Is the CDC lying about deleted VAERS reports?

The case for vaccine data science - Part 3

This is Part 3 of my Case for Vaccine Data Science series.

At the very least, they are misleading everyone.

And journalists, who should be questioning all this, nowadays just accept everything the CDC says at face value.

Here is an example.

In the same article, David Gorski also writes this:

Rose then goes on to claim—of course!—that the nefarious CDC is “deleting” VAERS reports, particularly for children. This is a more difficult conspiracy theory to look at because there could be any of a number of reasons why VAERS ID entries are deleted. Even Rose admits that it could be because more than one report was filed for the same vaccine recipient (e.g., by the doctor and the parents) or for other reasons. A version of this conspiracy theory was going around a few months ago, and the CDC responded by explaining that some 6,000 VAERS reports had been removed from the database because they came from outside the US:

David Gorski links to this Reuters article, but it is actually an email correspondence.

Curtis Gill, a CDC representative, told Reuters via email that the CDC is aware of an error which took place while data was being uploaded to the page.

“The error resulted in what appeared to be a large spike in the number of deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after COVID-19 vaccination,” Gill said. “It happened, accidentally, because of combining foreign and domestic reports, and has been corrected.”

So the CDC did not even bother to publish a detailed explanation for deleted records on its website¹.

The Reuters article concludes with this paragraph:

Missing context. The larger number of reported deaths was due to an error that occurred while uploading data to the website. There is no evidence the CDC is deleting reports of deaths.

Clearly, this is false, and I have already shown specific examples of death reports being deleted.

(Note: after you read the article below, make sure you also read the other articles I have cited in the following paragraphs. I have learnt a lot of new information about deleted VAERS reports after publishing this one - thanks mainly to input from reader Devon Brewer - and my earliest articles were written before I understood the full picture)

Analyzing deleted VAERS death reports

But disproving the Reuters article is also a bit tricky (which is why I would have preferred CDC had published some kind of press release about this on their website), because I don’t know exactly what was said in the email correspondence between Curtis Gill and the Reuters’ journalist.

Is this really a “more difficult conspiracy theory to look at”?

First of all, this is not a “more difficult conspiracy theory to look at“ but just one that no one has done, probably because it actually needs proper data science skills. I will come back to this in a later article in this series, as one of the major advantages of data science techniques is the ability to “look at” and answer these types of questions. But this approach does have a downside which needs to be discussed in detail, and I will do that in that later article.

Since I have already analyzed deleted reports in a lot of detail, it is actually very easy to prove that the CDC is misleading people.

First of all, you can just go and download the deleted reports here (it is automatically updated each week) and see that only about 20% of the reports are foreign (state will be marked as ‘FR’). To the best of my knowledge, this ratio has barely changed, meaning the claim made in that email that Curtis Gill sent to Reuters was false.

Implications of deleted VAERS reports

It is now quite clear that the main reason for deletion is that multiple reports being filed for the same vaccine recipient:

Do deleted reports simply follow "Keep the first" policy?

But it is also clear that the analysis should not stop there.

For example, I showed that about 80% of deleted VAERS reports became more conclusive about causality (much more information provided in the write-up), more complete (some missing fields were added) or more serious in the followup report.

Why are VAERS reports deleted?

This means nearly all the research papers which have been written about VAERS in the last 2 years are inaccurate, sometimes by fairly big margins:

Why all research papers based on VAERS are wrong about vaccine safety

A not-very-surprising outcome of this is that there are some scenarios where the patient died between the date of the original and the followup report, and the people who write research papers using VAERS are not even aware of it.

How the VAERS followup process hides death reports

Now back to the original claim where I said the CDC is at the very least misleading people.

For example, I took the deleted reports from the VAERS Analysis website and appended the MedAlerts URL for only the ones which correspond to the COVID19 vaccine. Then I filtered down to those where the AbsentDate <= ‘1 Aug 2021’ (the date the Reuters article was published), set DIED=’Y’ and State != ‘FR’ to omit foreign reports.

As you can see, there are still 55 such entries.

Click here to see this list of 55 reports

Why deleting followup reports is such a bad idea

I will now take a very specific example of a 13 year old male who died a few days after taking the vaccine to show exactly how bad the VAERS followup system is at the moment.

Original report

Followup report

Here is a side by side comparison. The original report is on the left and the followup report is on the right.

You can see that both reports refer to the same patient (you can infer that based on the following fields matching - age, gender, date of vaccination, and lot number).

But notice that the followup report adds a lot of additional information (autopsy result, full list of symptoms) which shows that this was very likely caused by the vaccine. You will not be able to infer much (except temporality) from reading only the original report.

Why wasn’t this information merged into the original report? Is it not true that in this case, the followup report made the vaccine look worse?

More importantly, this was one of the deleted reports which was deleted from the system before Aug 2021 when the Reuters article was published. So CDC was not even being completely honest when they said the deletions corresponded to foreign reports.

Of course, David does not actually defend the CDC on this:

I really wish that the CDC would be more proactive about such incidents. Instead of waiting until questions are asked about such anomalies in VAERS data, the CDC should announce when it corrects the data. That wouldn’t stop conspiracy theories like the ones Mercola and Rose are spreading, but it could help. Likely there are other legitimate reasons for reports to be removed, but if the CDC isn’t painfully aware that antivaxxers are monitoring VAERS for the purposes of anomaly hunting by now, I don’t know what else would nudge them to do more. Such removals, which before COVID-19 were just part of the normal maintenance of VAERS and rarely noticed or commented on, even by antivaxxers, are now grist for the conspiracy mill. No doubt Rose will deny that this is what she was looking at, but there’s also no doubt that the CDC can no longer do routine quality control of the VAERS database without a lot more transparency, as conspiracy mongers like her are watching for any anomaly that they can weaponize against COVID-19 vaccines.

But the CDC does nothing at all when it deletes followup reports to correct the data. They still have not published a list of deleted reports along with the reason for deletion (plus the ID of the original report in case it was a followup), and it is now more than 18 months since that Reuters article was published.

On top of that, calling this “anomaly hunting” is ridiculous. Given that there are now over 30 thousand deleted reports for just the COVID19 vaccines, if these are just “anomalies”, then you are also admitting that the total number of VAERS reports is excessively high. If the deletions are not that anomalous (which is what I think because a good number of them are just followup reports), then the CDC needs to take deletions a lot more seriously and start publishing detailed information about why they delete reports.

Either way, these deleted reports are making it very hard to believe the other things that the CDC says.

1. It is not hard to see why. This will probably get people to ask (as they should) for a mapping between the original and the followup reports, which in turn will also negate even the research that the CDC itself publishes.