Are the SAEs from other countries being dumped into VAERS?

With a 74% SAE rate in reports from Viet Nam, I do wonder.

Update: Thank you to Aravind Mohanoor for the link to the article entitled: Safety monitoring in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) written by none other than Shimabukuro et al. in 2015 and published in Vaccine. It clearly states the following:

Here’s a screenshot of what ‘serious’ and ‘unexpected’ adverse events mean in this context. They are meant to report BOTH serious and unexpected AEs.

Once again, we know from these documents what is ‘supposed’ to be the case. So if we assume that it’s normal for SAEs to be reported with the highest frequency then the question I have for the CDC and HHS and FDA is this:

In what twisted universe do 26,241 reports - 11,632 of which are serious (44.3%) in Japan not comprise a safety signal? So what if this 44.3% is the ‘norm’: look at the absolute count of reports! We can even assume that every single SAE was reported properly by the manufacturers. Then what? We still have 11,632 Japanese people who took these shots who suffered and reported disabilities and death in association with them. How is this considered safe or prophylactic against a virus with an infection fatality rate of 0?

According to Our World in Data, 104,700,000 people (84.5%) have been dosed (“people vaccinated”) as of May 7, 2023. This means that 1 out of every 10,000 people (1.1/10,000) will sustain and report an SAE. This is without an under reporting factor (URF) and assuming that serious damage is done after 1 dose. If we incorporate an URF of 31, assuming that vaccine manufacturers broke the law and did not report all SAEs, that’s 3.4/1,000 people or 1/290 people.

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If I wanted to make a serious adverse event (SAE) report disappear, I might put it into the VAERS Foreign (FR) data set. To be honest, I don’t even understand why there is a VAERS FR data set. Are these reports from U.S. citizens living abroad? Some of them are certainly, but not all of them. Is there another reason for its existence? Was it organic that the FR data file got so big? Did this happen because there are so many reports being made (in general) in the context of the COVID-19 shots?

To reiterate: For the purposes of this article, an SAE is death, disability, birth defect, hospitalization, emergency room visit or life-threatening illness ensuance. I count people, not events. For example, if a person suffered hospitalization followed by death, this counts as one SAE as per my calculations.

There’s a data set from New Zealand (NZ) doing the rounds and its existence sparked an idea in my brain. Out of interest, I calculated the SAE rate for the NZ data in VAERS, and it turns out it’s really high at 60%. So, I decided to dive back into VAERS to calculate the SAE rate for a few randomly-selected countries, and to compare these to the U.S. SAE rate to see if they are comparatively higher, lower, or neither.

One would think that the SAE rates for the U.S. and for the FR countries - or individual countries - should be the same, unless more dangerous products are being doled out in ‘the world’ as opposed to the U.S., or vice versa.

The ultimate way to identify U.S. reports from FR reports is via the ‘STATE’ variable. If the report is FR, it will have an “FR” in the field for this variable. Some fields have no data as indicated by an “NA”. If one wished to go one level deeper to identify coutries within the FR data, a way to do this is to use the SPLTTYPE variable. The first 2 digits in this variable indicate the country where the report originates from. Sometimes again, there is no data as indicated by an “NA”.

I picked 49 countries at random, and included only those with at least 15 reported SAEs because I wanted a ‘fair’ denominator for SAE calculation.

This brought the total number of countries in the sample to 26. I made sure I calculated the SAE rate for Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Of these reports, I counted the total number of SAEs for each country and then divided this by the total number of reports for that country. For example, there are 29,613 total reports as per the SPLTTYPE variable for Japan in the VAERS FR data set (JP-) and of these, 12,951 reports of SAEs.

Here’s what I found:

The first thing I wanted to know was the big picture difference - if there was one - between the U.S. SAE rate and the FR SAE rate. There actually is a notable difference, whereby the FR rate = 33.6% and the U.S. rate is 19.6%. These both exceed the VAERS standard 15% SAE rate norm, but the FR rate is considerably higher indeed. This reminds me of how 3/4 of the myocarditis reports in VAERS are/were hidden in the FR data set.

https://vaers.hhs.gov/docs/VAERSDataUseGuide_November2020.pdf

Here are the SAE rates per country:

The SAE rates for Taiwan and Viet Nam are 69.7% and 74.1%?! In fact, half of all of the SAE rates of the countries sampled are above 40%. The average is 41.9%. It is possible that the high SAE rates could be explained by a reporting bias whereby SAEs are reported more frequently in these countries, but on the other hand, what if this isn’t reporting bias?

In any case, what I would really like to know is: How are the people of Taiwan and Viet Nam doing?

“On 7 May 2021, Vietnam recorded first death after administered AstraZeneca vaccine. She was a 35-year-old medical staff in An Giang Province.”¹²

The Vietnamese people got no less than 12 different COVID-19 injectable products which started being administered on March 8, 2021 with 230,910,514 injections delivered as of November 9, 2023. They also got the go-ahead for mixing-and-matching - which is a huge no-no and a whole other article.

I guess it was a good idea to look to see if there are differences in SAE rates between countries as per the VAERS FR data. If anyone has family in Viet Nam ot Taiwan, please let me know - I would love a boots-on-the-ground assessment.

1. "Người đầu tiên tử vong sau tiêm vaccine Covid-19". VnExpress (in Vietnamese). May 7, 2021

2. "Vietnam reports first death in patient who received AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine". Reuters. May 7, 2021