Indeed, the open nature of VAERS is why antivaxxers love VAERS so much. Indeed, as I said last time, were I a peer reviewer of that study, I’d have been tempted to say that unadjudicated VAERS reports (CDC officials try to verify the reports to determine if they are real and to find more medical information before using them in any analysis) cannot, by the very nature of the VAERS database, be used to do the sort of analysis that its authors (Tracy Beth Høeg, John Mandrola, Allison Krug, and Josh Stevenson) were trying to do, much less to compare the incidence of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination to hospitalizations due to COVID-19 itself, and that any attempt to use it that way is folly and incompetent science of the worst sort. That’s why, at best, VAERS can be hypothesis generating, not hypothesis testing, and it is not suitable for estimating the incidence of an adverse event after vaccination. This open nature makes VAERS useful as an early reporting system, a “canary in the coal mine”, if you will, that can find safety signals if there are a large number of reports of a particular adverse event after a given vaccine, but to determine if such a safety signal indicates actual correlation that might indicate causation requires other, more rigorously maintained, active surveillance systems such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD). VAERS, of course, is a 30-year-old database to which anyone can literally report anything that might be an adverse event after vaccination.Īs I like to say, the greatest strength of VAERS is that anyone can report anything to it, but simultaneously the greatest weakness of VAERS is that anyone can report anything to it. Let me just say now that what surprised me more than anything else about the preprint VAERS study is that doctors with training in epidemiology could misunderstand VAERS so badly that they unwittingly carried out the same sort of awful, incompetent VAERS analysis that antivaxxers have been doing for a couple of decades, all in order to produce evidence that suggests that the risk of myocarditis in adolescents due to COVID-19 vaccines makes the risk/benefit equation of the vaccine unfavorable in this age group. There’s a regular segment on The Amber Ruffin Show called “ How Did We Get Here?” Now seems as good a time as any for a postmortem on this incident thus far that asks, “How did we get here?” So how did we get here, where normally-respectable physicians teamed up with a COVID-minimizing crank to dumpster dive in the VAERS database and produce a study that seemed almost intended to spread fear of COVID-19 vaccines and discourage mandates for adolescents, particularly adolescent boys? How we got here, a recapīefore I look into the fallout that helped reveal how we got here, a brief recap is likely required for most readers, who can click on the links above and in this section if they desire more detailed information. Rather, I’ll be discussing what’s been revealed since this preprint was published and the reaction of those supporting its authors, not to mention that one of the authors, Josh Stevenson, had an undisclosed conflict of interest in that he is associated with a COVID-19 minimizing group opposing masks, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates.

Given the copious coverage we’ve provided to this one bad preprint, you might wonder, what’s left to say? Quite a bit unfortunately, albeit not so much about the science anymore, given that, between Twitter and SBM bloggers and guest bloggers, the study has been thoroughly deconstructed, with lengthy explanations of why the study’s design was so poor and its conclusions not justified by its data and analysis.

Frank Han, as well as the newest regular blogger, Dr. Dan Freedman and pediatric cardiologist Dr. Adding to the criticism were two guest bloggers, Dr.

Last week, I wrote about a study published as a preprint that I referred to as a “ dumpster dive” into the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System ( VAERS) database.

Vaers database