Very well done, Aravind! Your investigations have effectively resolved the matter of deleted reports, it seems to me. I think part of the problem, as illustrated in the case you highlight, is that VAERS is going beyond its protocol and accepting weak/incomplete reports from manufacturers that it wouldn't accept from others. That is, the manufacturers pick up social media mentions of adverse effects and take these non-identifiable cases and report them to VAERS. So both the manufacturers and VAERS are being too liberal in their reporting.
These kinds of cases also show the curious phenomenon of medical professionals spending the time to post adverse effects of non-identifiable cases on social media, yet apparently not spending the time (instead) to report to VAERS directly. That seems to be evidence that those professionals may be violating the law. Of course, most medical professionals ignore adverse effects and even when they recognize them do not report to VAERS, despite their legal obligations. But those professionals who post such information on social media but don't report to VAERS seem to be clearly guilty. There are many culprits in adverse effect underreporting.
Yeah, I think people don't realize that the overall sloppiness of VAERS can even cause ambiguous coding, making it nearly impossible to be certain that a given deletion has no duplicate in the system:
As I mentioned in the article, I think you can still get very close to 100% deduping by developing a spaCy ML model customized for parsing VAERS writeups, but it needs a lot of upfront effort
Very well done, Aravind! Your investigations have effectively resolved the matter of deleted reports, it seems to me. I think part of the problem, as illustrated in the case you highlight, is that VAERS is going beyond its protocol and accepting weak/incomplete reports from manufacturers that it wouldn't accept from others. That is, the manufacturers pick up social media mentions of adverse effects and take these non-identifiable cases and report them to VAERS. So both the manufacturers and VAERS are being too liberal in their reporting.
These kinds of cases also show the curious phenomenon of medical professionals spending the time to post adverse effects of non-identifiable cases on social media, yet apparently not spending the time (instead) to report to VAERS directly. That seems to be evidence that those professionals may be violating the law. Of course, most medical professionals ignore adverse effects and even when they recognize them do not report to VAERS, despite their legal obligations. But those professionals who post such information on social media but don't report to VAERS seem to be clearly guilty. There are many culprits in adverse effect underreporting.
Yeah, I think people don't realize that the overall sloppiness of VAERS can even cause ambiguous coding, making it nearly impossible to be certain that a given deletion has no duplicate in the system:
https://twitter.com/aravindmc/status/1669185888662999040
As I mentioned in the article, I think you can still get very close to 100% deduping by developing a spaCy ML model customized for parsing VAERS writeups, but it needs a lot of upfront effort