Mirror, mirror on the wall, what’s the safest shot of all?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what’s the safest shot of all?

Every week in clinic I make entries into the U.S. CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), as I catch up on years of injuries, disabilities, and deaths that have occurred after [COVID] vaccination.

These words were written by Dr. Peter A. McCullough, who has for years been dealing with the aftermath of the government’s decision to approve the mRNA jabs at “warp speed” before waging a PR campaign to inject the substances into the arms of as many Americans as possible. VAERS, for him, is a tool that could potentially alert people to the dangers associated with the COVID shots. However, for many in the establishment, VAERS is a nuisance, even a danger.

VAERS has never lived up to expectations. Ideally, it would allow private individuals, doctors, and vaccine manufacturers to report all the adverse effects they thought, with reasonable justification, might be associated with vaccination. Vaccine manufacturers are actually obligated to report adverse effects they become aware of to VAERS. But less than ten percent of adverse events are actually reported.

Keeping the masses in the dark, for their own good

That's still enough to make people like Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (a Gates Foundation pet project) upset.

In an article published last month in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) and titled, “Misinformation and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System,” Jamieson and her colleagues honed in on the reason for their misgivings:

Vaccine hesitancy is not a new phenomenon ... To fuel vaccine hesitancy, those opposed to vaccination often point to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

Submitting a report

Jamieson actually begins by lauding the database: “The power of VAERS,” she writes, “lies in the CDC encouraging everyone, including vaccine production companies, clinicians, and the public, to report any health-related events that occur after vaccination.” When the report concerns a serious adverse event, Jamieson continues, a VAERS contractor will collect “detailed health record data” which are transmitted to the FDA and CDC. 

"Thanks for the report; we'll handle it from here”

This is where the problems with VAERS begin, problems so notorious that they were the subject of an article in another prestigious medical journal, the BMJ (British Medical Journal). The BMJ’s author described the frustrating process of trying to file a report of an adverse event, and of people waiting months and even years before getting a response (or never getting one at all), even when the adverse event was serious.

Patrick Whelan is a rheumatologist and researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2022, one of his patients, a seven-year-old boy, went into cardiac arrest following a COVID shot and had to be intubated.

Whelan filed a VAERS report and waited to be contacted by the CDC, given the seriousness of the event.

“I assumed that, since it was a catastrophic event, the safety committee would want to hear about it right away,” he said. But nobody called.

A week later, Whelan had to update the report. Tragically, there had been no improvement in the boy’s condition and the family decided to terminate life support. When Whelan tried to update, however, he found that it wasn't an option; instead, he had to file a new report, of his patient's death.

And still no one from the FDA or CDC contacted him.

Inability to update reports (which can often create the skewed impression that a serious case resolved itself when in fact the person concerned died) is not a bug in VAERS—it’s by design, as the FDA claims that case updates and corrections must be made and kept on the backend of the system in order to “protect patient confidentiality.” FAERS—the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System—however, which collects reports on drugs rather than vaccines, can be updated, with no such concerns about patient confidentiality.

The (ab)uses of VAERS data

Even the best clinical trials can only enroll so many people. So with virtually an entire population of millions effectively part of a huge experiment in mRNA “vaccines,” one might have thought the resulting information provided by the subjects themselves would present a gold mine of data for scientists keen to know how things were working out in such a novel field. Jamieson seems to suggest that this actually happened, writing that VAERS

has proved to be a useful surveillance system for health care globally, when combined with robust, well-designed studies to understand if there is a causal relationship between a vaccine and a subsequent diagnosis.

Possibly this has been the case with other vaccines. With the mRNA shots, however, less than four percent of people who experienced a serious medical event following a shot were contacted for further information.

Furthermore, the CDC, as of November 2023, had only reviewed 20,000 reports (out of millions). Interestingly, it determined that not a single death was linked to the mRNA shots. Jamieson appears to believe this is an accurate assessment—she writes scathingly of an Instagram video (since taken down) featuring a person pointing to a VAERS report and saying, “Acute myocardial infarction. That is a stroke, if you guys aren’t aware of what that means.” Jamieson then specifically attacks the social media user for making the “implication” that the jabs are causing deaths:

She proceeded to scroll through dozens of reported postvaccination deaths as she noted, “Look at all these deaths you guys.” The implication: COVID-19 vaccination caused the strokes and deaths.

Why don’t they trust vaccines anymore? Must be VAERS

Filing a false report to VAERS is a criminal offense that can land a person in prison for up to five years. Even physicians and scientists find the process complex and time-consuming—and even they sometimes have their reports challenged by the CDC, despite providing full documentation. Jamieson, nonetheless, asserts that serious adverse events are significantly over-reported to VAERS, and that the entire concept of the database is one huge invitation for bad agents to engage in misinformation.

The crux of her concern is her view that most people simply can't understand what VAERS is.

Access to VAERS reports without understanding their role in surveillance may diminish trust in scientists or, worse, seed misinformation … and allowing full access to unvetted language increases public susceptibility to misconceptions about vaccine safety.”

... In the prepandemic era, attention to data such as that publicly available through VAERS was limited to a minority of the public. However, since the pandemic, a rapid growth of information has occurred from global sources available in the public domain. [Emphases added]

Two different solutions

The VAERS site already prominently features a warning that “VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness.” So what is Jamieson to do, given that many members of the public persist in believing that the data, however imperfect, do actually signify something?

She comes up with an interesting solution: Rename VAERS.

How can we improve the public’s understanding of vaccine surveillance reports and their significance or lack thereof? A simple first step might be to change the name of this system from the “Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System” to one that more accurately describes its purpose. 

What is VAERS’ purpose?

For example, in our opinion, reterming the system “Vaccine Safety Sentinel” would remind audiences that the incidents of concern are unverified, related to safety, and part of a monitoring or early-warning system. Adding “safety” to the title would align the system with others in the CDC, “v-safe” notable among them, that include “safe” or “safety” in their name ... “Safety” reinforces the monitoring system’s goal: protecting those who have been vaccinated. [Emphases added]

Possibly there’s a better solution. How about creating a more robust version of VAERS with data considered reliable? Well, that was already tried in the past, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reveals in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci:

In 2010, the federal Agency for Health Care Research Quality (AHRQ) designed and field-tested a state-of-the-art machine-counting (AI) system as an efficient alternative to VAERS. By testing the system for several years on the Harvard Pilgrim HMO, AHRQ proved that it could capture most vaccine injuries. AHRQ initially planned to roll out the system to all remaining HMOs, but after seeing the AHRQ’s frightening results—vaccines were causing serious injuries in 1 of every 40 recipients—CDC killed the project and stowed the new system on a dusty shelf.