Numbers? Who needs numbers when we have propaganda?
The massive increase in serious injuries and deaths reported to VAERS from the covid shots has been getting attention in alternative media, and the vaccine industry has responded—not with analyses showing it’s nothing to worry about—but with anti-VAERS propaganda designed to (1) keep the massive increase concealed from the public, and (2) convince people VAERS data doesn’t matter.
Most of the propaganda I’ve seen follows this pattern:
It claims ‘anti-vaxxers’ are making deceptive claims about VAERS, but doesn’t show any examples.
It says nothing about the unprecedented increase in VAERS reports from covid shots, and doesn’t provide relevant VAERS data.
It discusses the limitations of VAERS—all of which have been around since VAERS was new 30 years ago, and therefore can’t explain the recent explosion of vaccine injury reports (which it doesn’t mention).
Here’s a typical example, this one from the McGill Office for Science and Society, which describes itself like a science watchdog agency:
“The McGill Office for Science and Society (OSS) is a unique venture dedicated to the promotion of critical thinking, science communication, and the presentation of scientific information to the public, educators, and students in an accurate and responsible fashion. With a mandate to demystify science for the public and separate sense from nonsense, the Office has a history of tackling fake news in the world of science well before the term ‘fake news’ even existed.”
Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Many people would read this description and immediately label OSS a ‘reliable source’. It’s amazing what a carefully crafted façade of expertise and objectivity can accomplish.
I’m going to show here that the OSS article not only contains no critical thinking and omits critical facts, it presents scientific information deceptively, to cover up the massive increase in serious injuries and deaths reported to VAERS from the COVID19 vaccines.
The ‘Weaponization of VAERS’
The OSS article is titled “Don’t Fall for the ‘VAERS Scare’ Tactic--Anti-vaxxers show how a precious vaccine adverse event reporting database can be used to scare the public,” written by Jonathan Jarry, M.Sc.
Yes—he really did call VAERS “precious”.
Jarry warned us about dangerous anti-vaxxers abusing our precious VAERS. He didn’t show us any examples of the abuse—maybe it was too graphic.
“The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS is being misused by anti-vaxxers to terrify the public. It’s a shame because VAERS plays a vital role in detecting important but rare reactions caused by vaccines.”
Apparently, VAERS doesn’t play a vital role in detecting important and frequent adverse reactions—since Jarry didn’t bother to mention that more serious injuries and deaths have been reported to VAERS from the covid shots than from all other vaccines combined for the last 30 years.
See the CVax Risk page for the sources for this chart.
No one can accuse Jarry of not bringing enough drama to the table:
“The weaponization of VAERS by anti-vaccine activists serves as a reminder that having access to more information does not always lead to better decisions.”
Credit Unknown
When my eyes stopped rolling enough to read the rest of the article, I realized Mr. Jarry had the entire VAERS database at his fingertips, but used hardly any of it, as you’ll see below—serving as a reminder that having access to more information never leads to better decisions if you ignore it.
A sidebar on vaccine manufacturer liability
Mr. Jarry ventured briefly into the issue of liability protection for vaccine manufacturers. He told us about the horrific days when vaccine manufacturers could be sued, just like every other product manufacturer:
“As claims were filed by individuals contending they had been harmed by a vaccine, it was unclear what people’s rights and obligations were. Could drug manufacturers be sued? Were governments liable? What about the pediatrician who had vaccinated the child?”
No, Mr. Jarry—the law was not “unclear” in any way. There were longstanding rules in the legal system at that time (mid-1980s) about product liability, as well as suing governments, and malpractice. By long tradition, every manufacturer of every product of any kind in the US could be sued for injuries and deaths the product caused, and that’s still true today—except for vaccines.
“Imagine you are selling a product that does not make you much money but that enough people think is injuring them to the point where you get sued for it. If you have better sources of income, you may reach a point where you decide selling this product is no longer worth it from a financial standpoint.”
Vintage polio vaccine advertising targeting children (Public Domain).
These “better sources of income” presumably include pharmaceutical drugs, which continue to be highly profitable for the industry.
The first obvious question is, if a product does so much harm that it’s impossible to produce it for a profit, then why do we want that product on the market?
The second obvious question is, if pharmaceutical companies can make enormous profits from the drugs they produce, in spite of frequent lawsuits and multi-million-dollar and multi-billion-dollar payouts for damages, then how sky high were vaccine damages expected to go, that would put manufacturers completely out of business?
Those obvious questions were forgotten in Mr. Jarry’s dedication to promoting the vaccine agenda:
“Indeed, the number of vaccine companies willing to distribute vaccines in the litigious United States started to tumble, and in 1986 Americans were left with a single supplier of the vaccine against diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus. Faced with the possibility of simply running out of the vaccine, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). In a nutshell, NCVIA would simplify the whole process and help ensure life-saving vaccines would continue to get distributed in the United States. A surtax would be collected on vaccine doses, which would go to help compensate people judged more likely than not to have been injured by a vaccine through a new vaccine court that would exist outside the traditional legal system.”
Running out of vaccines?! Dear God! Let’s investigate this dire emergency.
Here’s a chart showing the history of death from common diseases in the US, including diphtheria and pertussis (whooping cough). Data from the UK and the rest of the industrialized world looks similar: they all show deaths from common diseases declined by 98% before most vaccines even existed, as the result of vast improvements in nutrition, sanitation and living conditions.
