Why am I enthusiastic about using VAERS as a data source?
Simply, VAERS has a depth of data that I have never seen in a publicly-searchable medical database. It is possible to do searches by age, sex, dosage, type of vaccine, type of complication, severity of complication, month of vaccination, and on and on.
And the reports themselves can be very informative, in terms of what diagnostic tests were done, which treatments given.
As a clinician, this is interesting material! Is it as good as a peer-reviewed, randomized controlled trial? No, because it is subject to a whole bunch of biases.
BUT…randomized controlled trial data never provides the granularity of detail that VAERS does.
(here is a randomly chosen tweet which displays a set of VAERS case stories)
A single VAERS case report with minimal clinical data:
One discovery is that VAERS analysis graphs have nowhere near the “reach” on Twitter as single case histories such as this one. Why? I suspect it is because people can imagine themselves in an individual story, perhaps as the parent or coach of the boy in this history.
This is painful. And powerful.