Why do we know so little about foreign VAERS reports?
Why is there such a big difference between rate of followups for US vs foreign?
Summary:
VAERS followup rates differ dramatically between US and foreign reports
US reports show a 3.51% overall followup rate compared to just 0.5% for foreign reports
COVID-19 vaccine reports show even lower followup rates
US COVID-19 reports dropped to 1.22% followups while foreign COVID-19 reports plummeted to just 0.04%
However, US Myocarditis cases have disproportionately high followup rates
US myocarditis reports show an 8.18% followup rate, significantly higher than the 1.22% average for all COVID-19 vaccine reports
Foreign VAERS reports receive minimal investigation
Investigations largely ignore foreign reports even though they are much more detailed and thus much more likely to prove/disprove causality
Recently
wrote an article about myocarditis issues not being MedDRA coded as Myocarditis in the first report for some US VAERS reports.
His thesis is that in the US they try to rush the first report into the system before the full damage becomes obvious1
The situation is nearly inverted for foreign VAERS reports.
For example, the US had had a total2 of 1_886_297 reports all time, with 66_351 followups, for a followup ratio of 3.51%
This changes to 12_380/1_018_115 = 1.22% for the COVID vaccine reports.
This suggests two possibilities - the rate of followups came down for COVID19 vaccine, or it is more likely that a lot more reports got lost to bad coding after 2020. Or maybe there is a third reason which we can only figure out by looking more closely at the data.
But it will not change the fundamental point I am making in this article.
We can contrast these numbers with foreign VAERS reports.
4_019/782_981 = 0.5% for all time
For only COVID19 reports, the rate of followup for foreign reports is
263/638_097 = 0.04%
So the followup rate for COVID19 reports is much smaller than the usual rate of followup for foreign reports, and the reduction (2.87x vs 12.5x) is even more dramatic than for US reports.
[3.51/1.22 = 2.87, 0.5/0.04 = 12.5]
US Myocarditis reports
The followup rate for US VAERS reports coded as myocarditis is even higher (and was highlighted in the article by
)262/3201 = 8.18%
But the rate isn’t quite as high for all cardiac related symptoms, and only slightly worse than the average rate for non-COVID reports
2194/54012 = 4.06%
To summarize, for US VAERS reports related to the COVID19 vaccines:
Rate of followup across all types of conditions: 1.22%
Rate of followup for cardiac related conditions: 4.06%
Rate of followup for myocarditis alone: 8.18%
Even if you somehow ignore that nearly 10% of US myocarditis followup reports were not published till the most recent data update, we still need to know why there is such a big difference between the overall followup rate for all conditions and the followup rate for myocarditis
In 2021, CDC kept insisting that almost all cases of vaccine caused myocarditis were mild and self-resolving. If that is true, why are there so many followup reports?Questions about foreign VAERS reports
This leads to a lot of questions, many of which are in fact quite relevant to any VAERS investigation
why is there an order of magnitude difference in VAERS followups for US reports?
I think at least some of this could be explained by the fact that a very large percentage of foreign VAERS reports are filed by healthcare professionals but is that the only reason?
why is there no mention, let alone full investigation, of foreign VAERS reports for topics like myocarditis?
remember, even if the CDC could claim they do not know the “denominator” for foreign countries, they are obligated to inform the public if there is any bad news in foreign VAERS reports (and there is plenty)
why do we still know so little about how foreign VAERS reports are processed?
who decided to stop publishing EU VAERS writeups?
why are there so many reports which don’t have the age field populated even though it is clearly mentioned in the writeup?
Is this because they knew that they would never have to reveal the followups to the world? Did this happen only because RFK Jr became the Health Secretary?
Crude calculations like these will probably have some properties that I did not consider which might make a small difference to the overall numbers. For example, in some cases the lowest ORDER value for a given VAERS_ID might be 2 and not 1, which will definitely change the percentages. But I expect that these issues are quite rare and that they happen in all the segments considered.