How Reports Come Into Vaers
VAERS collects reports of possible adverse events that happen after vaccination. Anyone can submit a report to VAERSexternal icon, including patients, parents or caregivers, healthcare providers, and vaccine manufacturers.
Under Emergency Use Authorization, FDA requires healthcare professionals to report to VAERS certain adverse eventsexternal icon that occur after COVID-19 vaccination. CDC also encourages reporting of any medically important adverse event even if it isnt clear if the vaccine caused the health problem. This helps public health officials monitor and follow-up on possible safety problems. Learn more about selected adverse events reported to VAERS.
Fact Check: Have 966 People Died After Receiving The Covid Vaccine
The U.S. COVID vaccine rollout has seen over 90 million people receive at least one dose, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data as of March 7.
Scientists told Newsweek on February 24 that serious side-effects from the vaccine were rare at a time when 65 million doses had been given. Some examples of common reported side-effects include pain at the site of injection and tiredness.
There also have been reports of people dying after receiving a vaccine, based on data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System reporting database. VAERS is a U.S.-based early warning system for vaccine side-effects.
Healthcare professionals are required to report certain adverse events that occur after vaccines to the system, but it is not designed to give information on what caused the events, such as deaths.
How Many People Have Died As A Result Of A Covid
There has been widespread speculation about the side-effects of the coronavirus vaccines, including, tragically, deaths. But how many people have died as a result of a vaccine and why do different sources of data tell a different story? Sarah Caul takes a look at what the data are showing us.
Last month we published our first statistics on the number of fully vaccinated people who had subsequently died from COVID-19. They showed the risk of death involving COVID-19 was consistently lower for people who had received two vaccinations compared to one or no vaccination. However, there has also been some inaccurate speculation about the number of people who have died as a result of an adverse reaction to one of the vaccines.
There are two main sources for obtaining the number of deaths where the vaccine played a part these are the Yellow Card Scheme by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and death registrations analysis produced by the Office for National Statistics , National Records of Scotland and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency .
Both sets of statistics are important but they have different purposes and use different sources.
What is the Yellow Card Scheme?
What are death registrations data?
When a death is registered the information, including causes involved in the death, is sent to the different statistical agencies across the UK .
What numbers are currently available?
Which figures should I use?
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Unvaccinated People Are Still Dying From Covid
The unvaccinated arent dying.
Our verdict
Unvaccinated people are, sadly, still dying from Covid-19 and other causes. Age-standardised mortality rates among unvaccinated people have been higher than for those who have been vaccinated.
A picture of an elephant in a room with the words The unvaccinated arent dying has been shared on .
The post is similar to another we have previously written about, and is somewhat vague in its claim.
If the post is referring to people who have not been vaccinated against Covid-19, it is not true that they are not dying, whether from Covid-19 or other causes.
If the post means that unvaccinated people are not dying as a result of a vaccine they havent received, then this of course is truebut it could misleadingly suggest that large numbers of vaccinated people are dying from vaccine-related causes.
While a small number of deaths due to the Covid-19 vaccines have been recorded in the UK, vaccination is estimated to have saved a far greater number of lives.
Sadly Unvaccinated People Are Dying
In the broadest possible terms, the claim that the unvaccinated arent dying would suggest that no person who has not been vaccinated against Covid-19 has died of any cause since the vaccine rollout began in the UK in December 2020.
This, of course, is not the case. The Office for National Statistics has published data showing mortality rates for all causes of death, by vaccination status. This data shows that between 1 January 2021 and 31 March 2022, 107,035 people who were unvaccinated died in the UK.
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Who Is Still Dying Of Covid
Many who succumb to the disease are severely immunocompromised, or people who may not have responded to the vaccine, Kuritzkes explained.
“Of course, there are people who have not been vaccinated or boosted who are at risk for severe disease. And so that’s why we continue to see death from COVID,” he said. “Fortunately, it’s much much lower than it had been a year ago and then certainly two years ago, but it is persistent.”
The Boston-based infectious disease experts stressed that vaccination significantly reduces the risk of severe hospitalization and death, as well as other protective measures like wearing masks and social distancing.
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“If you are an otherwise healthy person who’s vaccinated, I think that your risk of dying of a COVID infection is infinitesimally small at this point,” Linas said. “But just because that’s most of us doesn’t make it all of us, and people are still dying of COVID and this is a real disease.”
Immunocompromised people can potentially avoid severe disease and death by getting prophylactic antibody infusions, if eligible, Kuritzkes added.
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He Did Not Expect To Be Sick
Arianne Bennett recalled her husband, Scott Bennett, saying, But Im vaxxed. But Im vaxxed, from the D.C. hospital bed where he struggled to fight off covid-19 this winter.
