Myth busted: VAERS is NOT "overreported"

My latest survey shatters all of the myths that the CDC has used to ignore the VAERS safety data. There are more reports for these vaccines because there are more events observed.

Steve Kirsch

Oct 22

Executive summary

There are only three possible reasons that the adverse events reported in VAERS are so high for the COVID vaccines:

1. Fraud

2. Overreporting

3. The vaccines are unsafe.

Nobody argues for #1 because there is no evidence to support that.

The CDC and FDA argue, without any evidence, that the sole reason is #2.

This is unlikely since the “overreporting” was happening worldwide in every adverse event reporting system and it all began at the same time as the vaccine rollout.

In this article, I bust the “overreporting” myth by using data that took me only a few hours to collect. What I found is that it isn’t even a close call: VAERS is actually underreported for the COVID vaccines (relative to other vaccines) and there are more reports because the vaccines are extremely unsafe (reason #3).

For the COVID vaccines, the CDC has had nearly two years to collect the data that I collected in just 2 hours. For Gardasil, they’ve had 16 years to collect the data.

What I found from my survey of over 250 healthcare workers was that:

1. Deaths were underreported to VAERS by a factor of 51x which is consistent with my “minimum URF” estimate of 41X that I calculated more than a year ago.

2. The number of COVID vaccine deaths observed by just the first 281 healthcare workers to fill out the survey was 1,128. This is enough deaths to sink any vaccine in any rational society. Remember: We shut down a baby formula factory after just 2 babies died. Also, there are over 22 million healthcare workers in the US. I just sampled a tiny fraction of the workers and found 1,128 deaths that were judged by healthcare professionals to be associated with the COVID vaccines.

3. The adverse events for the COVID vaccines are vastly underreported compared to previous vaccines, not overreported as hypothesized by the CDC. There were only 1.2X more events actually reported for the COVID vaccines than for all previous vaccines combined. But there were 6.6X as many adverse events observed for the COVID vaccines than for all vaccines combined. This means that doctors were 5.4X less likely to report an adverse event if it happened after a COVID vaccine than for other vaccines.

4. This means that if you thought this mortality chart was bad for the COVID vaccines, the reality is at least 41 times worse for the total number of actual events. Also the relative bar heights in 2021 and 2022 should be made 5.4X higher. This is clearly a red-alert safety signal for the COVID vaccines. These bars in this chart, once adjusted, would literally be “off the charts.”

   

   Domestic deaths reported to VAERS total 14,842 as of October 23, 2022. The two bars on the right need to be 5.4X higher to adjust for the 5.4X lower reporting rates for the COVID vaccines. The actual number of deaths are around 41X higher than the number reported (14,842).

I invite any fact checker in the world to verify the data I collected or to collect their own.

Why hasn’t the CDC collected any data to dispute my data? They’ve had nearly 2 years to do something that took me 2 hours! I wish I knew but they won’t tell me.

The myth: “Nothing to see here folks… it’s just overreporting”

The CDC and FDA have always claimed that the high reporting rates in VAERS are simply due to the overreporting of background events that is caused by greater awareness of VAERS by the public and the healthcare industry.

They’ve made this claim for the COVID vaccines as noted in the Rosenblum paper, “Safety of mRNA vaccines administered during the initial 6 months of the US COVID-19 vaccination programme: an observational study of reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and v-safe”:

Heightened public awareness of the COVID-19 vaccination programme, outreach and education to health-care providers and hospitals about COVID-19 EUA reporting requirements for adverse events, and adherence to EUA reporting requirements by providers and health systems, probably all contributed to the high volume of VAERS reports received.

The CDC made a similar claim in 2009 in the Slade report in order to dismiss the huge rate of adverse events in VAERS for the Gardasil vaccine as noted on page 115 of Turtles All the Way Down:

Although the authors admit that VAERS does not provide reliable data to realistically assess safety, they willfully leap all methodological obstacles and conclude that Gardasil’s safety profile was generally similar to that of other vaccines. [27] This is certainly a noteworthy achievement, especially when one considers that they stated at the outset that “the VAERS reporting rate for [Gardasil] is triple the rate for all other vaccines combined.” [28] Did VAERS data and the research techniques at the authors’ disposal enable them to come up with a reasonable explanation for the abnormally high rate of reported adverse events for Gardasil? The answer seems to be no. The paper does not contain an evidence-based explanation, merely the speculation that the high reporting rate might simply “reflect greater public attention to HPV” that was purportedly “stimulated” by “widespread media coverage”.[29]

Isn’t it time to bust the myth with actual data?

