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
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