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Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by kiltedpanda on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @02:28PM (#38281227)
I had the same experience as the guy in this BMJ article in terms of trouble filing a report. The process was extremely cumbersome and had to be lodged through my physician. The physician had no idea what paperwork was required or how to fill it out once I found it for him. I don't know whether the report was actually registered in the national database.

My mother-in-law was bedridden for days after each booster (without filing a VAERS report) until her doctor eventually said she maybe shouldn't take any more (god forbid she risk her practicing license by uttering the heresy that the vaccine may not be 100% safe).

A better measure of the prevalence of adverse events are the randomized phone surveys done by countries like Israel. They called 2000 people after their second dose, and magically 4% of men and 7% of women experienced chest pain soon afterwards. What a coincidence!

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by giantg2 on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @02:36PM (#38281314)
Patients can self report without the provider being involved. You might not have some info like lot numbers, but you can still submit. It was a bit of an ordeal to submit, although I've heard it got easier after they made updates during covid (not sure if that's true).
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by kiltedpanda on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @02:50PM (#38281458)
I'm in Canada. I used the term VAERS, but I meant the Canadian equivalent reporting system. In Canada self-reporting isn't permitted - it has to go through a doctor. Then you're subject to doctor's biases as well. In my case, with first onset of chest pain a couple of days after the second dose, his bias led him to hypothesize that it could have been from a latent Covid infection (with zero covid symptoms). That theory was squashed when I caught Covid a few weeks later.
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by cempaka on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @02:54PM (#38281522)
An American friend of mine in his mid thirties developed cardiac issues after 3 doses of Moderna, but his doctors doggedly attribute it to his mild COVID case (and he is of course happy to believe that rather than that the damage may have been self-inflicted).
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by kiltedpanda on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @03:07PM (#38281711)
Would a peer reviewed study in the European Journal of Heart Failure finding 1 in 35 people suffered heart damage after a Moderna booster shot change his mind?

https://farmersforum.com/one-in-35-people-suffered-heart-dam...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejhf.2978

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by bigtex on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @03:38PM (#38282117)
Vaccines are safer than water!
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by ben_w on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @04:12PM (#38282558)
I doubt any medical doctor has claimed that.

Heck, I doubt any have even said that an injection of saline solution is as safe as normal water consumption.

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by giantg2 on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @09:45PM (#38285350)
You might be surprised. I've heard a doctor I know personally who is so pro vaccine that they have stated they are absolutely safe (not generally safe) and they wish they could secretly give the vaccine (specifically covid) to kids who's parents decline.
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by ben_w on Thursday November 16, 2023 @04:04AM (#38287209)
Have you tried prompting them differently? People are a bit like chatGPT and anchor weirdly.

My reason for phrasing the earlier comment that way, and also my guess for that doctors thought process, is that asking the relative risks per million of a saline injection and only when you get that answer following up by asking if any other injection is safer, would get you there, unless they were currently thinking about all the antivax conspiracies, and there's still a chance that just asking about saline injection would cause that thought process directly.

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by giantg2 on Thursday November 16, 2023 @06:38AM (#38288334)
True, this was unprompted and offered up voluntarily.
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by kiltedpanda on Thursday November 16, 2023 @12:15PM (#38292303)
Yeah this whole thing really brought out the inner SS in some people.
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by ben_w on Thursday November 16, 2023 @12:56PM (#38292960)
Only in the parallel reality where the SS was famous for trying to prevent a transmissible illness. Given our reality is one where the SS were racist paramilitaries that industrialised homicide, you seem to be regurgitating from the "everyone I disagree with is literally hitler" school of rhetoric.
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by cempaka on Friday November 17, 2023 @10:19AM (#38304744)
There was no "trying to prevent a transmissible illness" once the CDC's Provincetown study made it clear in late July 2021 that the vaccines didn't prevent transmission. After that point, it was purely enforcing a purity ritual and loyalty test on people, and was even couched in those terms: "we're not accepting the refusal of this undertested therapeutic from those anti-social anti-vaxxers!"
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by ben_w on Friday November 17, 2023 @10:57AM (#38305304)
> the vaccines didn't prevent transmission

Tell me you don't know how vaccines work without telling me you don't know how vaccines work.

Preventing transmission is a nice to have, not a must have. Less serious symptoms (which can include, but are absolutely not limited to, death, not for Covid not for anything else) are the requirement for them to be useful.

> CDC's Provincetown study

Tell me you don't know Baysean statistics etc.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/08/08/cdc-re...

--

Comments like yours are why I wrote the other day:

"I think people expect cancer cures to be as effective as vaccines really are, while also expecting vaccines (and antibiotics) to be as effective as a Potion of Cure Disease in Skyrim."

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by kiltedpanda on Friday November 17, 2023 @01:46PM (#38308063)
Gosh I wonder where they got that idea

"When people are vaccinated, they're not going to get infected" - Fauci

"You're not going to get Covid if you get these vaccinations" - Biden

"Vaccinated people do not carry the virus and don't get sick" - Walensky (Head of CDC)

"There is no variant that escapes the protection of our vaccines" - Bourla (Pfizer CEO)

"Emergency uses of the vaccine have not been approved or licensed by US FDA but have been authorized to prevent COVID-19 in ages 5+." - Pfizer Inc.

