VAERS is unverified, unfiltered user-generated content.
> “Many of these types of claims that we hear are actually a misrepresentation of the VAERS data,” Vasudevan said.
> The pace of reporting has picked up: In North Carolina alone, roughly 70,000 reports have come in related to the COVID vaccines — more than triple the total back in May, when CBS 17 explained what the database does — and does not — tell you.
> “It is reasonable to expect that reports on VAERS increase whenever there is a new vaccine on the market,” Vasudevan said. “And that’s definitely what we are seeing with COVID.”
> What the system makes perfectly clear: It does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between any vaccine and those side effects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explicitly says the reports “may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.”
> Among the reported side effects of the COVID vaccines in North Carolina: Yawning, fractures, a foot deformity, and wisdom tooth removal.
> She estimates that 85 percent of the reports on VAERS are “either completely unrelated to vaccinations, or about events that pose little to no concern.”
The SNR is probably pretty high in VAERS in general most of the time, but when we have a misinformation pandemic combined with a real pandemic, it's easy to see how the data becomes polluted pretty fast.
And I agree, the USA should probably have better reporting systems!
Some other countries do, some of them have much better data quality than VAERS, and genuine analysis of them still agrees that the vaccines have a good safety profile. To just select a few English-language systems:
> “Many of these types of claims that we hear are actually a misrepresentation of the VAERS data,” Vasudevan said.
> The pace of reporting has picked up: In North Carolina alone, roughly 70,000 reports have come in related to the COVID vaccines — more than triple the total back in May, when CBS 17 explained what the database does — and does not — tell you.
> “It is reasonable to expect that reports on VAERS increase whenever there is a new vaccine on the market,” Vasudevan said. “And that’s definitely what we are seeing with COVID.”
> What the system makes perfectly clear: It does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between any vaccine and those side effects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explicitly says the reports “may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.”
> Among the reported side effects of the COVID vaccines in North Carolina: Yawning, fractures, a foot deformity, and wisdom tooth removal.
> She estimates that 85 percent of the reports on VAERS are “either completely unrelated to vaccinations, or about events that pose little to no concern.”
https://www.cbs17.com/community/health/coronavirus/fact-chec...