The data in this chart was compiled for the book Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines and the Forgotten History. This chart is from the website for the book. It’s been around for many years, and I’ve never seen anything refuting this data.
The diphtheria and pertussis vaccines were both introduced at the tail end of a decades-long declining trend in death from those diseases—at which point the vaccine industry took credit for saving us from those diseases. That was done entirely with propaganda—not science. This is a repeated pattern of deception in the vaccine industry.
In any case, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) is a cumbersome system that involves all the same hoops and long delays as the regular legal system—except there’s no right to a jury trial. Sweet—for the industry, that is. For people whose lives were destroyed by vaccines, not so much. But that’s a topic for another day.
Cherry-picked VAERS data
Paolo Neo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The OSS paper acknowledged that VAERS is a valuable early warning system of vaccine dangers, and can be useful for risk/benefit analyses, and other things.
But when it came to actual VAERS data, the OSS paper was secretive. This is what Jarry said about serious injuries reported to VAERS:
“From 2011 to 2014, it [VAERS] collected an average of 30,000 reports each year on vaccine adverse events, with roughly one in every fourteen reports classified as ‘serious.’
“This last statistic will appear quite scary. Am I saying that every year 2,100 people are seriously injured by a vaccine? No, and that is where we start to see VAERS’ important limitations, which are easily exploited by those looking to scare the vaccine-hesitant.”
Jarry wrote this article in June 2021. As someone who searches VAERS frequently, I can attest that VAERS data from 2014 thru 2021 is just as easily available as data from 2011 thru 2014. It’s fast and easy to run a VAERS search for the number of serious adverse events reported each year, like I did here.
Why, then, did Jarry only mention 2011-2014? Because the purpose of his paper was to decrease vaccine hesitancy, not increase it—which the numbers here are certainly likely to do, for rational minds.
See Note 1 for the citation for this VAERS search.
There was a pretty dramatic drop in VAERS reports in 2011, but that difference is chump change compared to 2021, when a mind-boggling 61,474 serious injuries were reported to VAERS (almost all from the COVID19 vaccines). Yes, the 2021 total was lower back in June when Jarry wrote the article, but it was still mind-boggling high compared to prior years.
This stunning information wasn’t disclosed anywhere in the OSS paper, so Jarry never had to explain why it isn’t terrifying—especially considering only a small fraction of vaccine injuries are reported to VAERS. (2)
False claim that an increase in vaccination caused an (unspecified) increase in VAERS reports
Mr. Jarry explained the basic concept of calculating risk with a hypothetical example:
“Fifteen cases is the numerator of a fraction. What is the denominator? Fifteen cases out of how many that received the vaccine? Fifteen out of fifteen? That’s shocking! Fifteen out of a million? Hardly the same.
“This is an important limitation of VAERS. It cannot be used, on its own, to figure out if an event following vaccination is common or rare.”
See the CVax Risk page for the sources for this chart.
The CDC keeps a tally of COVID19 vaccines administered, which is available to anyone online. So, while Jarry is correct that VAERS data alone cannot be used to assess risk, the data he needed to do that was easily available. I’ve used that data many times, for charts like this one, which demonstrates that the massive increase in serious injuries reported to VAERS from COVID19 vaccines is definitely not due to more vaccination.
But Jarry, without mentioning any specific numbers, claimed any increase in VAERS reports was caused by more vaccines:
“For example, when vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus started to be used in the population at large, more and more reports of adverse events began to be submitted to VAERS. This should not come as a shock. Obviously, the more a vaccine is used, the more adverse events are likely to be reported.”
Irrelevant and unsupported explanations
Jarry offered a few other explanations for an increase in VAERS reports. For example, the “background rate” of a particular malady could make VAERS reports increase. It was basically a plug for the idea that vaccines don’t cause autism, and was completely irrelevant to COVID19 vaccines:
“Moreover, if the background rate of the event being reported, meaning how common this event is in the population, goes up, it’s likely that its frequency in VAERS will also go up. If the diagnostic criteria for a condition are expanded, more people will receive the diagnosis, which will make it look like its incidence has suddenly increased. This is what happened with autism over the years,…”
We’re told that serious events are reported to VAERS more often than mild ones—again, irrelevant to the issue at hand:
“VAERS can also be biased in an interesting way: mild events following a vaccine are less likely to get reported compared to more severe ones.”
Lastly, still without providing any specifics on the number of VAERS reports from covid shots, or giving any indication of the unprecedented increase, Jarry provided one explanation that could potentially be relevant, called “stimulated” reporting—but provided no evidence it actually played a role here:
“Finally, there is also the fact that as an adverse event gets widely reported in the media, more people will pay attention to it, leading to an increase in reports to VAERS. This is known as stimulated reporting.”
Conclusion: pure propaganda
The article discussed here from the McGill Office for Science and Society is propaganda pretending to be science and critical thinking. Its purpose is to cover up the massive increase in serious injuries and deaths reported to VAERS from the COVID19 vaccines. It cleverly omits any mention of the huge and unprecedented increase in VAERS reports, while falsely claiming an unspecified uptick was due to more vaccination.
Now you know.
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NOTES:
(1) Serious vaccine injuries reported to VAERS. Adverse events are classified as “serious” if any of the following results occur: Death, Permanent Disability, Life Threatening, Hospitalized, Existing Hospitalization Prolonged, Congenital Anomaly or Birth Defect.
(2) Only a “small fraction” of vaccine injuries are reported to VAERS, according to guidance on the VAERS website. VAERS is jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA).
