No, of course not. But that’s the outrageous accusation leveled by Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative organization Turning Point USA. Kirk’s accusation is not, according to him, a statement of truth per se:
“The Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System shows that there’s as many as 12,313 deaths after getting the vaccine,” Kirk said. “We’ve also gone into detail about how VAERS and the FDA—according to this study of the electronic support for public health Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System—shows that it may really might only reflect one percent. So, if VAERS is off by 99 percent, that would mean 1.2 million people died after getting the vaccine.”
Kirk says “I'm not saying that's true, I'm saying that according to how we calculate VAERS...this could be true”. Hey, I’m just tossing this out there to poison the well. Might be wrong, who knows?
Kirk provides no support for the contention that VAERS is underreporting COVID19 vaccine-related side effects by a factor of 100, or even 10 (that I’ve been able to locate), so let’s write that contention off as pure BS. A Big Lie that Kirk has concocted and is trying to push. (It could be based on the fact that VAERS is a voluntary reporting database, and Kirk is using that fact alone to “estimate” an underreporting by a factor of 10 or 100. Again, there’s nothing to base this on.)
But what about those 12,313 deaths? Well, the VAERS website itself clearly states that VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The VAERS website also states that “The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically.” So it’s a mistake (or just an outright lie, without more) to state that 12,313 deaths are attributable to COVID19 vaccines. Well, about 340 million vaccine doses have been administered in the US to date. Therefore, many, if not most, of those deaths could have been just part of the normal attrition of the vaccinated population.
This looks like a worse example of the old saw “there are liars, damned liars, and statisticians”. Kirk can’t even credibly claim to be a statistician.
Incidentally, I’m not sure where Kirk got the 12,383 figure. From the spreadsheet I downloaded, I found only 5626 incidences of death. Which are, again, not necessarily attributable to the vaccine.
So what does VAERS tell us about vaccine side effects? The VAERS spreadsheet I downloaded this morning listed 418,782 reported side effects from 01/01/2021 through 07/16/2021, so this data includes side effects reported during clinical trials and as a result of vaccinating the US population in general. Based on the number of doses administered (over 340 million), this number represents a rate of about 0.12%, or about 1.2 reported incidences out of every 1000 administrations. And that is across all reported side effects, not just death.
Looking at entries in the VAERS spreadsheet, the majority of side effects are the ones generally known — fever, chills, malaise, swelling and pain at the injection site, and the like. Some of the side effects are no small matter, including severe pain in the arm receiving the administration, and/or paralysis. So some significant side effects are apparently happening.
But the decision to administer any drug is a risk/benefit analysis — what is your risk vs. what benefit you expect to receive? Any drug has a risk; even aspirin causes intestinal bleeding which for some folks is quite risky. The current mortality rate for COVID19 infections is around 1.8% (just dividing 610,000 deaths by 34.4 million cases; I’ll use this as a proxy for the rate for the unvaccinated population). Therefore, given the current rate of side effects (quite low) with the risk of death (significant), getting a vaccination is still worth the risk of side effects. Even, I would venture to say, death. Charlie Kirk can go pound sand.