Back in September, I published an article in CHD’s The Defender, where I showed the alarming and unambiguous safety signals coming from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), using the CDC’s own published methodology. In that article, I wondered out loud why, if the safety signals were so blaringly obvious, nobody was doing anything. Was anybody listening?
Well, it turns out the CDC wasn’t even looking for safety signals! They said they were going to use the most basic, standard pharmacovigilance method by calculating what are called proportional reporting ratios (PRR’s) to monitor VAERS (see the article linked above for more details). But it turns out they didn’t. And then they turned around and said they weren’t seeing any safety signals in VAERS. They forgot to mention that they weren’t looking for any.
They took a page from the pharma playbook: don’t look for safety problems, then claim that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Maybe they think it’s OK if you do it with your fingers crossed behind your back.
Let’s rewind a bit. See, in late January of 2021, the CDC released a briefing document outlining the agency’s standard operating procedures (SOP) for ongoing monitoring of VAERS for safety signals from COVID-19 vaccines. The document describes the analyses that the VAERS team at the CDC’s own Immunization Safety Office was going to conduct in their “unprecedented” effort to monitor the safety of the new COVID-19 vaccines. This included a plan to produce weekly tables of the incidence of about forty different adverse events. They would also engage in data mining using PRRs and create tables with the results (you can read the document at the link above for more details - see esp. sections 2.2-2.5):
At my request, the amazing legal team at CHD submitted a FOIA request to CDC asking for:
Copies of the weekly tables they said they would produce from Feb 1-Sept. 30, 2021.
Copies of all tables, analyses and reports generated in connection with ‘Signal Detection Analyses’ as described in sections 2.3 and 2.5 of the SOP document, also from Feb 1-Sept. 30.
Well guess what? In their response letter they state that “no PRRs were conducted by CDC” and that “data mining is outside of the agency’s purview” even though their own SOP document from January stated they would do data mining.