Anti-Vaccine Activists Use A Federal Database To Spread Fear About COVID Vaccines - NPR

Solid research has found the vaccines authorized for use against COVID-19 to be safe and effective.

database for detecting events that might be vaccine side effects is being used by activists to spread disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

Known as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, the database includes hundreds of thousands of reports of health events that occurred minutes, hours or days after vaccination.

In fact, VAERS has played a major role in the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

The data is regularly appropriated by anti-vaccine advocates, who use the reports to claim falsely that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous.

They are aided by the fact that the entire VAERS database is public — it can be downloaded by anyone for any purpose.

She says that she sees VAERS data being shared across a wide variety of anti-vaccine social media channels.

Right away, the database looked different from other collections of government medical data: Anybody could report a side effect from a vaccine (not just doctors), and anyone could request the entire VAERS database for any reason.

"VAERS data is often shared in the anti-vax community with the understanding that it's something that they fought for," Smith says.

Since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, Smith says that anti-vaccine advocates have been sharing YouTube videos showing how to download the data.

Graphics from anti-vaccine proponents frequently tick off the number of deaths directly reported in VAERS — without noting the reports there have not been investigated or verified as causally linked to an immunization.

The problem, says Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, is that many of those deaths in the VAERS database were caused by other illnesses that happened around the same time as the immunization and had nothing to do with a vaccine: "Vaccines decrease your risk of COVID-19," Omer notes.

VAERS is where that data is recorded, and anti-vaccine campaigners then cite the number as people killed by the vaccine.

VAERS data helped to identify allergic reactions and blood clotting disorders caused by the COVID-19 vaccines