A podium with
the logo for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the Tom Harkin
Global Communications Center in Atlanta, Ga., in a file photo. (Kevin C.
Cox/Getty Images)
Over
10,000 COVID-19 Claims Removed From VAERS, 500 Death Reports Deleted, Claims
Data Analyst
By Naveen Athrappully
May 28, 2022 Updated: May 28, 2022
More than
10,000 COVID-19-related reports have been deleted from the U.S. Vaccine Adverse
Event Reporting System (VAERS), according to Albert Benavides, a data analyst
who has been analyzing VAERS data since the COVID-19 vaccines were released for
public usage.
The VAERS
database is an early warning system maintained by the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used to
identify vaccines that might be triggering adverse events at higher than
expected rates. Anyone, including health care professionals, vaccine
manufacturers, and the general public, can submit a report to VAERS.
“500 death
reports have already been deleted so far to date for COVID jabs. 10,000 claims
have been deleted total since the rollout for COVID. I’ve spot-checked 2,000 of
those claims and I cannot find the duplicate because, in the fine print, it
says ‘We delete duplicates and false reports,’” Benavides said in an interview with the Stew Peters
Network published on April 28.
Deletions for
COVID-19 reports are “way more” when compared to deletions of reports for other
vaccines, the data analyst said.
Of the 14,000
total reportedly deleted entries on VAERS, 10,000 are linked to COVID-19, while
the remaining 4,000 were related to other vaccines.
Of the 1.2
million COVID jab records on VAERS, there are roughly 27,000 deaths, which
comes to around 2 percent, he said he found in his analysis. But taking into
account the fact that the 10,000 deleted COVID-19 claims include 500 death
reports, the deletion rate of death reports comes in at a higher ratio of 5
percent.
“65 percent
of all the COVID reports [in VAERS] are classified as the lowest level: not
serious … They don’t even rise to the level of office visit, emergency, or
in-patient hospital,” Benavides said. “But when you read them, there’s
thousands of cardiac arrests, strokes, pulmonary embolisms … These are misclassified.”
Benavides
also asserted that the CDC and FDA are responsible for the missing data from
VAERS and is seeking transparency on the reason behind their deletion.
CDC and FDA
did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
Last year, a
similar observation was made regarding VAERS, with some saying that the agency
had deleted 6,000 death reports from the database.
However, the
agency told Reuters that they had deleted
the entries due to foreign reports getting combined with domestic reports.
According to
the latest VAERS data dated May 13, there
were 1.268 million total COVID-19 claims in the database. There were 28,141
claims of death, 52,299 reports of permanent disability, and 31,437 instances
of life-threatening events.
An analysis by ABC News shows
that 18.9 percent of COVID-19 deaths in August 2021 occurred among vaccinated
Americans. In February 2022, this number had risen to more than 40 percent.
In September
2021, only 1.1 percent of COVID-19 deaths were among U.S. citizens who had
received two doses of the vaccine as well as a booster. Five months later in
February, the number surged to around 25 percent.
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Naveen Athrappully is a
news reporter covering business and world events at The Epoch Times.