Friends had a hard time believing Bennett, co-founder of the D.C.-based chain Amsterdam Falafelshop, was 70. The adventurous longtime entrepreneur hoped to buy a bar and planned to resume scuba-diving trips and 40-mile bike rides to George Washingtons Mount Vernon estate.
Bennett went to get his booster in early December after returning to D.C. from a lodge he owned in the Poconos, where he and his wife hunkered down for fall. Just a few days after his shot, Bennett began experiencing covid-19 symptoms, meaning he was probably exposed before the extra dose of immunity could kick in. His wife suspects he was infected at a dinner where he and his server were unmasked at times.
A fever-stricken Bennett limped into the hospital alongside his wife, who was also infected, a week before Christmas. He died Jan. 13, among the 125,000 Americans who succumbed to covid-19 in January and February.
He was absolutely shocked. He did not expect to be sick. He really thought he was safe, Arianne Bennett recalled. And Im like, But baby, youve got to wear the mask all the time. All the time. Up over your nose.
When we are not taking this collective effort to curb community spread of the virus, the virus has proven time and time again its really good at finding that subset of vulnerable people, Salemi said.
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Severely Immunocompromised Persons Receiving Live Vaccines
Live vaccine viruses are attenuated so they do not cause infection in individuals with intact immune systems. Live vaccines, however, are contraindicated for people who are severely immunocompromised since their weakened immune systems may result in the live vaccine causing illness. Two published case reports describe immunocompromised children who received varicella vaccine, and where vaccine strain varicella zoster virus infection contributed to their deaths . In one case, a 4-year-old child who had been in complete remission from acute lymphoblastic leukemia for 5 months received varicella vaccine during a 2-week break from chemotherapy in the other case, a 15-month-old did not have a diagnosis of being immunocompromised, but had failure to thrive and several hospitalizations beginning at 5 months of age for infections and respiratory problems requiring steroid treatment , indicating a possible undiagnosed immunodeficiency. There are at least six case reports of death among severely immunocompromised persons that have been linked to vaccine strain measles virus infection , including a case of vaccine associated pneumonitis in an immunocompromised person with HIV and a case of measles inclusion-body encephalitis in a 21-month-old child with primary immunodeficiency . CDC recommends screening prior to vaccination so that contraindications and precautions, including previously diagnosed immune system problems are identified .
Vaccine Breakthroughs And Variants
CDC continues to actively monitor vaccine safety and effectiveness against new and emerging variants for all FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines. Research shows that the FDA-authorized vaccines offer protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death against currently circulating variants in the United States. However, some people who are fully vaccinated will get COVID-19.
The Delta variant is more contagious than previous variants of the virus that causes COVID-19. However, studies so far indicate that the vaccines used in the United States work well against the Delta variant, particularly in preventing severe disease and hospitalization.
Overall, if there are more COVID-19 infections there will be more vaccine breakthrough infections. However, the risk of infection, hospitalization, and death are all much lower in vaccinated compared to unvaccinated people. Therefore, everyone ages 5 years and older should get vaccinated to protect themselves and those around them, including family members who are not able to be vaccinated from severe disease and death.
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How To Compare Covid Deaths For Vaccinated And Unvaccinated People
The death rate among unvaccinated people is still far higher than that among the vaccinated even though vaccinated people now make up a significant proportion of deaths
Looking at COVID data in recent months, it may appear that a significant proportion of the people who have died of COVID were vaccinated against the disease. But it is important to put those numbers in context.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has compiled data from 28 geographically representative state and local health departments that keep track of COVID death rates among people age 12 and older in relation to their vaccination status, including whether or not they got a booster dose, and age group. Each week in March, on average, a reported 644 people in this data set died of COVID. Of them, 261 were vaccinated with either just a primary round of shotstwo doses of an mRNA vaccine or a single dose of Johnson & Johnsons vaccineor with that primary series and at least one shot of a booster.
In order to avoid the pitfalls of absolute numbers, it is useful to instead look at incidence ratesusually expressed as the number of deaths per 100,000 people. Standardizing the denominator across all groups offers a very different picture.
*Editors Note : This sentence was edited after posting to correct the populations described by Heather Scobie.
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Unvaccinated people accounted for the overwhelming majority of deaths in the United States throughout much of the coronavirus pandemic. But that has changed in recent months, according to a Washington Post analysis of state and federal data.
The pandemics toll is no longer falling almost exclusively on those who chose not to or could not get shots, with vaccine protection waning over time and the elderly and immunocompromised who are at greatest risk of succumbing to covid-19, even if vaccinated having a harder time dodging increasingly contagious strains.
The vaccinated made up 42 percent of fatalities in January and February during the highly contagious omicron variants surge, compared with 23 percent of the dead in September, the peak of the delta wave, according to nationwide data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by The Post. The data is based on the date of infection and limited to a sampling of cases in which vaccination status was known.
