Both of these studies do not constitute evidence of any type of reporting bias. The only way to measure reporting bias is to follow individual vaccinees, and note which experienced adverse effects and which reported to VAERS. Lazarus' Pilgrim Health study (https://digital.ahrq.gov/ahrq-funded-projects/electronic-support-public-health-vaccine-adverse-event-reporting-system) is the most recent and rigorous example of this kind of evaluation (incidentally, he found dramatic underreporting). Overreporting exists only when there is a report to VAERS that is not matched by independent evidence of adverse effects -- that is, an "overreport" is a fake report. Changes in the proportion and number of VAERS reports that might be related to litigation and exemptions may simply reflect changes in litigation behavior and exemption-seeking independent of VAERS (in fact, legal changes, as in the California law, spur such reactions). My sense is that both of the latter have increased dramatically over time.
Also, even some of the reports flagged as litigation- or exemption-related clearly aren't (such as '"legally" blind' and "injury lawyers know how"). I think there's no replacement for actual human beings to read and code the content, especially when the number of relevant cases is so small.
"especially when the number of relevant cases is so small."
This might be useful for my next article. Can you help us quantify what would be "small" in this context? Say, is manually reading a total of 1000 VAERS reports doable using just the personnel they have allocated for this task? I don't really know how many people are specifically looking into VAERS writeups.
I find it odd that it is possible for the vaccine injury databases to somehow be good enough for external authors to write research papers about, while simultaneously the CDC is "too resource constrained" to merely translate all the information into the CSV file (which they clearly don't do).
I was referring to analysis of the VAERS data. Reviewing the symptom text write-ups for 1,000 reports is easy enough to do for a research project. VAERS staff wouldn't do this -- they are data producers. Trying to divine whether a report might possibly be related to litigation or an exemption (or something else) is an analysis task.
CDC is a government agency, so its policies and statements are political, not necessarily rational.
Mar 19, 2023·edited Mar 19, 2023Liked by Aravind Mohanoor
I define the hallucinatory "over-reporting" as 100% of vaccine harm having been reported in VAERS PLUS additional reports to announce legal action.
This is of course impossible because, along with the large number of reports that CDC deletes, they would not allow a duplicate, no?
I'm seeing 1,461,998 covid reports through 2022 so the mere 420 for covid is less than 29 thousandths of 1 percent.
And that is a meager sliver of an almost non-existent percentage far far far-and-away LOWER than previous years with other vaccines as evidenced by the data presented, is it not?
Perhaps a better question might be: Is it now legal to destroy lives with vaccines?
The answer is yes.
And the reason for that, to cut to the chase: Life is now cheap. We have 385,000 new babies per day. (Google kindly highlights the result when asked). Everything hinges on that.
So we find ourselves in a situation here, where people in power may want to try to reduce the growth rate, may have been convinced by actuary tables projecting our future planetary conditions that it would be beneficial to reduce that growth, and may have a difficult time letting a good crisis go to waste, believing earth's survival is at stake. You argue with them folks, I would find it rather tough.
VAERS remains synonymous with under-reporting.
Unless Gorski's attacking CDC as irresponsibly allowing "over-reporting" in VAERS, he made it up as an act of desperation to hide truth.
I wonder how the pay compares for manufacturing false impressions versus truth telling (a route our keepers have never tried).
The paper uses a similar fraudulent methodology associating increase in parents seeking medical exemption for vaccines in California as somehow being mostly fake reports.
That is remarkably stupid, given that OF COURSE if you have a vaccine injured child, and some law changed to mandate more vaccination, you will naturally report to VAERS to strengthen your case (even if you had earlier not wanted to go through the whole process).
But unfortunately VAERS does not publish the "Reporter" field anymore. Otherwise I could have looked at their Methods and verified the accuracy of that paper too.
Both of these studies do not constitute evidence of any type of reporting bias. The only way to measure reporting bias is to follow individual vaccinees, and note which experienced adverse effects and which reported to VAERS. Lazarus' Pilgrim Health study (https://digital.ahrq.gov/ahrq-funded-projects/electronic-support-public-health-vaccine-adverse-event-reporting-system) is the most recent and rigorous example of this kind of evaluation (incidentally, he found dramatic underreporting). Overreporting exists only when there is a report to VAERS that is not matched by independent evidence of adverse effects -- that is, an "overreport" is a fake report. Changes in the proportion and number of VAERS reports that might be related to litigation and exemptions may simply reflect changes in litigation behavior and exemption-seeking independent of VAERS (in fact, legal changes, as in the California law, spur such reactions). My sense is that both of the latter have increased dramatically over time.
Also, even some of the reports flagged as litigation- or exemption-related clearly aren't (such as '"legally" blind' and "injury lawyers know how"). I think there's no replacement for actual human beings to read and code the content, especially when the number of relevant cases is so small.
"especially when the number of relevant cases is so small."
This might be useful for my next article. Can you help us quantify what would be "small" in this context? Say, is manually reading a total of 1000 VAERS reports doable using just the personnel they have allocated for this task? I don't really know how many people are specifically looking into VAERS writeups.
I find it odd that it is possible for the vaccine injury databases to somehow be good enough for external authors to write research papers about, while simultaneously the CDC is "too resource constrained" to merely translate all the information into the CSV file (which they clearly don't do).
I was referring to analysis of the VAERS data. Reviewing the symptom text write-ups for 1,000 reports is easy enough to do for a research project. VAERS staff wouldn't do this -- they are data producers. Trying to divine whether a report might possibly be related to litigation or an exemption (or something else) is an analysis task.
CDC is a government agency, so its policies and statements are political, not necessarily rational.
I define the hallucinatory "over-reporting" as 100% of vaccine harm having been reported in VAERS PLUS additional reports to announce legal action.
This is of course impossible because, along with the large number of reports that CDC deletes, they would not allow a duplicate, no?
I'm seeing 1,461,998 covid reports through 2022 so the mere 420 for covid is less than 29 thousandths of 1 percent.
And that is a meager sliver of an almost non-existent percentage far far far-and-away LOWER than previous years with other vaccines as evidenced by the data presented, is it not?
Perhaps a better question might be: Is it now legal to destroy lives with vaccines?
The answer is yes.
And the reason for that, to cut to the chase: Life is now cheap. We have 385,000 new babies per day. (Google kindly highlights the result when asked). Everything hinges on that.
So we find ourselves in a situation here, where people in power may want to try to reduce the growth rate, may have been convinced by actuary tables projecting our future planetary conditions that it would be beneficial to reduce that growth, and may have a difficult time letting a good crisis go to waste, believing earth's survival is at stake. You argue with them folks, I would find it rather tough.
VAERS remains synonymous with under-reporting.
Unless Gorski's attacking CDC as irresponsibly allowing "over-reporting" in VAERS, he made it up as an act of desperation to hide truth.
I wonder how the pay compares for manufacturing false impressions versus truth telling (a route our keepers have never tried).
Yeah, it is not like there are only two possibilities: true report OR litigation. There is clearly a third possibility - true report AND litigation.
Interestingly, Gorski also cites another paper in that same article:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32176185/
The paper uses a similar fraudulent methodology associating increase in parents seeking medical exemption for vaccines in California as somehow being mostly fake reports.
That is remarkably stupid, given that OF COURSE if you have a vaccine injured child, and some law changed to mandate more vaccination, you will naturally report to VAERS to strengthen your case (even if you had earlier not wanted to go through the whole process).
But unfortunately VAERS does not publish the "Reporter" field anymore. Otherwise I could have looked at their Methods and verified the accuracy of that paper too.