Hospitalist tells about experience of reporting to VAERS

curator — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 00:00:56 +0000

Deborah Conrad was in a leadership position at her local community hospital. She was a Hospitalist Physician’s Assistant, Member of Medical Executive Committee Advanced Practice Provider Director. She was fired because she refused to take the vaccine as mandated by her hospital. She approached The HighWire to tell her story about her experience reporting adverse events to VAERS.

Deborah Conrad said that reporting to VAERS became a fulltime job for her after she decided to take on the job. Let’s tease out some numbers. According to OpenVAERS, there are 798,634 reported adverse events related to COVID in VAERS as of the date of this writing, about a month after this episode aired. According to the American Hospital Association, there are a total of 6,090 hospitals in the US. Assuming that hospitals reported all adverse events (and just to be clear, I don’t think that is the case), that is an average of 131 adverse events per hospital. This much is fact.

Now let’s speculate a bit. Deborah Conrad said that her hospital was small. Let’s assume that her hospital was half the size of the average hospital. So maybe her hospital might have reported about 65 adverse events. Another doctor reported that doing a report took about half an hour, but Deborah Conrad is a hospitalist. She would not be anyone’s primary care provider. She would not have had all of the information needed for the reports readily available, so she would need to make some calls to do the reports. For her, a report may have taken an hour or more. Sixty-five cases would have taken about a week and a half to report, but it seems from the interview that she spent much more time at it than that.

It would be nice to at least have the bed count for the hospital. That would give us a more certain number to work with, since the number of total hospital beds in the US is known, but we will work with what we have. Whistleblowers in other reports, including a Project Veritas report, have told us that vaccine adverse events are greatly underreported. The rough numbers we have teased out here would indicate that this is indeed the case. Unfortunately, that is about all I can say since I do not know the number of beds at the hospital. Also, I do not know what percentage of VAERS reports are reported by hospital staff. Consequently, I cannot estimate from this teasing out of numbers the true scale of the underreporting. I can only determine from these simple calculations that underreporting is an issue.

The real concern here is that the terms of the EUAs essentially turned medical care providers into research assistants without them realizing what that would mean. As Deborah Conrad discovered,

Healthcare providers are required by law to report to VAERS:

Any adverse event listed in the VAERS Table of Reportable Events Following Vaccination that occurs within the specified time period after vaccinations

An adverse event listed by the vaccine manufacturer as a contraindication to further doses of the vaccine

Healthcare providers are strongly encouraged to report to VAERS:

Any adverse event that occurs after the administration of a vaccine licensed in the United States, whether it is or is not clear that a vaccine caused the adverse event

Vaccine administration errors

Vaccine manufacturers are required to report to VAERS all adverse events that come to their attention.

Online reporting is strongly encouraged. Please report clinically important adverse events that occur after vaccination of adults and children, even if you are not sure whether the vaccine caused the adverse event.

This last point is made clear in a CDC video. It is the CDC’s job to determine if the event is related to the vaccine, not the doctor’s. The doctor’s job is to report anything adverse that falls within a certain time range, and the CDC will decide whether it is relevant to them.

Deborah Conrad did not know about the VAERS system prior to her research, let alone know that healthcare providers are required to report adverse events.

The reportable events for the COVID vaccines is not on the list in the first bullet, so now we must look to the Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers Administering Vaccine. Here, it says,

SUMMARY OF INSTRUCTIONS FOR COVID-19 VACCINATION PROVIDERS

Vaccination providers enrolled in the federal COVID-19 Vaccination Program must report all vaccine administration errors, all serious adverse events, cases of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MIS) in adults and children, and cases of COVID-19 that result in hospitalization or death following administration of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine

— Page 2

Technically, the responsibility, then, appears to belong to the person who provided the dose, the way this is written. Practically, it would seem that the attending physician must be the one to do the reporting. In any case, the CDC needs to make clear to providers the responsibilities for reporting. To the credit of the CDC, Deborah Conrad’s report shows them to be truly interested in getting the facts. It is important that the CDC get these reports. Failure to provide the reports could mean that the CDC may not have the information it needs to consider whether to approve additional boosters or stop the COVID vaccine program altogether. An order of magnitude underreporting could make a difference between “safe and effective” and something so dangerous that the program needs to be stopped immediately.

Does this mean that if someone got their jab at a pharmacy such as Walgreens or CVS, that the pharmacy is responsible for reporting their adverse reactions? Have they reported any beyond maybe those occurring at the service site? Given the detail needed to prepare the reports, is this a reasonable expectation? If a patient lands in the hospital after getting a jab at one of these sites, what is the likelihood that the provider of the jab will prepare the report?