As a group, the unvaccinated remain far more vulnerable to the worst consequences of infection and are far more likely to die than people who are vaccinated, and they are especially more at risk than people who have received a booster shot.
A key explanation for the rise in deaths among the vaccinated isthat covid-19 fatalities are again concentrated among the elderly.
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What Are Your Questions About The Coronavirus Vaccine
Ideastream Public Media’s health team is answering as many questions as possible, with help from local experts in a range of fields. You can send us your questions with our online form, through our social media group, or call us at . We’ll keep the answers coming on our website and on the air.
A listener. Marc, submitted a question during a recent Sound of Ideas Reporters’ Roundtable program. He said: “Did the speaker on the show really just make the declarative statement that no one has died from the vaccine? Not looking for any sense of false equivalency or anything else, but has anybody looked at the online open VAERS data?”
Marc was referring to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, which has been around long before COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration operate the site that allows anyone to report an adverse event at any time.
As of August 30, 2021, there have been more than 369 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered in the U.S. During this time, VAERS received 7,218 reports of death among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine but a causal link to the vaccine has not been established, according to the CDC. “However, recent reports indicate a plausible causal relationship between the J& J/Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine and TTS, a rare and serious adverse eventblood clots with low platelets- which has caused death,” according to the CDC website.
Breakthrough Deaths Comprise Increasing Proportion Of Those Who Died From Covid
“These data should not be interpreted as vaccines not working,” one expert said.
A growing proportion of COVID-19 deaths are occurring among the vaccinated, a new ABC News analysis of federal data shows.
In August of 2021, about 18.9% of COVID-19 deaths occurred among the vaccinated. Six months later, in February 2022, that proportional percent of deaths had increased to more than 40%.
Comparatively, in September 2021, just 1.1% of COVID-19 deaths occurred among Americans who had been fully vaccinated and boosted with their first dose. By February 2022, that percentage had increased to about 25%.
Experts said the increase in breakthrough deaths is expected with more Americans reaching full vaccination status.
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Us Could Lose Control
Without swift, decisive action, monkeypox could become endemic in the United States, as it is in some parts of Africa, experts say.
Many of us are concerned that the window is closing for us to be able to eliminate monkeypox, Dr. Celine Grounder, an infectious disease expert and editor at large for Kaiser Health News, told The New York Times.
The CDC reported 351 cases in 27 states and the District of Columbia by June 29, which was more than double that of the previous week. Public health officials warn the numbers could be undercounts.
With case numbers rising, many experts fear the demand will quickly outpace the number of vaccine doses initially available.
The New York Times reported that Washingtons health department offered 300 monkeypox vaccination appointments on Monday and the slots filled within 15 minutes. New York City booked up all its available doses in less than two hours and had stopped taking walk-ins, while waiting for more vaccine doses to be available.
Is It True You Dont Have To Wear A Mask If You Get The Covid
It is fiction now. It may become fact, eventually, when more and more people are vaccinated. When we get closer to herd immunity, you likely will see the public health authorities relax those mass mask restrictions, Adalja said.
The big issue here for why scientists still want you to wear a mask has to do with research.
Initial vaccine studies only looked at whether patients got COVID-19 symptoms, not whether they got asymptomatic cases. So, studies are now underway on people who got the vaccine to determine if some are getting mild cases of COVID-19 and dont have symptoms.
Most of us in the field believe this is a very unlikely possibility, that the vaccine is likely to provide an ability to decrease spread as well as decreased symptomatic disease. So, we will likely see these types of recommendations change over time as we get more data, Adalja said.
At least for now, even if you get the vaccine, medical professionals still want you to keep wearing masks.
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Are People Still Dying From Covid
Despite a substantial growth in collective immunity through the development of vaccines and natural infection, people do and will continue to die from COVID-19, experts said.
“Yes, people are still dying of COVID. I think that’s really important to acknowledge. It’s not true that this disease is gone and that it’s something for 2020,” Linas said. “There are hundreds of people dying every day in the U.S. of COVID, so I think it’s really important that we state that off the top. I think it’s also important to recognize that it’s much less than it was.”
In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the seven-day average of confirmed deaths reached 198 people in Massachusetts. Today that number is just over six, state data shows.
The vast majority of Massachusetts — over 5.4 million people — are fully vaccinated. Adding to the protection of vaccinations over the last year is natural immunity. To date, more than 1.7 million people in Massachusetts have been infected.
But death remains a risk even with immunity and a less deadly variant like omicron, Doron explained.
“Essentially, almost every American has had either a vaccine or infection at this point,” she said. “So there’s a lot of immunity, and what that means is that each individual’s risk of dying of COVID is small, but when you have a lot of COVID — and you know that the first omicron wave in December, January, February was really a striking example — you can still have a lot of death.”