Why is the age field missing in so many foreign VAERS reports?

Are health authorities outside the US doing their calculations based on incorrect numbers?

A few days back, the founder of OpenVAERS made an interesting point on Twitter

OpenVAERS @OpenVAERS

@aravindmc @stkirsch That’s not the question we want answered. We want to know why they don’t translate the data into the assigned fields, how does splttype and history and lab work etc compromise privacy, and why not just remove the MHRA codes?

These are all good questions.

But when it comes to (not) translating the data into assigned fields, it is not true for the US reports for the most part. For example, I took 2022 reports and tried to see if I could infer the age from the SYMPTOM_TEXT and found only a small fraction of reports had that problem for Jan - Aug 2022 reports for the US.

Here I am talking about the percentage of reports where I was able to fill in the age from the SYMPTOM_TEXT based on the total number of reports.

For example, for the month of Jan 2022, that would be 1518/32982 = 4.6%. While this can be improved by writing a simple Python script as I have demonstrated, it is still less than 5% of the total reports. This can usually be attributed just to lack of diligence.

From what I have seen so far, the failure to translate SYMPTOM_TEXT information into the appropriate field value is not a major issue in the US dataset. And this becomes ESPECIALLY more apparent when you see the foreign reports.

For example, in the previous article I mentioned how the Myocarditis cases from New Zealand for people under 40 is 5X (it increases from 25 to about 120) if you use the age mentioned in the SYMPTOM_TEXT versus the one translated into the AGE_YRS field.

How NLU based information extraction makes VAERS more searchable

That’s a big jump, and I certainly hope the health authorities in New Zealand are not basing their calculation on the AGE_YRS field and are instead reading the actual narrative text in the reports.

And then I started doing the same analysis for all the foreign countries, and got this map. As you can see, the blue colors (higher values) are concentrated in Europe.

You can click on the caption under the image to see the full map which also shows you the individual numbers for each country when you hover over it.

See an interactive visualization

Here is the raw data for that map.

These are the columns:

NUM_REPORTS = Number of VAERS reports for the country, which I inferred based on the country code in the SPLTTYPE field

Note: there are approximately 1200 reports out of a total of 500000+ which cannot be classified using the SPLTTYPE field. It could either be an error, or perhaps uses some code which I was not able to figure out. But that is less than 1% of all foreign VAERS reports for COVID19 vaccines.

NUM_AGE_NULL = Number of reports for the country where the AGE_YRS is empty

NUM_DERIVED_AGE = Number of reports for the country where the age is present in the SYMPTOM_TEXT field and where I was able to extract the value using my Python script

PERCENT_FILLED = (NUM_AGE_DERIVED/NUM_AGE_NULL)*100

PERCENT_OF_TOTAL = (NUM_AGE_DERIVED/NUM_REPORTS)*100

In the map I have shown above, I plot the PERCENT_OF_TOTAL values for each country. For additional clarity, I have removed countries which have fewer than 500 reports.

If you filter out countries with fewer than 500 reports, this is what you see:

The table above is sorted in descending order by PERCENT_OF_TOTAL.

Anything over 50% is very high in my estimate, and 26 countries are over that number. And Belgium, Germany and UK are not very far behind.

The significance of Austria’s VAERS reports

The top country by PERCENT_OF_TOTAL is Austria at around 90%.

Interestingly, it is also the one with the highest number of VAERS reports per capita.

Why does Austria have an anomalously high number of VAERS reports?

Of the 103147 VAERS reports from Austria, 93570 do not have the AGE_YRS filled out. And of those, 93186 of reports do mention the age in the SYMPTOM_TEXT field.

But why does Austria have so many VAERS reports? It is because they reported all breakthrough infections as “Adverse Events”.

As an aside, it would have been very interesting if all the countries would have told Pfizer et al. before they signed their contracts that breakthrough infections would be considered as AEs. I wonder if Big Pharma would have agreed to the terms of the contract?

On the one hand, this means Austria’s true VEARS reports (adverse reaction to the vaccine) is only about 15% of the reported total.

On the other hand, by calling these as adverse events and meticulously documenting them, they have created a lot of SYMPTOM_TEXT data which can be used as a fairly large dataset to analyze COVID19 breakthrough infections.

I will be discussing that in a future article after I complete the analysis.

Request to my readers

I am not sure how European countries use VAERS. Do they have their own alternative vaccine injury tracking systems?

If you know whether European health authorities use VAERS, and how exactly they use it, please let me know in the comments.