Prelude: Doctors who should know better stumbling through VAERSĪs many times as I’ve seen antivaxxers misuse VAERS to try to blame vaccines for autism, sudden infant death syndrome, infertility, and more, I must admit that I was unprepared and profoundly disappointed late last week to see the database abused in a similar fashion by investigators who are not antivaccine (although definitely biased) and then to see their bad science amplified in stories like this one in The Guardian by its science editor Ian Sample (who really should know better), titled “ Boys more at risk from Pfizer jab side-effect than Covid, suggests study“: I will begin by describing how this study is being spun, continue to discuss the history and structure of VAERS, which is absolutely essential to understand why this study is so bad, and then finish by delving into the study itself, using the analysis to make some observations.
Moreover, I’ll cite problems pointed out by others on social media with more expertise than I in the nitty-gritty of these sorts of analyses, to complement my knowledge of VAERS.
I view my commentary as complementary in that I will provide a lot of background that I’ve learned the hard way over nearly 20 years and emphasize different problems than the ones Dr. Dan Freedman has already commented on some of the glaring problems with this study. In adding to this refrain, this study contributes material to the antimask and antivaccine movement and falls prey to the same sorts of gross errors observed in studies done by antivaxxers using VAERS data. It goes along with a common refrain that a lot of physicians who really should know better have been repeating without context and, sadly, even though they are not antivaccine need to be fact-checked as though they were, namely the false narrative that masks and vaccines to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 are at best useless in children or even worse than the disease. You see, there was a study published as a preprint last week, and it’s being held up as “evidence” that vaccinating 12-17 year olds against COVID-19 is more dangerous than COVID-19 because of post-vaccination myocarditis.
Unfortunately, that makes the misuse of the database all the more potentially damaging. Last week, VAERS was in the news, and for once it wasn’t because of antivaxxers abusing it. That’s why, over the years, we’ve mentioned VAERS on this blog many times, and I’ve mentioned it elsewhere many times going back to 2005. Because of its very nature, VAERS is prone to misunderstanding and misuse, and, unsurprisingly, VAERS has become a favorite tool of antivaxxers to claim that vaccines cause whatever AE on which they want to blame vaccines. The first time that I ever discussed VAERS here on Science-Based Medicine ( SBM) was in 2008 in the context of a discussion of harms attributed by antivaxxers to the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine. (I’ll explain in detail later in this post when I discuss the shortcomings of VAERS.) Indeed, out of curiosity, I did some searching of all of my blogs and discovered that the first time that I mentioned VAERS and its shortcomings was in 2005 in the context of a discussion of chelation therapy for autism. It serves as an early warning system that can generate hypotheses regarding correlations between specific AEs and vaccines, but by its very design cannot test these hypotheses. VAERS, for those unfamiliar with it, is a database to which anyone can report any adverse event (AE) noted after vaccination. I’ve been writing about how antivaxxers misuse the Vaccine Adverse Events Recording System ( VAERS) database dating back to very early in my history as a blogger.
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