Recent deletions of Janssen death reports are a distraction
It may be an unintentional distraction
Recently there was a post by Albert Benavides from WelcomeTheEagle about a decrease in total death count in VAERS, where the CDC deleted over a 100 deaths all at once when they published the 26th May 2023 CSV file.
I spot checked some of these and noticed the following:
a) the deleted death reports were mostly for the Janssen ad26.cov2.s vaccine
b) they were mostly followup reports
c) the original reports ALSO mentioned death
d) the fields which are usually very useful for deduplication (so we can map the deleted report to its original report) - such as vaccination date, age and gender, lot number, detailed list of symptoms - are usually missing in these deletions
I don’t know if this is intentional, but I do think this is a distraction.
If I were to rank deleted reports in terms of quality - which I will define as having sufficient information so people can find the correct mapping to the original report - the recent deletions would all be very low quality.
Reminder: nearly all deleted reports are actually followup reports. If you are not already familiar with my research into deleted VAERS reports, I recommend reading these articles:
Do deleted reports simply follow "Keep the first" policy?
This doesn’t mean the current batch of deletions will not provide any useful insight, but just that the effort needed to do the deletion → original mapping is way too high for it to be worthwhile.
Here is an example:
Believe it or not, I found the followup just by searching for DIED=’Y’ and the presence of the word “buddy”in the SYMPTOM_TEXT (there are only 6 such reports over all of COVID19 VAERS). And this is a good example of a deletion which simply cannot be mapped using algorithmic techniques (in other words by writing code), but needs some human intuition.
As you can see from this example deleted report, the recent deletions are mostly very low quality reports because they don’t provide enough information to enable us to write an algorithm to identify the original report.
As a result, mapping the deletions to their originals is likely to end up as a very costly effort without providing much insight.
Thank you for your further investigation, Aravind. In my opinion, the most concerning thing is not that these apparently duplicate reports were deleted, but that they and their twins were included in the first place. They don't seem to have been submitted through the standard VAERS process, and as such, could sometimes represent duplicate reports if a family member or medical professional already submitted a more complete, identifiable report on the same individual. If anything, VAERS staff are being way too liberal in including these reports which degrade the quality of the VAERS. Maybe that's the intent, or maybe it's just another sign of an incompetent government contractor and lack of meaningful oversight by CDC/FDA.