Peter McCullough on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1747

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

McCullough's figure traces to a self-published 2021 analysis by Scott McLachlan and colleagues, who manually reviewed a sample of VAERS death report narratives and found that vaccination could be positively "ruled out" as a contributing cause in only about 14% of cases, framing the remainder (roughly 86%) as cases where no alternative cause was identified in the brief report. VAERS is a passive, unverified reporting system that the CDC and FDA state "is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem," but rather to detect unusual patterns warranting further investigation; reports are not vetted for accuracy or completeness, so the inability to positively identify an alternative cause of death from a short incident narrative is not equivalent to establishing the vaccine as the cause. This "cannot rule out" framing inverts the normal burden of causal evidence, lacks an unvaccinated comparison group, and has been widely criticized by public-health researchers as methodologically unable to demonstrate causation. Larger controlled analyses using systems with comparison populations, such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink, have not found a corresponding signal of excess non-accidental mortality attributable to COVID-19 vaccination. The 86% figure is accurately quoted from the source analysis, but the causal interpretation McCullough draws from it is considered misleading by mainstream vaccine-safety researchers.