccine safety monitoring system.”
Leroy et al on Febrile seizures after 2010-2011 influenza vaccine in young children, United States: a vaccine safety signal from the vaccine adverse event reporting system.
As we have seen, for VAERS to work, we don’t need all side effects and reactions to be reported.
“VAERS is primarily a safety signal detection and hypothesis generating system. Generally, VAERS data cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event. VAERS data interpreted alone or out of context can lead to erroneous conclusions about cause and effect as well as the risk of adverse events occurring following vaccination.”
Shimabukuro et al on Safety monitoring in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Also, VAERS is not the only safety system that we have to make sure that our vaccines are safe.
The other thing that folks should understand? Most reports to VAERS are not actually vaccine injuries…
More on the Percentage of Reports to VAERS
- Vaccine Safety Datalink
- Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Project
- Global Vaccine Side Effect Reporting Systems
- Are There Any Long-Term Studies On Vaccine Safety?
- Are Vaccines Evaluated for Mutagenicity, Carcinogenicity or Impairment of Fertility?
- Are Vaccines Tested Together?
- Why Are You Still Worried About the MMR Vaccine?
- Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS)
- Automated Detection and Reporting of Vaccine Adverse Events: ESP-VAERS
- Vaccination informed consent – more anti-vaccine rhetoric from ICAN
- Study – Advanced Clinical Decision Support for Vaccine Adverse Event Detection and Reporting.
- Study – The reporting sensitivities of two passive surveillance systems for vaccine adverse events
- CDC – Surveillance for Adverse Events Following Immunization Using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)
- Study – Safety monitoring in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)
- Study – Intussusception Among Recipients of Rotavirus Vaccine: Reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
- Study – Febrile seizures after 2010-2011 influenza vaccine in young children, United States: a vaccine safety signal from the vaccine adverse event reporting system.
- Study – Safety monitoring in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
- Announcement: Implementation of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System 2.0 Reporting Form
- Electronic medical record Support for Public health
- Debunking anti-vaccine arguments: VAERS, package inserts, and the VICP do not prove that vaccines are dangerous
- How vaccine litigation distorts the VAERS database
- VAERS as “evidence” of vaccine harm
- On Using VAERS
- VAERS a Few Things We Need to Discuss
- Harvard vaccine study? Not really, more Tetyana Obukhanych nonsense
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. = Harvard? Uh, no. I figured that out from 1 second of googling. Again, reading comprehension.
You’re not being completely honest here.
From Wikipedia:
“Harvard Pilgrim is home to the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, a collaboration with Harvard Medical School. As Harvard Medical School’s Department of Population Medicine, the Institute is the only appointing department of a U.S. medical school housed within a health plan.”
So, they ARE affiliated with Harvard Medical School.
Also this:
“Harvard Pilgrim is among America’s highest-rated health plans according to an annual ranking by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).[citation needed] Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is currently rated 5 out of 5 for its private HMO/POS and PPO plans and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care of New England is currently rated 4.5 out of 5 for its private HMO/POS plans in NCQA’s Private Health Insurance Plan Ratings 2015-16.[5]”
So they also have very high ratings and their reputation seems top notch. Be gone troll.
Harvard Pilgram Heathcare is the healthcare provider that Harvard Medical School analyzed for the study.
#readingcomrehension
Shame you didn’t dig a little deeper, you’d find out that Pilgrim is actually a Harvard medical school. But that’s normal among non-humans
A quote from the in-question Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. study:
“Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed. Barriers to reporting include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part of clinicians’ usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative. Proactive, spontaneous, automated adverse event reporting imbedded within EHRs and other information systems has the potential to speed the identification of problems with new drugs and more careful quantification of the risks of older drugs.
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”
They were awarded two $499,405 grants to do that study. Why would the dept. of Health and Human Services award $998,810 in grants for a study, and then simply be non-responsive or “no longer available”? Is it possible – stick with me here, this is a complicated postulation – that someone (CDC, HHS) decided they didn’t like the outcome of the study, and instructed the right people to simply stop communicating with the researchers?
Well, get evidence of such, then we can talk.
