Acceptable Adverse Event Report Rates
Post #1118
While passive surveillance systems like VAERS do not capture all instances of adverse events which follow an immunization, you can still rely on such a system to determine boundaries of acceptability. When the DTP vaccine (with whole-cell pertussis) first came out, it led to an unacceptably-high rate of adverse event reports (AERs):
DTaP — with acellular pertussus in it, instead of the whole-cell pertussis in DTP — replaced DTP because of having under half the frequency of adverse events following it. The serious adverse event reporting rate for DTP was 48 per million doses, but DTaP had a serious AER rate of 19 per million, which was more acceptable.
Later research would even reveal that it had actually been a net detriment for kids to have been taking DTP, especially the girls:
But if 48 serious AERs per million doses is “too high to be acceptable” then we can ask if the COVID shots can be considered to be acceptable or not. Let’s first check flu shots. For flu shots, there were 900.6 million doses given from late 2013 to early 2019. The 4th of those 7 flu seasons is highlighted below:
When VAERS is searched for serious AERs after flu shots for those 7 seasons, you find 3,550 serious AERs:
Dividing 3,550 by 900.6 gives you a serious adverse event reporting rate of 3.9 serious AERs per million doses, which is within the acceptable range for serious AERs following an immunization. But what about COVID shots? Are COVID shots within the acceptable range for serious AERs?
By August 2024, there had been 672.61 million doses of COVID shots:
But for those shots which had been given out by July 2024, there were 118,746 serious AERs:
Dividing 118,746 by 672.61 gives a serious adverse event reporting rate of 176.5 per million doses — far beyond what is considered to be an acceptable frequency of serious adverse event reports following an immunization.
The evidence suggests that COVID shots are not safe, at least not when compared to the historical evidence of what has been considered to have been relatively safe in the past.
Reference
[DTP phased out because of being too dangerous] — https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5201a1.htm
[VAERS search tool] — https://medalerts.org/vaersdb/index.php
[total COVID shots] — https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
[DTP found to be even more dangerous than originally thought] — Aaby P, Ravn H, Fisker AB, Rodrigues A, Benn CS. Is diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) associated with increased female mortality? A meta-analysis testing the hypotheses of sex-differential non-specific effects of DTP vaccine. Trans R Soc Trop Med Hyg. 2016 Dec;110(10):570-581. doi: 10.1093/trstmh/trw073. Epub 2016 Nov 17. PMID: 27856947; PMCID: PMC5155548. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5155548/