Why is VAERS so hard to search?

Some alternative tools

One of the strangest things about the VAERS database is that it is extremely hard to search.

Here is a tutorial from the CDC itself

You can see how complex the tool is just by looking at the screenshots. And the filters are often confusing enough that there is a good chance you will miss some required option.

COVID19 was declared a pandemic sometime in March 2020. The vaccine rollout started only in Dec 2020 and Jan 2021.

In other words, CDC had a good 9 months to fix the VAERS search. Why didn’t they do it? Especially considering that the vaccines were developed at “warp speed”?

So you can of course search VAERS reports using the CDC Wonder tool as described in that PDF tutorial.

There are three alternative options

1 Download the entire dataset

The datasets are also available as CSV files.

You can then load them into Excel or other spreadsheet software and analyze the data.

Alternatively, you can also load them into a tool like Zoho Analytics to run queries.

2 Use the MedAlerts search

The MedAlerts VAERS search interface isn’t a whole lot better than the CDC Wonder tool in my opinion

3 Use OpenVAERS

OpenVAERS provides the best user interface for searching VAERS reports.

They also have a toggle for searching through reports for COVID19 vaccines alone

A tip to improve your VAERS search

Get familiar with the full list of fields which are used in VAERS reports as well as their descriptions.

This gives you a good idea of what you can search for and it will help you select the right search filters.