Do COVID vaccine deaths prove vaccines are unsafe?

A leaked email written by the head of the FDA, Vinay Prasad, claims that COVID vaccines have caused the deaths of at least 10 children and suggests that past safety problems were ignored or hidden by the FDA and CDC. It also argues that current vaccine rules are too weak, vaccine mandates harmed young people, and that the FDA must change how all vaccines are tested, approved, and monitored.

Prasad claims that VAERS proves that “COVID vaccines killed children.” As mentioned in this newsletter many times, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS is a reporting system where anyone can file a report about a bad reaction after getting a vaccine. But that doesn’t mean the vaccine actually caused the problem.

When you visit the VAERS website, it warns that “VAERS reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable.” Because of this, scientists must be very careful about how they use VAERS data. The graph itself shows this problem too—it says vaccine deaths are only suspected, not proven. In fact, the reports don’t always mean there is a real link to vaccines at all.

If vaccines were killing large numbers of children, we would see this in all-cause mortality and excess-death data in highly vaccinated areas—which we don’t. In fact, higher vaccination coverage is associated with lower all-cause mortality. Carefully reviewed safety data have found extremely rare deaths plausibly linked to COVID vaccines, versus hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths and many pediatric hospitalizations prevented.