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by ben_w on Saturday November 18, 2023 @07:53AM (#38318988)
> "When people are vaccinated, they're not going to get infected"

> "There is no variant that escapes the protection of our vaccines"

I googled these two then stopped, because you know what results I see? Conspiracy theorists quoting each other. I don't actually see a single reference to any source material to verify the original statements.

To put that another way: https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2021/04/dont...

> "Emergency uses of the vaccine have not been approved or licensed by US FDA but have been authorized to prevent COVID-19 in ages 5+." - Pfizer Inc.

This I can believe (it's close enough to the docs I can find even though it's not actually a quotation from any of them), but I have no idea why you think this quote is supposed to support your point.

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by kiltedpanda on Monday November 20, 2023 @01:09AM (#38343188)
Here you go:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...

https://twitter.com/i/status/1555369351238537216

"I have no idea why you think this quote is supposed to support your point."

Because it says "authorized to prevent COVID-19 in ages 5+". It does no such thing obviously.

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by cempaka on Friday November 17, 2023 @03:14PM (#38309383)
What was the justification for firing people from their jobs or excluding them from public accommodations for not taking a non-sterilizing vaccine?

The USA Today article you link is just a lot of the usual verbal gymnastics that was rolled out at the time: they still work against severe outcomes, sure lots of vaccinated people are getting infected but you have to use Bayesian analysis and compare against the proportion of the base population that was vaccinated, no vaccine is 100% effective so let's pretend these ones are just as good as the ones that are 99% effective, etc.

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by ben_w on Saturday November 18, 2023 @07:45AM (#38318925)
> just as good as the ones that are 99% effective

How many vaccines do you think are 99% effective? Or even 90%?

The covid vaccine researchers would've been happy if it had only been 50% effective.

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by giantg2 on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @02:59PM (#38281598)
That's a major problem. Anything that could possibly be caused by the vaccine, or has an unknown cause, should be reported. You want the raw data without the biases of doctors guessing if something is related or not. Then the data scientists and researchers can clean the data.
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by waterhouse on Thursday November 16, 2023 @10:19AM (#38290590)
Indeed. The extreme version would be to collect data about "all problems, period", and compare the rates of "people who got the vaccine in the last N weeks" against a control group. Like looking at "excess deaths" to estimate the deaths caused by COVID. Picking the right control group might be tricky, though...
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by giantg2 on Thursday November 16, 2023 @11:13AM (#38291347)
Yeah, I looked at doing some analysis for a vaccine related injury. There aren't really any control groups for the mandatory vaccines. The best you can do is try to time box it like you're talking about. Even using groups that may not vaccinate (certain religious sects usually) may have issues with the sampling not being random due to genetics and demographics in those communities.

I wanted to do the time boxing like you suggest, but access to anonymous records with that level of detail and with a sufficient size is not easy to come by (as a lay person for free at least).

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by el_benhameen on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @02:43PM (#38281377)
Unless you have the overall incidence of self-reported chest pain or that of those who didn’t get the vaccine in the same period, those aren’t particularly meaningful numbers.
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by kiltedpanda on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @02:57PM (#38281566)
2000 people is a pretty good sample size. It is true though that I'm hazarding a guess that the background rate of chest pain in any given timeframe is slightly lower than ~5%.
Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by serial_dev on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @05:01PM (#38283181)
I had the AstraZeneca vaccine and I was very sick for a week (I couldn't get out of bed and had 39+ Celsius fever) and for a month it was hard for me to walk to the nearby grocery store. The Pfizer vaccine, the second for me, was only slightly better.

Half a year after the vaccines, I had irregular heart beats, at one point more than thousand a day. It's a horrible experience, because even when I had only tens of irregular heart beats a day, I could feel most of them. Now imagine that a thousand times a day, especially knowing that cardiovascular issues are a common side effect.

And I still didn't report anything (Germany) as I don't believe anyone would come out of it. Not to be too cynical, but the Russia-Ukraine war "cured" COVID in Europe, so apart from staying alive and not taking anymore vaccines myself, I didn't care about the issue as I was no longer forced to take further "vaccines" to be a free man.

In the end, there are arguments both for these systems under reporting (cases like mine and many variations of it) and over reporting (in a comment someone mentioned that people maliciously report things or just in general people noticing small things and reporting that as side effect), and it's hard to come up with a sound estimation as to which one is the reality.

Re:Is the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken? by kiltedpanda on Thursday November 16, 2023 @12:10PM (#38292207)
Brutal, sorry to hear that. Hope you're feeling better!

I personally don't believe the suggestion of over-reporting is an issue at all. I recall reading that in the VAERS back end they can see which entries are made by individuals vs a doctor or doctor's office, so this could be easily verified.

I also recall reading that the majority of entries made in VAERS are by medical professionals but I can't locate the source for that.