He just gave you the circumstencial evidence….. What else you want him to do? Arrest crooks from HHS? If they ordered the study, paid for it and then ignored them, what can possibly the reason? they didn’t like the color of the paper? The font ? Email went to spam and they forgot all about it? Or maybe they’ve seen it and decided not to publish it, because it goes against their agenda. Every single health organization in the US and across the world seems to be on board with the official party line and data and testimonies of the injured people are censored on all major platforms. All you have to do is step back for a moment, detach yourself emotionally and just look at the facts. It can be very enlightening.
critical thinking skills, i like it
such a shame that the person who wrote this didn’t possess the same
not only is it possible, its pretty standard across the board. yup, even the medical board.
people who you call “anti-vaccine” are actually just pro medical freedom + informed consent- a wild idea, i know. they’ve likely done more research than all of the losers who sit at their keyboards making fun of them.
What basis do you have to make that assumption?
VAERS is not intended to be an absolute concrete amount of exactly how many people have adverse effects.
It’s a radar that’s pinging. If something comes up like “oh hey some people have reported that this might happen” then OTHER ACTION is taken to investigate and get more concrete data on exactly how often it happens, or doesn’t.
Underreporting is not necessarily an issue so long as issues are reported at all, which they are.
Also, even the study admits that the more severe the effect, the more likely it is to be reported. Things like coughs and sneezes, probably not reported much. And even then, those reports don’t ensure that the vaccine is the cause. It’s just commenting that people tend not to report when they cough after getting a vaccine.
We also have other security safeguards in effect when it comes to studying a vaccine, putting it under trial, and announcing it safe. VAERS is just one of many tools to help ensure the safety of the vaccine.
In short: It doesn’t matter whether there’s underreporting or not; it doesn’t affect the vaccine’s safety. And so this is a solution without a problem. That’s why there was no action.
That seems to be a much more likely assumption than your conspiracy theory. Occam’s razor it. If you insist on the conspiracy instead, then, like that other guy said….time to show some proof of it.
Technically speaking, the Pilgrim-Health thing isn’t even a study. It’s a progress report on the ESP:VAERS system implementation.
There was no study. There was no analysis of data.
The 1% thing was just a unattributed and uncited figure in the “results” paragraph.
“Patient data were available from Epic System’s Certification Commission for Health Information Technology-certified EpicCare system at all ambulatory care encounters within Atrius Health, a large multispecialty group practice with over 35 facilities. Every patient receiving a vaccine was automatically identified, and for the next 30 days, their health care diagnostic codes, laboratory tests, and medication prescriptions are evaluated for values suggestive of an adverse vaccine event. When a possible adverse event was detected, it was recorded, and the appropriate clinician was to be notified electronically……… Preliminary data were collected from June 2006 through October 2009 on 715,000 patients, and 1.4 million doses (of 45 different vaccines) were given to 376,452 individuals. Of these doses, 35,570 possible reactions (2.6 percent of vaccinations) were identified. This is an average of 890 possible events, an average of 1.3 events per clinician, per month. These data were presented at the 2009 AMIA conference.”
??????
This article is a joke.
Wow, what a rebuttal– so informative
Why was the Harvard study not completed? Even a null result would be informative.
Per the report, sounds like the CDC did not like the results and decided to cancel participation (my opinion on that). Now the Facts: from the report which can be found at the link provided by user “TS Rohnevarg” below, (note I had to capture the link from https:\\ to .PDF, the rest of the link doesn’t work in my browser)
“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”.
My speculation is they’re talking about response time from report to posting (or similar) here in particular, either way, They seem to have stopped providing information.
To me this is totally contradictory to TRANSPARENCY of a government organization. Also fits in with my opinion above, they got the information they wanted to see and said were done (finding out how many people DON’T report adverse events… Again, my opinion there, I wasn’t invited to the meeting)
Special thanks to TS Rohnevarg for the information, your one of a kind!
Cheers
How come the OP did not just give everybody the link to the study..Hmm? It took an outside source to get to it. Just more questions that sometimes keep me up at night. In fact I rarely see news posts that cite the link to an article they purport to discredit, maybe never, but that’s a strong word. As my dad liked to say, “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see”.
