Use in Research and Litigation
Many medical researchers make use of VAERS to study the effects of vaccination. VAERS warns researchers using its database that the data should not be used in isolation to draw conclusions about cause and effect. Nonetheless, data from VAERS has been used in vaccine litigation to support the claim that vaccines cause autism.
Litigation related to vaccines and autism has led to an increase in VAERS reports filed by plaintiff's attorneys. A 2006 article in Pediatrics found that most VAERS reports related to thimerosal, and many related to autism, were filed in connection with litigation, leading the authors to caution that inappropriate reliance on VAERS data may be a source of bias. The study's lead author stated: "Lawyers are manipulating this system to show increases that are based on litigation, not health research." Paul Offit, chief of infectious disease at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, wrote:
Public health officials were disappointed to learn that reports of autism to VAERS weren't coming from parents, doctors, nurses, or nurse practitioners; they were coming from personal-injury lawyers... For the lawyers, VAERS reports hadn't been a self-fulfilling prophecy; they'd been a self-generated prophecy.
Read more about this topic: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
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