Officials with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will present unverified claims from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) at next week’s meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in order to further limit access to lifesaving updated COVID-19 vaccines, reports The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Unverified VAERS reports can be submitted by anyone, even if it’s unproven whether a vaccine caused the injury, notes the CDC website:
A VAERS report alone does not indicate whether a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event. Only scientists and public health professionals can make this determination after thorough investigation.
However, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine conspiracy theorist has falsely claimed COVID vaccines were “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” noted Politifact:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines are the most deadly, citing deaths reported in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting (VAERS), an open database where anyone can report anything.
Health officials say that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and comparable to other vaccines.
NBC News reports that two sources said the FDA is misusing the VAERS database to link the Covid vaccine to 25 deaths in children:
Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy expert at the University of California Law, San Francisco, said the database reports can’t prove a connection between vaccination and children’s deaths.
“To identify causation to a vaccine you need to show that the cause of death was something the vaccine caused, and by itself, a VAERS report would not show that — you need larger studies comparing incidents of the harm with or without the vaccine,” she said in an email.
(Sources: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politifact, NBC News)