Analysis of Finland VAERS reports

What do they tell us?

I recently heard (on Twitter) that some MD association in Finland had deleted the Nuremberg code from their website.

Link to tweet

So I started looking at Finland’s VAERS reports. (Note: I am not implying any correlation, I am simply saying that I got interested in Finland’s data because of this information).

And I noticed that Finland’s VAERS dataset is actually quite unique, even among countries which provide good VAERS reports.

From what I have seen till now, their reports have the highest signal-to-noise ratio.

They did three things:

• they only reported genuinely serious reports

• they tried to determine if the patient was healthy

• they assessed the medical significance of every symptom (as best as I can see)

Generally speaking, VAERS reports from EU countries are much better than the ones from US, and I think this is because a very large majority of them (>90%) are made by health care professionals.

Finland is no different, but they have one more unique aspect - it looks like they also tried quite hard to find and report pre-existing conditions.

The three ways VAERS reports pre-existing conditions

Broadly speaking, you can infer three types of pre-existing conditions from EU VAERS reports (and from detailed reports generally speaking)

1. the patient DID have some pre-existing conditions

2. no pre-existing conditions were reported (this only means we cannot be sure they had any pre-existing conditions, which is very different from being sure they did NOT have any)

3. the patient did NOT have any pre-existing conditions

As a general rule, VAERS reports try to classify the patients into either bucket 1 or bucket 2. It is very rare that they go out of their way to report that the patient was actually healthy.

Finland VAERS reports specifically mention it if they know that the patient was healthy.

Click here to see the full list of Finland VAERS reports

Reminder: the above list is based on the VAERS CSV files from November 2022, which was the last time the CDC published the text write-up for the EU region.

The foreign data set was gutted this week in VAERS and the cancer signal was halved, the myocarditis dose 3 response signal was lost and 994 spontaneous abortions/still births were dropped

Seriousness of adverse events

Suppose we want to filter the dataset to find only those reports which are not serious.

If you want to filter the dataset for reports which are not serious, we can look at those where

a) DIED, DISABLE, L_THREAT and HOSPITAL are null

b) RECOVD is Yes

c) the phrase “medically significant” is NOT included in the writeup

there are only 89 such reports out of a total of 6605 reports, so less than 1.5% of the reports can be considered non-serious.

Looking at the ones which are still left, you can see a lot of day zero (NUMDAYS=0) reports and those with LAB_DATA filled out (meaning it was significant enough to do some lab work).

So I think it is fairly safe to say that Finland only reported serious adverse events, which suggests they already applied some kind of quality filter before adding them to VAERS.

Derived Ages

As with other EU reports, the VAERS reports from Finland were also often missing the AGE_YRS field

Number of reports = 6605

Number of reports with AGE_YRS missing = 4221

Number of reports where I could infer the DERIVED_AGE using spaCy = 3915

In other words, I was able to infer over 92% of the missing age values from the writeup. And this makes up over 50% of all the VAERS reports from Finland.

“Patient was healthy”

I was able to identify a lot of Finnish VAERS reports where the patient was reported to be healthy.

I searched for the word “healthy” and used spaCy to extract the specific phrase which contains this word.

Please note that this will produce a few false positives - that is, it will mark some people as healthy even if the writeup uses the word healthy in a slightly different context.

While it is a still a pretty small percentage, it is actually one of the highest percentages of all countries which reported to VAERS.

I created a small dataset to show this.

Click here to see this dataset

There is clearly something anomalous about Mexico (and I plan to investigate that in a future article), but Finland has one of the highest percentage of ‘healthy’ people who had VAERS injuries¹.

You can see that Finland is in the 4th place on this list, and will be highest placed if you filter for more than 5000 reports.

The patients had NOT recovered for nearly 80% of the reports

If you simply filter for RECOVD=N, you can see that a total of 5102/6605 = 77% of the people had not recovered from their vaccine injury at the time of reporting.

This is second only to the UK, but I think the RECOVD field is much more likely to be accurate for Finland based on the level of detail I usually see (although I could be wrong about this)

Click here to see percentage of RECOVD by country

Here is the dataset sorted in reverse percentage of Unrecovered - the higher the percentage in the last column, the more number of people who have RECOVD=’N’ in the VAERS report.

Healthy people under 50

In the previous article, I mentioned the Israel MOH FOIA reply where they stated that they couldn’t find any COVID19 deaths under 50 in the year 2020, where the patient did not have at least one pre-existing condition.

When I filter for deaths under 50 with the “healthy” filter I get two results for Finland VAERS reports. One of them was actually healthy, while the other was mostly healthy.

Here is the VAERS report for the healthy woman, who developed Myocarditis. The symptom onset was on the same day of the vaccination.

And there are over 50 disabilities among healthy people under 50.

In the table below I provide the breakdown of reports for “healthy” patients by age decile. Not surprisingly, the percent is quite high among the under-50 cohorts.

Those who say “this is quite obvious - younger people will be healthier” are missing the point.

What we want to see in a table like this is that healthy people should have fewer severe adverse reactions on a percentage basis, and we would probably tolerate it if people who are already not very healthy (and are supposed to be at higher risk from COVID19) get vaccine injuries.

The risk-vs-reward is not favorable towards vaccinating younger cohorts if healthy young people end up with severe vaccine injuries.

Some people might still ask - “but how do you know the vaccine did cause the injury?”

I don’t know for sure. But if the patient is already reported to be healthy, the odds are much higher that the vaccine did cause the injury. And this is also why the VAERS writeups should be published and not be hidden from public view, so people can do such analyses.

So what do the Finland VAERS reports tell us?

If you suppose all the reported deaths were caused by the vaccine, there are about 1.2-in-100K deaths (total deaths: 158, total doses in Finland: ~13 million). This is actually quite close to the estimate of 1-in-100K in the Qatar study.

There are 6605 severe adverse reactions for the 13 million doses. This works out to be about 1-in-2000 doses², which is in the same ballpark as some estimates we have heard³ from Germany’s Ministry of Health.

Since the write-ups are quite detailed, we know that there were a lot of medically significant adverse reactions.

A very high percentage of people did not recover from their vaccine injury at the time of reporting.

In other words, there is a lot of signal in the Finland VAERS reports (EU reports in general), and it isn’t all that surprising that the health authorities have stopped publishing the EU writeups⁴.

1. I think this is mainly due to more diligent reporting, but it could also have been a bad batch. It is also important to remember that this crude keyword search will sometimes include cases where the actual meaning is different. Another reason could be that Finland only reported adverse events beyond a threshold of severity (reducing the denominator), while other countries allowed less severe events to be reported.

2. The rate could be slightly higher (worse) because the VAERS data is only up to Nov 2022, while the total vaccine dose information is based on May 2023 data

3. “…considering numbers from Germany’s own Ministry of Health showed (also repeated by Lauterbach himself) that reported serious adverse events occurred in one in 5,000 vaccinations.” - Source

4. And just as important, they have also stopped publishing the SPLTTYPE field, which identifies the country code. Without the country code, I could not have done the country-wise grouped aggregate analysis. This is why my article is based on the Nov 2022 version of the CSV files, which still had this information.