Did COVID vaccines cause 39,000 child deaths or 0?

Even though he received a letter from the FDA explaining that no deaths in children were definitively linked to COVID vaccines, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson is still saying that 39,000 children died because of the COVID vaccine.

Senator Johnson’s claims about vaccine safety use VAERS data. VAERS stands for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. It is a tool used to collect reports about health problems that happen after vaccination.

VAERS is an early warning system. Anyone can submit a report about anything that happened to them after they were vaccinated. This means it helps experts notice possible safety concerns. But VAERS reports do not prove that a vaccine caused a health problem or death. The VAERS system itself explains that its data should not be used alone to decide cause and effect.

If VAERS shows a higher number of certain health problems than expected, experts can study the reports more closely. They can look at individual cases, compare them with other data, and do more research to see if there may be a real connection.

During the pandemic, under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), every death that occurred after vaccination was supposed to be reported to VAERS, whether or not the vaccine caused the death. This means deaths from car accidents, other illnesses, suicide, or other causes could be included in VAERS.

Because of this, people cannot look only at the number of deaths reported to VAERS and say the vaccine caused them. More investigation is needed to understand what happened. Using VAERS numbers alone can give a misleading picture.