In December of 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, now the United States Secretary of Health and Human services, referred to the then-emergent Covid 19 vaccines as “the deadliest vaccines ever made”.
The basis for the claim was the number of reported “adverse incidents” on the United States’ VAERS database. VAERS is an open-access database which allows any person in any place to make a report of an “adverse effect” that they believe – note the word believe – to have been connected to a particular vaccine administered to the person about whom the report is being made. VAERS itself notes that its data cannot and should not be used to underpin claims about vaccine data for the simple reason that no individual report is verified or investigated before being collated by the database. In the very best case scenario, VAERS is what we might call a “warning signal” mechanism: A large number of reports might indicate a cause for investigation. They do not constitute an investigation themselves.
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