v-safe visualization tool with dynamic URLs

Due to server resource constraints I only display v-safe registrants who reported some health impact

Since VAERS has been around for a while, people have already built tools to see all information about an individual VAERS report based on a custom URL which contains the VAERS_ID.

I know of at least two - OpenVAERS and MedAlerts. There are other tools for seeing individual VAERS reports, but being able to see the information based on a dynamic URL is sort of the main point of this discussion.

There isn’t even any such tool for v-safe that I know of.

Unfortunately v-safe is a pretty large dataset, so it is not cheap to build tools for it. And I do think maintaining it can be quite expensive for independent researchers.

In fact ICAN has a dashboard which uses Microsoft BI, but it doesn’t provide a way to see all the data specific to a single registrant inside a timeline view.

So I built a simple tool which uses client side JavaScript (less load on my server) and uploaded it to my own website.

There are about 780K v-safe registrants who reported some health impact, such as needing to see the Doctor 

This is the subset I am using for this tool.

There are three reasons I am restricting the tool to this subset:

• I plan to build a faceted search for this subset using Algolia which has a free plan which allows maximum of 1 million rows per index

• I am uploading the data itself to my own website which has its own set of server resource limitations

• I also want to focus on this subset because it is usually sufficient to show how badly the CDC has neglected free text information without making it too cumbersome to operate

The tool is here:

https://learnspacy.com/vsafe_timeline/index.html?id=9DZ-19514-38300

While the tool is really basic at the moment, I managed to create it in a way that actually makes it easy to read the information.

For example, the Systemic Reaction Other table is probably best rendered in the following way (transposed, and with a SYMPTOM row which lists all the symptoms as PT_NAME, LLT_NAME pairs within a nested table)

Just replace with any other id from the list below, and you will see all the information presented in a reasonably easy to browse format for that specific v-safe registrant.

Here is the full list of IDs you can use with this tool

I will be using this in my future v-safe articles.