Exactly. And so many of the people who submit reports are medical professionals. If they play loosy-goosy with the facts, I'm thinking they can end up in a lot of trouble.
Exactly. And so many of the people who submit reports are medical professionals. If they play loosy-goosy with the facts, I'm thinking they can end up in a lot of trouble.
I will offer one more piece of anecdotal evidence. I was on a Zoom call with a *bunch* of doctors a little while back. One of them mentioned, with some embarrassment, that he actually tried to enter an adverse event into VAERS but stopped short, because he could not figure out how to tell the system which shot--first or second--he had administered. (It is unclear if, at that time, VAERS had been set up for properly reporting the effects of a vaccination that was based upon two shots, versus the more traditional case of one-shot-and-done.) He just quit trying to report the adverse event, in frustration!
...so, one has to figure out a work-around, such as using the notes, to report an adverse event for the COVID-19 vaccines in VAERS, versus having appropriate drop-downs and fields already in the tool. As a further result, the types of entries that would allow for easier--or even *any* type of--data analysis based upon field entries versus random text, is lost.
And search seems to have broken in an update (previously, you had to manually refresh to actually get Page 2+ results to show up), though maybe it's my browser. I'm a broken record on this, but the only way to really "use" VAERS is to trawl, trawl, trawl.
Exactly. And so many of the people who submit reports are medical professionals. If they play loosy-goosy with the facts, I'm thinking they can end up in a lot of trouble.
I will offer one more piece of anecdotal evidence. I was on a Zoom call with a *bunch* of doctors a little while back. One of them mentioned, with some embarrassment, that he actually tried to enter an adverse event into VAERS but stopped short, because he could not figure out how to tell the system which shot--first or second--he had administered. (It is unclear if, at that time, VAERS had been set up for properly reporting the effects of a vaccination that was based upon two shots, versus the more traditional case of one-shot-and-done.) He just quit trying to report the adverse event, in frustration!
Right, VAERS only seems to have a field for "VAXDATE" and most reports do not bother to specify both dose dates in the notes, though some do.
...so, one has to figure out a work-around, such as using the notes, to report an adverse event for the COVID-19 vaccines in VAERS, versus having appropriate drop-downs and fields already in the tool. As a further result, the types of entries that would allow for easier--or even *any* type of--data analysis based upon field entries versus random text, is lost.
And search seems to have broken in an update (previously, you had to manually refresh to actually get Page 2+ results to show up), though maybe it's my browser. I'm a broken record on this, but the only way to really "use" VAERS is to trawl, trawl, trawl.