On July 20, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) posted it received 12,313 reports of deaths following a COVID vaccine, double the number from the previous week.
The unusual increase occurred within a 24-hour period on the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting (VAERS) website. Investigative reporter Alex Berenson noticed the anomaly and tweeted about it: “@CDCgov has quietly more than DOUBLED the number of #Covid vaccine death reports in VAERS, the federal side effect reporting system.”
Berenson noted the 12,313 deaths are the most ever reported for a vaccine, including “all other vaccines combined in the 30-year history of VAERS.” Berenson urged the agency to explain what has been happening. The 12,313 deaths would comprise .0036 percent of all vaccine doses.
CDC Backtracks
At the bottom of a separate webpage, the agency listed the death number from the previous week: “More than 334 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through July 13, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 6,079 reports of death (0.0018%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.”
A CDC spokesperson told the Epoch Times the doubled number was incorrect.
“We checked our stats internally and it’s only 6,000,” the newspaper reported the CDC representative as saying. “So, someone doing an update misrepresented that or made a mistake, in other words.”
As of July 28, the VAERS website showed 11,405 reports. Separately, the CDC states the VAERS is an “early warning system” which “cannot determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event but can determine if further investigation is needed.”
Calls for Straight Talk
There could be another explanation for the changing death numbers other than it being a “mistake,” says Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology at the Yale University School of Public Health.
“The VAERS now reports about 5,500 deaths in U.S.-related locations, 1,000 in ‘unknown’ locations, and 5,000 in ‘foreign’ locations,” Risch told Health Care News.
“It is unclear how reports from foreign locations get into the US database,” Risch said. “What CDC says is, ‘VAERS occasionally receives case reports from U.S. manufacturers that were reported to their foreign subsidiaries. Under FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) regulations, if a manufacturer is notified of a foreign case report that describes an event that is both serious and unexpected [in other words, it does not appear in the product labeling], they are required to submit it to VAERS.’ This would suggest the U.S. vax companies have received about as many death reports from Europe and other locations as from U.S. sources.”
In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Risch and Joseph Ladapo, M.D. said the CDC and the FDA should be more forthcoming about the adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. The doctors note at least two disturbing patterns: severe events have been occurring immediately after people receive the vaccine, and a study in Norway found the Pfizer vaccine “likely” contributed to the deaths of 26 of 100 nursing-home patients who were vaccinated.
“Analyses to confirm or dismiss these findings should be performed using large data sets of health-insurance companies and healthcare organizations,” Risch and Lapado write. “The CDC and FDA are surely aware of these data patterns, yet neither agency has acknowledged the trend.”
AnneMarie Schieber (amschieber@heartland.org) is the managing editor of Health Care News.
This article was updated 8/6/21.