The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, database has been fodder for anti-vaccine activists since before the COVID-19 pandemic. The reporting system, which is jointly run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, is the nation’s early warning system to detect possible safety problems with vaccines after they are rolled out to the public.
Vaccines are always rigorously tested before widespread use, but the clinical trials can only be so large and cannot rule out rare safety concerns. For this reason, VAERS is used, in conjunction with a variety of other vaccine safety monitoring systems, to quickly identify potential problems, which are then investigated.
Importantly, anyone can submit a report of a symptom that occurred following vaccination. The reports are not vetted for accuracy, nor do they mean that the symptom was necessarily caused by the vaccine. In many cases, the symptom is purely coincidental.
These basic facts about VAERS, which are prominently advertised in a disclaimer that users must agree to before accessing the database, haven’t stopped people from misinterpreting the system’s data and using it to lend inaccurate or unsupported claims about vaccines a veneer of scientific and governmental legitimacy. And with the arrival of the three FDA-approved or -authorized COVID-19 vaccines, claims using VAERS have gone into overdrive.
Television personalities, anti-vaccine websites and social media posts have all cited figures in VAERS or similar reporting systems abroad to falsely suggest that the COVID-19 vaccines aren’t safe, as we have written. The vaccines are remarkably safe — typically triggering only temporary and expected side effects that are signs that a person’s body is mounting the proper immune response — and are associated with only a few, very rare serious adverse events. |
