The VAERS System Is Broken

Written by John Leake on November 29, 2023. Posted in Current News

The British Medical Journal recently issued a report titled: Is the US’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken?

Phrasing the title as a question is purely rhetorical.

Anyone who reads this alarming document will conclude that VAERS is as broken as the BluesMobile upon its arrival at the Cook County Tax Assessor’s Office in The Blues Brothers.

The report is full of stunning revelations, starting with its opening case study.

Three weeks after receiving a second dose of a covid vaccine, Robert Sullivan collapsed at home on his treadmill. An anaesthesiologist in Maryland, USA, he was a particularly fit 49 year old: the week before falling ill, he’d been happily skiing at altitude in Colorado.

Sullivan was given a diagnosis of sudden onset pulmonary hypertension, which is generally progressive, can be fatal, and in most cases can’t be cured. The condition is rare, especially in middle aged men.

Sullivan decided to file a report in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which collects reports of symptoms, diagnoses, hospital admissions, and deaths after vaccination for the purpose of capturing post-market safety signals.

But the submission process was a glitchy race against the clock. “The format is cumbersome and it times you out,” he tells The BMJ. For his troubles, Sullivan received a confirmation by email and a temporary “e-report” number.

He learnt from his doctor’s office that a VAERS representative had requested medical records. Then he didn’t hear back for a year.

Given that this was the experience of a medical professional in trying to file a VAERS report, one can only imagine the experience of poor people in medically underserved communities.

I believe it’s reasonable to infer that the majority of their adverse events aren’t even initially reported, never mind investigated.

Even in the face of the cumbersome and interminable process of filing a report, the number of events reported still shot up from a multi-year baseline of 60,000 per year to over a million in 2021. To quote the BMJ:

Before the pandemic VAERS was receiving nearly 60 000 adverse event reports each year. A 2015 CDC article suggests that the agency had the capacity to request records for just a few thousand serious reports each year.

But in 2021 the total number of reports shot up to a million, and another 660,000 have been filed since.

Nearly one in five meet the criteria of serious. This surge reflects the unprecedented campaign to vaccinate against covid-19—in the US alone some 675 million doses have been administered—and the vast majority of recent reports are related to covid vaccines.

The CDC states that, “in the event of a significant increase” in VAERS reports warranting clinical review, the standard operating procedure requires additional CDC Immunization Safety Office staff to process cases.

This is a total disaster.

As far as I can see, the Epoch Times is the only major newspaper in the country that has reported the BMJ report.

The COVID-19 mass vaccination program was indeed the Great Gamble that Dr. Peter McCullough boldly proclaimed it to be in his August 2020 Opinion in The Hill.

The program was a great gamble with the lives of millions of Americans— and especially young Americans—who were not at sufficient risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 to warrant receiving a hastily developed, experimental gene transfer product.

At the risk of flattering my esteemed colleague: Dr. McCullough was right about the program. The vast majority of other medical professionals in the country were wrong.

On Wednesday morning I gave a presentation to a private club in Dallas. Afterwards, one of the men in the audience approached me and asked why doctors at major medical centers weren’t coming forward to acknowledge that Dr. McCullough was right about the COVID-19 vaccine great gamble.

“Because he was right about it,” I replied. “No one ever wants to admit he was wrong, especially about something as shameful as this disaster.”

P.S. – Given the appalling performance of so many doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our readers may find themselves in search of a new doctor who has demonstrated greater discernment.

See more here substack.com

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