Investigating CDC's claim that there are no deaths associated with mRNA vaccines
The CDC thinks Big Tech fact checkers are idiots, and they are right
Summary:
While the CDC acknowledges 19,476 preliminary reports of death following COVID-19 vaccination (as of March 2023), they have only confirmed 9 deaths as causally linked to vaccines - all from J&J shots, not mRNA vaccines
Through my analysis of foreign VAERS data, I identified over 100 death reports where healthcare professionals specifically attributed deaths to mRNA vaccines, which contradicts the CDC's position that no deaths are linked to mRNA vaccines
Foreign VAERS reports provide particularly valuable data since healthcare professionals submit most of them (unlike US reports) and include more detailed causality assessments.
Even sources like Wikipedia present mRNA vaccines more favorably regarding safety compared to adenovector vaccines like J&J
I created a system to analyze VAERS reports by searching for phrases like "as related to" to identify cases where reporters explicitly linked deaths to vaccines, though I acknowledge my analysis includes some false positives and negatives
I recently saw someone on the comments section of David Gorski’s website mention that there were no deaths associated with the mRNA vaccines, and linked to the CDC website as proof.
First, I confirmed if CDC actually still makes that claim.
Yes, that is actually what the CDC claims as of 24th April 2023.
Reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination are rare. FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, even if it’s unclear whether the vaccine was the cause. Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem. More than 672 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through March 1, 2023. During this time, VAERS received 19,476 preliminary reports of death (0.0029%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. CDC and FDA clinicians review reports of death to VAERS including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records. Continued monitoring has identified nine deaths causally associated with J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccination. CDC and FDA continue to review reports of death following COVID-19 vaccination and update information as it becomes available.
Now remember, every single Big Tech platform still adds the message “CDC states that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective…” on their content.
Here is a very recent example:
I think it is quite clear who Big Tech fact checkers consider as the authoritative source of this information.
mRNA vs other types of vaccines
Remember that the J&J vaccine is actually an adenovector vaccine and not an mRNA based vaccine.
Do you see all the adverse reactions mentioned in the Wikipedia introduction?
Now compare this with the Pfizer vaccine article on Wikipedia. They actually claim that no long-term complications have been reported. That’s because the article cited is from Dec 2020 and hasn’t yet been updated1!
The Wikipedia article for the Moderna mRNA vaccine does not have any information about side effects in the introduction.
Remember I recently wrote that there seems to be a concerted push to make the mRNA vaccine look “safer” compared to the adenovector ones.
Why foreign reports are qualitatively better
The usual pushback against VAERS is that anyone can report anything to it, and it is “unverified”.
In reality, VAERS is actually vetted quite a lot nowadays, and the foreign VAERS reports sometimes very clearly explain their causality assessment.
On top of that, the foreign reports are more useful for this particular task as their writeups are also much more descriptive2. Unlike the US VAERS reports, a very large majority of the foreign VAERS reports are sent in by healthcare professionals. (I will do a quantitative analysis of this in a future article as I think this by itself is a very interesting pattern).
I searched for the phrase ‘as related to’ in the writeups, and then wrote a little bit of code to do further analysis to see what the death was attributed to.
I found that there are already more than 100 deaths reported in the foreign VAERS reports where the reporter has actually attributed the death to the mRNA vaccine.
Here are some example reports (emphasis mine)
Died in his sleep through the night; This is a spontaneous report from a contactable consumer received via a Pfizer sales representative. A 20-years-old male patient received bnt162b2 (PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE) , via an unspecified route of administration on 08Feb2021 at single dose for covid-19 immunisation. Medical history included muscular dystrophy. The patient''s concomitant medications were not reported. The patient received their covid vaccine on 08Feb2021 and who subsequently died in his sleep through the night of 08/09Feb2021. It was not reported if an autopsy was performed. Information on the lot/batch number has been requested.; Sender''s Comments: The limited information provided in this report does not allow a full assessment of the case. The event death with unknown cause is assessed as related to the suspect drug per company guidance. This case will be reassessed when additional information becomes available. The impact of this report on the benefit/risk profile of the Pfizer product is evaluated as part of Pfizer procedures for safety evaluation, including the review and analysis of aggregate data for adverse events. Any safety concern identified as part of this review, as well as any appropriate action in response, will be promptly notified to Regulatory Authorities, Ethics Committees and Investigators, as appropriate.; Reported Cause(s) of Death: Unknown cause of death
Another same day symptom onset:
