Check out this paper published in JAMA written by a bunch of CDC authors including my favorite CDC misinformer, Dr. John Su.
It’s super popular. Over 500,000 views.
Here’s the key paragraph:
Furthermore, as a passive system, VAERS data are subject to reporting biases in that both underreporting and overreporting are possible.38 Given the high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination, underreporting is more likely. Therefore, the actual rates of myocarditis per million doses of vaccine are likely higher than estimated.
I agree. Underreporting is more likely. In fact, the term “overreporting” wasn’t even mentioned in the reference they cite. I can’t even figure out how VAERS could be overreported since the system should eliminate duplicates unless there is a bug.
But the key thing here is they did absolutely nothing to attempt to quantify the underreporting factor (URF).
They absolutely know how to estimate it. John wrote the paper on how to do that in November 2020: The reporting sensitivity of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) for anaphylaxis and for Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Do they apply that methodology to compute a minimum underreporting factor for serious adverse events (e.g., using the anaphylaxis rates from the Blumenthal paper in JAMA).
Of course not!
They simply do not want to let anyone know how serious it is.
So they deliberately leave out the estimate of the minimum URF (the minimum URF is the URF calculated using the most serious events that would be expected to be always reported) and leave it as an exercise for the reader.
My URF calculation
When I make the URF calculation using their methods and the best available data, the CDC then claims that they don’t agree with my results. They never say why.
My minimum URF comes to 41. But that’s for really serious stuff that will always get reported to VAERS. For myocarditis, the doctors don’t like to believe it could be caused by the vaccine so they typically won’t report it.
When you ask the CDC for the correct minimum URF, they say, “We’ll get back to you” and never do.
The paper says there are at most 106 reports per million doses for boys 16-17. That’s 1 in every 9,433 fully vaccinated teenage boys. It’s actually more than that in reality because there are reports from the first dose (these are usually an order of magnitude lower than the second dose) and because the “window” for looking at cases was only 7 days. So keep that in mind. Also, note the 10X dose dependency. That’s a sure sign of causality. It doesn’t get much stronger than that.
Now, using a pretty conservative URF of 100 for this symptom (2.5X the minimum which I think is a reasonable engineering estimate for the myocarditis which is much less likely than anaphylaxis to be reported), we get an actual rate in practice of more than 1 in 100.
That’s pretty high. It’s unacceptably high. That’s why they never apply the URF. Because it would disqualify the vaccine.
