Operation
Each year the VAERS receives 10,000–20,000 reports of adverse events following immunization. Higher-priority uses of the data include reports of death and other serious adverse events, recognizing and detecting adverse effects, and finding unexpected adverse events involving new vaccines. The VAERS data are also used to monitor known reactions to vaccines and for vaccine lot surveillance. Like other spontaneous reporting systems, VAERS has several limitations, including underreporting, unverified reports, inconsistent data quality, absence of a control group that is not vaccinated, and inadequate data about the number of people vaccinated. Although data mining techniques such as empirical Bayes methods can be used to improve the quality of data analysis, even with these techniques the VAERS data do not establish whether a vaccine caused an adverse event.
Read more about this topic: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)