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Notes -
The current form specifically says "Please report all significant adverse events that occur after vaccination of adults and children, even if you are not sure whether the vaccine caused the adverse event." Healthcare providers are only "required by law to report to VAERS:
(where that Table is basically "things we have a causal mechanism for, if seen within typically one week"), but are still "strongly encouraged to report to VAERS:
That's a very good point ... but the implicit assumption here is that healthcare providers were, for that vaccine, using VAERS that way. That's easy enough to check to back-of-napkin accuracy levels: in the US we administer flu shots to about 50% of the population each year, and we have around 60K deaths per week. Are we seeing the 30K "died within a week after a flu shot" base rate? Not only are we not within napkin-margin of that, we're a couple orders of magnitude too low. We're too low for the discrepancy to even be just "let's not give a flu shot to someone circling the drain" selection bias, which makes me suspect the alternative hypothesis: "nobody even thinks to blame the flu shot". But replace the flu shot with a brand-new politically-charged vaccine and it would be reasonable for the reporting rate to jump from negligible up to 30% - that'd be the responsible thing to do, even if you don't have any real suspicions, just to make it easier for researchers to possibly tease any signal out of the noise later.
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