How Anti-vaccination groups misuse information from VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System

One of the gambits the National Vaccine (mis)Information Center uses is to exploit raw data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about vaccine safety.

The author of "The Poxes" blog,  Reuben,  has written a blog post, VAERS reports as "evidence" of vaccine harm

Another common anti-vaccine attempt at rationalizing the fear they want to instill in you is to point at the "Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System", or VAERS. It is a system set up as a repository for reports from the public of "adverse" events following immunization. The vaccine injury act created it. Just about anyone can post an event to the system, and it is up to epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to look into the reports and investigate them. In most cases, it is determined that the event had a cause other than the vaccine. But that doesn't stop the anti-vaccine groups from scaring you through quoting numbers they got from VAERS.

In the post he walks the reader through how to use the system and illustrates that death reports may not be from vaccines at all.

Steven Novella MD has also written a post at the JREF Swift Blog: VAERS Pseudoscience, illustrating how the NVIC's VAERS "analyst" misused the VAERS system:

What voluntary reporting systems are not, however, are scientifically rigorous assessments of true risk. They are useful for generating, but not testing, hypotheses.

The primary weakness of voluntary reporting systems, like VAERS, is that they are voluntary - people take it upon themselves to report what they believe may be a vaccine side effect. Such reporting is therefore subject to reporting bias. A news story warning about the risks of the flu vaccine will result in a spike in VAERS reports of flu vaccine side effects.

Any trend in VAERS reporting, therefore, has to be interpreted with caution, and in fact cannot be scientifically interpreted. A possible signal in VAERS would need to be followed up with some rigorous data - systematically looking at the incidence of the alleged side effect in a population and correlating it with vaccine status, for example.

A recent article in Mothering Magazine however, ignored all this and treated VAERS reporting as if it were scientific data. The author, Stephen Rubin PhD, analyzed recent VAERS data and interpreted the results entirely as if trends represented actual trends in side effects, rather than potentially artifactual trends in reporting. The result was an irresponsible piece of fear-mongering.

It gets worse. Mothering has a regular column from Rubin, in which he relays endless misinformation about vaccine safety.

Comments

[Reuben]

Thank you for the linking. Yes, it's always been one of my pet peeves that anti-vaccine groups and people fail to mention all the caveats that go with VAERS, they just point to it as gospel, all the while accusing me (or us) of being "blind followers" of vaccine recommendations.

[Chris]

Unfortunately it seems Reuben's blog is only open to invited readers.

[Reuben]

Sorry. There were some hiccups. It will be back up tomorrow. (Hit "delete" by accident on a ton of posts.)

[Chris]

Thanks.

[Reuben]

Aaaaaaaaand it's back!

[Chris]

Woo Hoo! I plan to use it next time someone makes claims using VAERS.