Deborah Conrad revealed an additional reason why the fully vaccinated might be reported as unvaccinated. If the patient went to a pharmacy such as Walgreens or CVS to get their jab, the report of the incident might not have made it into the medical care system’s records. Deborah Conrad says that patients need to be asked about their vaccine status.

The phone call shown in the video at 39:47 shows a strange conflict between providing care for the patients and promoting the vaccines as the CDC seems to want done. As background, Deborah Conrad had seen a journal article about thrombosis (blood clots) and thrombocytopenia (low platelets) occurring at the same time following jabs. She wanted to make sure that physicians properly evaluated and treated the patients for this situation, but the concern created a conflict with other leaders at the hospital that somewhat resembled cognitive dissonance.

They seemed to know that the vaccines are still in testing, and yet they seemed so stuck on the idea that the public must know that the jabs are “safe and effective” that they could not tolerate the idea that maybe the public should know that certain safety issues had been found. At least in part, this may be the result of the long propaganda campaign to convince people that vaccines are “safe and effective.” This phenomenon is discussed at length in the Brian Gerrish deposition.

Were the other hospital administrators aware that the CDC had published a health alert about the possibility of combined thrombosis and thrombocytopenia that Deborah Conrad had told them about in the email? Did Deborah Conrad know about it or had she gotten the information only from the study that she cited? If they all knew about the CDC Health Alert, were they aware that a portion of the CDC Health Alert was addressed to the public? Were these people conspiring to keep this official information from the public? In general, are hospitals and physicians receiving these alerts as they should?

Deborah Conrad pointed out the difficulties in preparing VAERS reports. The VAERS system currently does not save partial reports that physicians can come back to later and finish. This is an important feature that needs to be added as soon as possible. The technology exists for much greater automation of VAERS reporting. Automated key word searches could help the physician find the information needed for reporting. These features would probably be most appropriately implemented in the medical records system. If the vaccination dates are properly recorded, then the combination of the date and adverse event recording could trigger preparation of a VAERS report. The records system could pull in data from various fields in the system and present a preliminary report for the physician to edit and approve. The VAERS system could be modified to accept reports prepared in this way. This would greatly reduce the physician’s time needed to report and increase compliance with reporting obligations.

Sources:

September 17, 2021. Del Bigtree with Deborah Conrad. “THESE PATIENTS DESERVE TO BE HEARD” -VAERS WHISTLEBLOWER. The HighWire with Del Bigtree.
https://rumble.com/vmncez-these-patients-deserve-to-be-heard-vaers-whistleblower.html.
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https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/pfizer-biontech-covid-19-vaccine.
Food & Drug Administration.
This is the FDA’s main page for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine. Links to the latest versions of FDA letters, memos, reports, and other documents relating the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine can be found here.
October 20, 2021. “Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers Administering Vaccine [Pfizer-BioNTech].” US Food & Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/media/144413/download.
Food & Drug Administration.
This document has instructions for healthcare providers who are administering the vaccines. This is a bit of a problem because the providers offering the vaccines are not always the same providers that patients suffering from adverse events will report to.
May 12, 2021. Tom Shimabukuro. “Update: Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS) Following COVID-19 Vaccination.” Presentation slides. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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“This is an official CDC Health Alert.” This health alert includes special instructions for testing and treating patients with combined thrombosis and thrombocytopenia.
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April 6, 2021. “AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 Vaccine: EMA Finds Possible Link to Very Rare Cases of Unusual Blood Clots with Low Platelets.” European Medicines Agency.
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European Medicines Agency.
June 22, 2021. Isaac See, John R. Su, Allison Lale, Emily Jane Woo, Alice Y. Guh, Tom T. Shimabukuro, Michael B. Streiff, Agam K. Rao, Allison P. Wheeler, Suzanne F. Beavers, Anna P. Durbin, Kathryn Edwards, Elaine Miller, Theresa A. Harrington, Adamma Mba-Jonas, Narayan Nair, Duong T. Nguyen, Kawsar R. Talaat, Victor C. Urrutia, Shannon C. Walker, C. Buddy Creech, Thomas A. Clark, Frank DeStefano, and Karen R. Broder. “US Case Reports of Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis With Thrombocytopenia After Ad26.COV2.S Vaccination, March 2 to April 21, 2021.” JAMA 325 (24): 2448–56.
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January 2021. “Fast Facts on U.S. Hospitals, 2021 | AHA.” American Hospital Association.
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July 7, 2017. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) Website and Ways to Report. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbCWhcQADFE.
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hospitals – Pandemic Timeline

Hospitalist tells about experience of reporting to VAERS

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