Public comment for 6.12.24 BOH meeting re VAERS
Lisa Templeton
On behalf of Informed Choice Washington, I am writing in response to some of the statements that State Epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist made regarding VAERS during his presentation to the Board at the April 10, 2024, meeting in Spokane.
Dr. Lindquist confirmed that the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) is a federal-government-run program where practitioners, manufacturers, and members of the public report negative health incidents associated with administration of a vaccine product. The system does not establish causation, but it was designed to identify post-market safety signals in the public, after injuries have occurred.
VAERS is a passive system, established by Congress pursuant to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which shields childhood vaccine manufacturers from legal liability for the harms caused by their products. By providing a means of recording such deaths and injuries, VAERS was intended to mitigate the removal of product makers’ accountability to consumers. While it’s not perfect, the system does provide trends that public health is tasked with investigating. Absent investigations of each temporally-associated injury and death, causality cannot be denied. (An HHS-sponsored Harvard study noted “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported [to VAERS].” In other words, 99% of adverse events go unreported.
We appreciate Dr. Lindquist’s encouraging clinicians and patients to report all post-vaccine events, regardless of their opinion of a causal link. Unfortunately, there is no legal ramification for practitioners who fail to do so. Nonetheless, the U.S. government’s Healthy People 2020 site states that 83% of the reporters to the system were health care workers or pharmaceutical and government-based sources during the years 1990-2010. “The majority of VAERS reports are submitted by vaccine manufacturers (37%) and health care providers (36%). The remaining reports are obtained from state immunization programs (10%), vaccine recipients (or their parents/guardians, 7%), and other sources (10%).” Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Vaccine Adverse Reporting System,
https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/data-source/vaccine-adverse-event-reporting-system, archived at https://wayback.archive-it.org/5774/20220414030910/https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/data-source/vaccine-adverse-event-reporting-system
Pertaining specifically to Covid injections, 72% of a sampling of 250 of the 1,644 VAERS reports of early death received in the first three months of 2021 were filed either by health service employees or pharmaceutical employees. “We identified health service employees as the reporter in at least 67% of the reports, while pharmaceutical employees were identified as the reporter in a further 5%.” Even though the sample contained only people vaccinated early in the rollout, i.e., those who were elderly or with significant health conditions, an adverse vaccine reaction could be ruled out in only 14% of the cases. Mclachlan, et al., Analysis of COVID-19 vaccine death reports from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) Database Interim: Results and Analysis. 10.13140/RG.2.2.26987.26402. (2021),
If there were no causal link between Covid vaccination and death, one would expect to see the occurrence randomized with respect to days post-vaccine. Instead, most death reports occur in the first few days:
VAERS COVID Vaccine Reports of Death by Days to Onset—All Ages—as of April 26, 2024.
Source:
https://openvaers.com/covid-data
We respectfully disagree with Dr. Linquist’s Key Take Away that VAERS “is one tool . . . to make sure vaccines are safe and efficacious.” (See slide below.) VAERS is not designed to assess efficacy, and it does not in itself confer safety on these products. Instead, it passively gathers reports that collectively may bring to light a troubling signal. However, discovery of the signal depends on CDC investigations of the injurious events. Given that the CDC is in the business of promoting and selling these products, its ability to impartially attribute causation of injury is compromised and coming under increasing scrutiny from the public.
TVW recording of the April 10 BOH meetingat
tvw.org/video/washington-state-board-of-health-2024041039/
In addition, the VAERS reporting program does not conduct studies comparing vaccinated and vaccine-free outcomes, as Dr. Lindquist alluded to at approximately 2:06 in the above recording.
Here are some websites where medical professionals and/or individuals have documented their experiences with reactions from the Covid-19 injections:
Pursuant to a FOIA request, additional context regarding injuries is available at
which sets forth data collected by the CDC through its V-Safe app, a smartphone-based program that collected health assessments from approximately 10 million of the very first Covid vaccinees, who likely had the most favorable attitudes toward the products. In addition to downloading the free-text comments, you may view summaries of the following:
· Adverse health impacts;
· Covid-19 vaccine symptoms;
· Registrations per month;
· User check-ins; and
· Breakdown of type of medical care sought by V-Safe users.
Dashboard at
Of 10,108,273 V-Safe users, over 3.3% reported that they were unable to do their normal activities, missed work or school, or required medical care.
We want our public health community to acknowledge that injuries secondary to vaccine products do exist, and we appreciate that Dr. Lindquist does so. The message becomes diluted, however, when captured agencies do not carry out sufficient investigation and attribute almost all injury to coincidence, underlying cause, the illness itself, etc.
In any event, it is of paramount importance that no one be coerced into medical risk-taking. Informed Choice Washington and our members advocate for the removal of all vaccine mandates.
I would like to leave you with a question to ponder: why do you suppose the U.S. swine flu vaccination program of 1976 was halted after 53 deaths, but today the establishment mercilessly presses forward despite over 37,500 reports of deaths?
Thank you for taking the time to read and consider my comment.
Sincerely,
Lisa Templeton
Director
Advocacy for Informed Immunity Choice and the Elimination of Vaccine Mandates in Washington State
Dashboard at
