Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaers: what the evidence says · JRE #1999

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

The underreporting figure Kennedy cites traces to a 2010-2011 Harvard Pilgrim Health Care pilot report (led by Ross Lazarus) for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which found that fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events were captured through traditional voluntary VAERS reporting compared with an experimental automated electronic-record screening tool; it is a preliminary, non-peer-reviewed pilot report, not a formal CDC study, and it did not isolate deaths or measure COVID-19 vaccines specifically. CDC and FDA, which co-manage VAERS, state on the system's own site that VAERS is a passive surveillance system anyone can submit a report to, that reports are not verified, and that VAERS "is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem"; HHS's data guide further notes underreporting varies widely by severity, with serious events far more likely to be reported than minor ones. VAERS does contain roughly the figures Kennedy cites for total reports following COVID-19 vaccination, but CDC, FDA, and independent fact-checkers have repeatedly said raw VAERS counts, including reported deaths, cannot be interpreted as vaccine-caused without further investigation. Fact-checking organizations have found that applying the Lazarus pilot's rough underreporting ratio to VAERS death or serious-injury tallies, as Kennedy and others have done, is not supported by the study's own scope and has been disputed by FDA as lacking evidentiary basis for such a large multiplier. Overall: the underlying data point exists but is applied well beyond what the source study measured and contradicts CDC/FDA's explicit guidance on how VAERS data should be interpreted.