You guys are pretty skillful liars. The study was done by Harvard Pilgrim for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And it is not an ‘old’ study. What the hell is that supposed to mean, like it’s from the 18th century? It was only a decade ago and it takes decades to compile data. The results of the study were set forth in the first page of results, page 6 of the study [https://digital.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/docs/publication/r18hs017045-lazarus-final-report-2011.pdf#:~:text=Likewise%2C%20fewer%20than%201%25%20of,vaccine%20adverse%20effects%20are%20needed.], stating, not ‘rashes,’ but ALL adverse effects are underreported, saying “Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. Although 25% of
ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events
and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or
slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health.”
All you have to do is go read the darn thing yourself and engage two brain cells to understand this report. I noticed it was “grant money” that funded it, so I would think the old follow the money trail is leaving Big Pharma VERY HAPPY that hardly anybody reports adverse reactions to vaccines. This very point is music to their pocket books. AND EVEN if this is not entirely accurate their sample size is large (“Preliminary data were collected from June 2006 through October 2009 on 715,000 patients, and 1.4 million doses”), so any error of EVEN 15% still leave the under-reported HUGE! I’m kind of amazed at the Author of this article not able to come to similar conclusions. I will change my mind though if someone wants to pay me a bunch of money to say something different. I accept Cash, paypal, BTC, and google pay. let me know. Cheers
I suffered a serious vaccine injury (twice) and so did a close relative of mine and neither one of us are in VAERS. Before Covid, I had heard of VAERS but I thought it was just for people seeking compensation. Now I know better but I think it is still self-reported?
I don’t think anyone should be using VAERS information to decide anything about vaccines good or bad. No one is following up with vaccine recipients and there is no system in place to make sure that all vaccine injuries are entered into the system.
This article is extremely deceptive.
“Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or
slow the identification of problem drugs and vaccines that endanger public health.”
-Grant Final Report, Grant ID: R18 HS 017045
Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS)
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc., reported to HHS
So, basically, 1% of mild reactions are reported and maybe 30% of serious reactions are reported…
I read the Harvard report months ago and as an Engineer the results seemed simple enough to understand. I even went to VAERS and downloaded and analyzed data for myself. Then I found this piece of garbage propaganda article.
The results are clear, these covid shots are killing and injuring people on an unprecedented scale that breaks all previous trends. And for some reason through some twisted logic the author thinks it’s cute to play word games. Shame on you Vincent Innelli you are garbage just like your propaganda article published here. You are helping to kill innocent people who trust you. Shame on you.
This seems like a common theme when people like this can’t argue findings; they try and discredit the finder. Oh it’s not the REAL Harvard. If this was written by a grate 10 science student, would it still not be worth looking in to what they found? Maybe check if anything has been improved since 2010? Maybe check weather the frantic pressure on physician from the pandemic is making it easier or harder to get accurate reporting?
The next step is your children when it comes to pushing these vaccines. Even for people who look at vaccines like a religious belief, are these not questions you still would like an answer to? Keep in mind that VEARS findings are NOT publicly available, even to physicians and it is the only means of reporting that is offered by the CDC according their website.
Dr. Iannelli, You are dead wrong and are giving a false paradigm to push the “covid clot shot” when it’s clearly not a vaccine, but a genicidal weaponized injection containing deadly component meant to kill. As it’s foundation it destroys the immune system forever. FOREVER. So in conclusion you are either GETTING PAID OR YOU ARE GETTING PAID………NUREMBURG. 2.0
And just who funds your work?
Not many people trust Big Pharma anymore. What’s the dollar amount Pfizer has ben fined in recent years? Opioid Crisis fines? You’re all criminals!
I’m looking for the actual Harvard report and was hoping you would have a link to it, but I’m not seeing one. I want to go to the source and see what it actually says, not read what people think or say it says.
I find it interesting that “43 reports of febrile seizure following TIV in children aged 6-23 months” were enough to raise questions, but the current VAERS statistics of thousands of adverse reactions/effects and deaths are not significant enough to bother with.
About halfway down, and I quote: “Even more importantly, even with it’s limitations, VAERS works!”
My comment: “Even after attending school, you don’t know how to write!”
The upshot: If you want people not to think you’re stupid, learn to use apostrophes as taught in middle school.