Children’s Health Defense, an organization headed by Robert F. On Facebook, videos of people reading lists of reported side-effects have gone viral. If you already know about the database, you may have learned about it via anti-vaccine propaganda, which falsely promotes it as evidence that vaccines have harmful effects. The existence of VAERS is little discussed by public-health figureheads. In fact, vaccine providers are urged to report any health problem that occurs after vaccination to the database, whether or not it seems likely the vaccine was the cause. The rollout of the Johnson & Johnson Covid shot was paused, for example, after just six cases of blood clots were reported to VAERS out of nearly 7 million doses administered.Īccessing the database requires first agreeing to have read a long-list of disclaimers: Anyone can report an adverse reaction, and they haven’t been verified or fact-checked. VAERS is a crucial monitoring system that helps both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration spot problems with vaccines early on. Take the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a government-run clearinghouse for potential issues with vaccines that has become a favored talking point among anti-vaccine groups. The result of this lack of investment is an information vacuum that can unwittingly provide an opportunity for anti-vaccine narratives to take hold. In general, public health entities haven’t much focused on education about topics such as vaccine side-effects or efficacy rates. “Communications is always the forgotten cousin in public health,” said Angus Thomson, a social scientist at the United Nations Children Fund who studies vaccine demand. On the other hand, too much information without the necessary context can create confusion, too. Give people too little information, and risk anti-vaccine forces swooping in to fill the information void with falsehoods. One of the greatest - though least discussed - challenges of the pandemic has been effective public health communication.
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