Finally, there is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines have killed large numbers of people. The Food and Drug Administration and CDC have multiple systems for monitoring vaccine safety, and they have detected very few deaths caused by the vaccines. "The latest VAERS-inspired claim attempts to cast doubt about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines by highlighting the high number of reports to the safety system compared with past vaccines.
“How can it be that adverse event reports input to VAERS are greater, since the COVID vaccines were rolled out, than all cumulative adverse event reports to VAERS for the prior thirty years?” a post from Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccination organization, suggestively asks. “Death reports for 2021 are also greater than cumulative deaths reported to VAERS over the preceding 30 years. Why has no public health official explained this?”
A December post from Health Impact News, a website known for spreading misinformation about vaccines, makes the same insinuating argument. “There are now 927,740 cases reported to VAERS following COVID-19 shots for the past 11 months, out of the total of 1,782,453 cases in the entire VAERS database filed for the past 30+ years,” the post reads. “That means that 52% off ALL vaccine adverse reaction cases in VAERS for the past 30+ years have been reported in the last 11 months following the COVID-19 shots.”
The figures, which reflected the totals in the database as of a few weeks ago, are accurate, although they’re cherry-picked to be as high as possible, as they include reports from abroad; more than a quarter of the COVID-19 reports are foreign.
More important, experts say there are plausible reasons for why the COVID-19 total is so high — and because of VAERS’ design, comparisons between vaccines are invalid. The statistics are not proof that the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous or significantly less safe than previous vaccines." |
