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The world conducted the largest medical intervention in history when billions of people received COVID-19 vaccines beginning in late 2020. Yet, five years later, no comprehensive, mandatory system exists in the U.S. or anywhere else to track down adverse events the vaccine may be causing on a massive scale.
No government health agency, medical association or hospital system has required doctors, clinics or hospitals to routinely ask every patient about new symptoms, cross-reference their COVID-19 and vaccination history, and systematically report that information to a central database capable of detecting possible patterns.
Today, untold millions of patients with mysterious or debilitating new conditions are said to be routinely told their symptoms are due to anxiety, depression, unexplained “long COVID” or simply treated without regard to what could be the cause, without any effort to collect the data that could prove or disprove a vaccine connection.
Read on for details.
The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), co-managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 1990, remains the primary U.S. tool for identifying previously unknown adverse events from vaccines and their frequency.
By law, healthcare providers must report certain serious events after any vaccination, including hospitalization, permanent disability or death, to the VAERS database.
But during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, compliance was extremely low and — shockingly — neither the government nor medical organizations enforced the requirement at perhaps the most critical time in our history in terms of sheer number being exposed to experiments, both in terms of the specific vaccines and novel form of delivery.
A major reason for underreporting to VAERS: many physicians believe — incorrectly — that they should only submit a report if they are personally convinced the vaccine caused the problem.
This misunderstanding defeats the entire purpose of a passive reporting system, which is to collect reports of all health issues following vaccination, regardless of suspected cause, so that unexpected patterns can emerge over time.
This is exactly how previously unrecognized serious side effects were discovered with other medications. In the late 1990s, as a CBS News investigative correspondent, I reported on Rezulin (troglitazone), a diabetes drug withdrawn in 2000 after reports of liver failure began appearing in the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS).
What started as a small number of reported liver deaths after Rezulin signaled a much larger problem once standard underreporting multipliers are understood: experts say for each adverse event reported, there are likely 10,000 to 100,000 more that don’t get reported.
That’s why a handful of fatalities was so alarming and prompted the FDA to pull the drug from the market.
Similarly, as I also broke news on at CBS, the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra was linked to a form of sudden blindness (non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy) years after approval.
But it was only because clusters of blindness cases happened to get reported to the FDA’s adverse-event system, and a few intrepid eye doctors noticed a pattern in their patients.
The actual doctors prescribing Viagra failed to recognize and report the blindness as a possible adverse event. The side effect was originally denied by the drugmaker, but is now added to the warnings on the label.
A third example among many I investigated is cholesterol-lowering statins. At first, statin makers denied that potentially fatal muscle problems and brain issues could be related to their medicine. But after enough reports made it into the federal database, it became undeniable— and those adverse events were ultimately added to the label.
VAERS data for COVID-19 vaccines now exceed 1.6 million reports in the U.S. alone, including more than 36,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations reported after vaccination.
Experts across the spectrum agree these figures represent massive underreporting because most physicians are not filing reports or even asking their sick patients about their vaccine status, and many adverse events are never recognized as possibly vaccine-related.
What should have happened from day one — and still has not — is a simple, mandatory protocol: at every medical encounter (office visit, emergency room, hospital admission or routine checkup), patients should be asked a few standardized questions about new or worsening conditions since their last COVID-19 vaccination or infection, and the answers should be forwarded to a central analytical database.
In an era of electronic health records and artificial intelligence, this could be inexpensive and straightforward.
Yet no such program exists.
The National Institutes of Health spent more than $1.15 billion in tax dollars on the RECOVER (Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery) initiative to study “long COVID.”
RECOVER has collected detailed longitudinal data on tens of thousands of patients. This includes data that could be valuable, if not vital, to the pursuit of finding out about and helping treat COVID-19 vaccine injuries.
Yet the study’s public protocols and publications to date lump all patients together as COVID-19 injuries — even though the majority of studied patients were also vaccinated.
When I contacted RECOVER representatives in 2024 to ask how they distinguished potential vaccine-related injury from post-viral “long COVID,” they refused to answer and then ceased communications with me.
It begins to look like RECOVER is more about finding and promoting money-making pharmaceutical treatments for “long COVID” without really getting at the heart of what COVID-19 vaccines might be doing to our population on a massive scale.
Confirmed serious adverse events now acknowledged by the FDA and CDC to be caused by COVID-19 vaccines include myocarditis and pericarditis (especially in young men after mRNA doses), anaphylaxis and immune thrombocytopenia.
Other conditions under continuing investigation include tinnitus, Guillain-Barré paralysis syndrome and various serious neurological disorders.
Rates of certain cancers in people under 50 have risen sharply since 2021, as have reports of aggressive “turbo cancers” and unusual neurological diagnoses.
Without systematic, mandatory post-vaccination surveillance that includes everyone — vaccinated or not — it is impossible to determine whether any of these increases are related to the vaccines, to the virus, to both or to unrelated factors.
Untold millions of patients are suffering mysterious or debilitating new conditions, with doctors potentially misunderstanding or misinterpreting causes, which impacts the success of treatment plans. Physicians are rarely, if ever, asking sick patients about COVID-19 vaccine status.
Often, patients report doctors are treating them without even bothering to identify potential causes of their maladies at all, let alone collect data that could prove or disprove a COVID-19 vaccine connection.
The largest vaccination campaign in history was accompanied by the weakest long-term safety monitoring ever attempted. Five years in, that failure has still not been corrected.
Originally published on Sharyl Attkisson’s Substack page.