In order to find out whether the CDC claim is true or not, I thought it might be helpful to gather some data from healthcare providers to gain insight as to whether the COVID vaccines are as safe as other vaccines.

I published an open call to fill out a survey for healthcare workers.

Here’s the summary for the first 281 records:

1. Avg years in field: 27

2. Avg years aware of VAERS: 9

For other vaccines combined

1. # of reportable AEs observed: 1085

2. # AEs actually reported to VAERS: 153

3. # vaccine-related deaths observed: 92

This is an AE underreporting factor of 7.09X

For COVID vaccines

1. # of reportable AEs observed: 7189

2. # AEs actually reported to VAERS: 187

3. # vaccine-related deaths observed: 1128

4. # vaccine-related deaths actually reported to VAERS: 8

This is an underreporting factor for AE’s of 7189/187=38.44X among the same reporters. So we have a self-controlled case series here by comparing for the rates reported by the same reporter for other vaccines.

Key insight: the COVID vaccines are being underreported by 5.4X compared to other vaccines in VAERS

This is significant. It shows that the COVID vaccines are underreported by a factor of (38.44/7.09)=5.4X compared to other vaccines.

What this means is that the elevations we observe in VAERS vs. other vaccines are really 5.4X worse than they appear in the charts!

So if you think this chart looks bad, it’s 5X worse.

For example, the VAERS data shows that acute cardiac failure is elevated in the COVID vaccines by 475X. Once we correct using the 5.4X factor, we get a 2,565X higher fatality rate for these vaccines.

This makes sense. Suppose the average vaccine has a fatality rate of around 1 in 1M people vaccinated. This suggests that the COVID vaccines kill 2,565 people per 1M vaccinated on average. With 250M vaccinated, that is an estimated 641,000 people killed in America from the COVID vaccine.

Now compare that to the VAERS estimate. We have 14,842 deaths * 41 (URF) = 608,522.

We are clearly in the same ballpark here.

Reasons why healthcare providers are underreporting events for the COVID vaccines

Here are some of the reasons that healthcare workers are underreporting events associated with the COVID vaccines:

1. Doctors are told over and over again that the COVID vaccines are extremely safe and there are only a few adverse events and they are mild.

2. Doctors are discouraged from filing VAERS reports because that would increase vaccine hesitancy which is not the patriotic thing to do.

3. There are also so many more events happening for these vaccines that even doctors who realize what is going on don’t have the time to file the reports. For example, I know one doctor who is underreporting by 1000X.

Limitations

1. The survey was open to any healthcare worker, but the survey was distributed to my followers on Substack.

2. The people who responded could be not representative of all healthcare workers

3. In the analysis, I didn’t remove non-US reporters

4. People didn’t always fill out the survey correctly, e.g., instead of putting the number of years they’ve been reporting, they put in the year they started reporting. So the data had to be corrected.

5. I did not verify any of the submissions. Some submissions could be gamed.

6. I added the death observed statistics after recordID 28. I added the deaths reported field after recordID 172.

7. I calculated the underreporting factor after the first 267 records. There were 411 observed deaths but just 8 VAERS reports, giving an actual underreporting factor (URF)=51. This isn’t far from my original calculation of 41 (done a year ago) or the most recent estimate of 66 using the v-safe data.

8. Two people could be reporting the same death. However, since the number of reporters is a tiny fraction of the number of healthcare workers, this should be very rare.

Sanity checks

Could I be way off? No. All of these determinations are consistent with other data. See my Sanity Checks article.

The raw data

The survey is here.

The results can be found here.

Summary

Based on the number of vaccine-related deaths observed by just the first 281 healthcare workers in my survey, the vaccines are a disaster and should be stopped immediately.

If there is better data, the CDC needs to produce it. Now.

At a minimum, they need to explain, with data to back it up, why there are so many deaths reported in VAERS because as our data shows, the reason these healthcare workers are reporting more events to VAERS is because they are seeing more events. Why are they seeing more events?

If the CDC cannot produce any data from healthcare providers who are polled by an independent polling company that this analysis is wrong, they should immediately halt the COVID vaccines.

Subscribe to Steve Kirsch's newsletter

Tens of thousands of paid subscribers

I write about COVID vaccine safety and efficacy, corruption, censorship, mandates, masking, and early treatments. America is being misled by formerly trusted authorities.