Jessica Rose, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge in Israel, has taken a deep-dive into the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), and in this interview she shares the details of what she’s finding.
VAERS, despite flaws and drawbacks, is one of the greatest tools we have to evaluate vaccine safety. It was implemented as a consequence of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. While vaccine companies were given blanket immunity against liability for adverse reactions under this law, VAERS was created to collect injury reports in a centralized database so that the post-marketing safety of childhood vaccines could be monitored.
The system was actually launched in 1990, so we have three decades’ worth of data to compare trends against. Granted, vaccine injuries are notoriously underreported. Investigations have found only 10%1 to as little as 1%2,3 of injuries are reported.