https://imahealth.substack.com/p/lost-signals-new-study-shows-how?
Lost Signals: New Study Shows How VAERS Buries Vaccine Harm
VAERS already catches only a fraction of vaccine harm. New research by Jessica Rose reveals the system is losing even more data to fixable flaws.
America’s vaccine safety system already catches only a fraction of the harm that occurs. That much has been known for years. VAERS is a passive reporting system, and most adverse events are never reported at all.
But what happens to the data that does make it in?
A new study by Jessica Rose, a computational biologist, immunologist, and IMA Senior Fellow, shows that VAERS is losing critical safety data from the inside. The system’s own infrastructure is so outdated and poorly maintained that real signals of harm are being buried by fixable data problems. When Rose cleaned the data and reassembled what had been scattered, she found safety signals for fetal loss and cardiac arrest that had been there all along, invisible to anyone using the system as designed.
“The main claim to fame here is that I pointed out some of the problems inherent in VAERS that most people, unless they’re using it as part of data analysis, wouldn’t really know about.” — Jessica Rose
📖 Read and Download the Full Paper
Minimizing Signal Loss and Optimizing Pharmacovigilance in VAERS (JIM Vol. 2, No. 2, 2026) — Author: Jessica Rose
What’s Broken in VAERS?
VAERS was built in the 1980s and has operated with the same basic infrastructure ever since. Reports are submitted through an online form that takes about 30 minutes to fill out. There are no pull-down menus. No standardized formats for vaccine lot numbers or dates. The form has session timeouts that can erase a report before it’s finished. And the system creates multiple IDs for the same patient rather than linking a serious reaction to a follow-up death report.
The people filing reports experience these problems every time they sit down to submit one. But the people relying on the data to detect harm may never realize what’s being lost.
Rose showed just how small the fixes can be. Two simple corrections to vaccine lot numbers (capitalizing letters and removing stray spaces) recovered 8,871 reports that had been invisible to analysis. Not because the data was missing. Because the system couldn’t recognize its own records.
(See link for article and video)
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CDC, FDA Admitted to Using ‘Mostly Useless’ Tool to Detect COVID Vaccine Safety Signals
Federal health officials knew the statistical tool they relied on to look for COVID-19 vaccination safety signals in VAERS was “mostly useless,” according to internal documents obtained by Sen. Ron Johnson and analyzed by scientists at Children’s Health Defense. CDC and FDA researchers used the tool anyway to create analyses they tried to publish that supported the vaccines’ safety.
Federal health officials knew that the statistical tool they relied on to look for COVID-19 vaccination safety signals in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) was “mostly useless,” according to internal documents obtained by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and analyzed by scientists at Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
The documents show that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) internally acknowledged that the tool — empirical Bayesian (EB) data mining — had “blind spots” that rendered it “mostly useless” for picking up on safety signals of COVID-19 vaccines.
Yet, the agencies used the method in analyses and attempted to publish findings from those analyses — including studies that supported the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD senior research scientist who analyzed the documents, told The Defender:
“Imagine a night watchman has to find something on the ground. But instead of holding a flashlight, he is wearing sunglasses. In the morning, he says he didn’t find anything. That’s true, but it’s because he was using a tool that impeded his ability to see.”
The records obtained by Johnson’s office include emails between CDC and FDA researchers from 2021 to 2023, along with draft manuscripts and peer reviewer comments.
In one case, researchers sought to publish an analysis in The Lancet Infectious Diseases using EB data mining on early COVID-19 vaccine data. They dropped the plan only after a reviewer wrote that the likelihood of detecting a safety signal using the method was “likely close to zero.”
FDA official Dr. David Menschik, who initially was a co-author on the paper, wrote to the study’s lead author in December 2021 saying he knew the method was essentially useless.
“We acknowledged this in the limitations and understand that there is a considerable bias toward the null when using our data mining methods in this current, unprecedented situation,” he wrote. (See link for article)
For more:
- https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2020/01/13/only-1-of-vaccine-reactions-reported-to-vaers/
- https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2025/08/11/cdc-vaers-manipulation-exposed/
- https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2023/01/05/cdc-releases-vaers-data-via-foia-and-now-its-clear-why-they-tried-to-hide-them/
- https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2024/04/23/cdc-redacted-emails-more-v-safe-injury-reports-adverse-events-in-vaers-are-in-predominantly-republican-states/
- https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2025/02/06/covid-shot-mandate-100-political-obvious-vaers-death-safety-signals-media-still-failing-to-cover-vax-injured-four-studies-confirm-health-risks-associated-with-childhood-vaccination/