Myocarditis; Giddiness; Shaking of hands; Giddiness and shaking of hands worsened; headache/headache aggravated/the possibility of Migraine was high; General malaise; This is a spontaneous report received from a contactable reporter(s) (Pharmacist) from Regulatory Authority. Regulatory number: v21131940. A 29-year and 3-month-old female patient received first single dose of bnt162b2 (COMIRNATY, Solution for injection), administration date 29Jun2021 15:00 (the day of vaccination), (Batch/Lot number: unknown) via an unspecified route of administration at the age of 29-year and 3-month-old as dose 1, single for covid-19 immunisation. Relevant medical history included: "had allergies to chicken, pork" (unspecified if ongoing); "had allergies alcohol" (unspecified if ongoing), notes: The patient had allergies to chicken, pork and alcohol. The patient''s concomitant medications were not reported. The following information was reported: MYOCARDITIS (death, hospitalization, medically significant) with onset 03Jul2021, outcome "fatal", described as "Myocarditis"; MALAISE (non-serious) with onset 29Jun2021 15:00, outcome "unknown", described as "General malaise"; HEADACHE (non-serious) with onset 30Jun2021, outcome "recovered", described as "headache/headache aggravated/the possibility of Migraine was high"; DIZZINESS (non-serious), outcome "unknown", described as "Giddiness"; TREMOR (non-serious), outcome "unknown", described as "Shaking of hands"; CONDITION AGGRAVATED (non-serious) with onset 05Jul2021, outcome "unknown", described as "Giddiness and shaking of hands worsened". The patient was hospitalized for myocarditis (start date: 25Sep2021). The events "myocarditis", "general malaise", "headache/headache aggravated/the possibility of migraine was high", "giddiness", "shaking of hands" and "giddiness and shaking of hands worsened" were evaluated at the emergency room visit. Therapeutic measures were taken as a result of malaise, headache, dizziness, tremor, condition aggravated. The patient date of death was unknown. The reported cause of death was myocarditis. It was not reported if an autopsy was performed. On 25Sep2021 (88 days after the vaccination), the patient was admitted to the hospital. On an unspecified date, the outcome of the event, myocarditis, was fatal. The course of the event was as follows: On 29Jun2021 at 15:00, the patient had general malaise. From 30Jun2021 in the morning, headache occurred, from 01Jul2021, the headache aggravated. The headache worsened due to body motion, then the patient rested quietly in her bed, but symptom did not improve. Since the patient had giddiness, general malaise, and shaking of hands, so she went to the emergency department of the reporting hospital. From the medical record, the possibility of migraine was high. The patient was prescribed medicines (TRIPTAN medicine, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), antiemetic and peptic ulcer medicine), and went to home. After taking the medicines, the headache disappeared, but the other symptoms persisted. On 05Jul2021, giddiness and shaking of hands worsened, then the patient went to the emergency department of the reporting hospital on 06Jul2021. There was a denial of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, orthostatic hypotension or cerebellar lesion. Considering that the symptoms were form the existing pain, the patient was prescribed medicines (NSAIDs and peptic ulcer medicine), and she was scheduled to revisit the doctor on 12Jul2021, then went to home. Outcome of the event, myocarditis, was fatal. It was unknown if an autopsy was performed. The reporting pharmacist classified the event as serious (hospitalization from 25Sep2021) and assessed that the event was related to BNT162b2. The lot number for bnt162b2 was not provided and will be requested during follow up.; Reported Cause(s) of Death: Myocarditis
Full list of foreign death reports
Here is the full list.
There are four columns in the dataset:
URL - the MedAlerts WayBack machine URL
RELATED - whether the reporter assessed this vaccine injury as having been related to the vaccine. Based on the phrase which follows “as related to”, I wrote some code to identify if the reporter made the assessment that the vaccine caused the death and marked the Related field as either True or False.
RELATED_SENT - the specific sentence which I parsed to assign the RELATED value
REPORTER - who made the report? This is based on identifying the phrase “report from” and then extracting the rest of the sentence. This is why it is sometimes empty, and sometimes very verbose.
You can filter “Related” to True and see these reports, and click on the URL field to read the full report on the MedAlerts website.
Please note that there are a few false positives and false negatives in this list3, and there are probably a handful of reports which are not for the mRNA vaccine.
Some example false positives:
If you click through and read all the reports, you will also see a few false negatives.
But even if you leave out the false positives, there are still well over 100 death reports which are attributed to the mRNA vaccine inside VAERS itself.
The easiest way to verify that the entire tech community has completely lost its mind on COVID19 is to see how often they cite Wikipedia on this topic
I sometimes wonder if the real reason the CDC decided to stop publishing the writeups is because people started analyzing the free text to see how well it matches with the propaganda we usually hear around the mRNA vaccine. But I am sure the CDC would never do such a thing.
And you can use Machine Learning to improve this (I did not use ML, I only used plain rules-based matching). This is one more example where ML + NLP can help improve VAERS analysis, and another reason why David Gorski is wrong about VAERS.