Offering Insight Into Vaccine Hesitancy – Unverified Reports Of Vaccine Side Effects In VAERS Aren’t The Smoking Guns Portrayed By Right-Wing Media Outlets
HEALTH
Matt Motta, Oklahoma State University and Dominik Stecuła, Colorado State University
Chances are you may not be not familiar with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. Co-managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, VAERS was established in 1990 to detect possible safety problems with vaccines.
Unfortunately, the anti-vaccine movement has used this once-obscure database to spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.
VAERS is ripe for exploitation because it relies on unverified self-reports of side effects. Anyone who received a vaccine can submit a report. And because this information is publicly available, misinterpretations of its data has been used to amplify COVID-19 misinformation through dubious...