WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Preliminary data from the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database for just the first two months of 2022 suggests an alarming spike in heart problems possibly stemming from the COVID-19 vaccines.
On March 11, The Blaze senior editor Daniel Horowitz highlighted the fact that 11,289 cases of pericarditis/myocarditis after COVID vaccination were reported to VAERS between January 1 and February 25 of this year, which is already 47% of the 24,177 reports for the same submitted in all of 2021.
The news is the latest apparent affirmation of the serious reservations many Americans have harbored as to the COVID vaccines’ safety, stemming in large part from the rushed nature of their creation. The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative developed and released the shots in a tenth of the time vaccine development usually takes and a quarter of the time it took the previous record-holder, the mumps vaccine, yet their advocates have done little to address the concerns of the hesitant.
Defenders of the relatively-new shots claim that VAERS offers an exaggerated view of a vaccine’s potential risks, as anyone can submit a report without vetting it. However, Horowitz noted that U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have acknowledged “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
Further, a 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS’s) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” On the problem of under-reporting, the VAERS website offers only that “more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones” (emphasis added).
Last year, Project Veritas shed light on some of the reasons for such under-reporting with undercover video from inside Phoenix Indian Medical Center, a facility run under the auspices of the HHS’s Indian Health Service program, in which multiplied medical professionals attest to seeing adverse reactions far more frequently than the impression given by the mainstream media.
In the footage, emergency room physician Dr. Maria Gonzales laments that myocarditis cases go unreported “because they want to shove it under the mat,” and nurse Deanna Paris attests to seeing “a lot” of people who “got sick from the side effects” of the COVID shots, but “nobody” is reporting them to VAERS “because it takes over a half hour to write the damn thing.”
In May 2021, NBC News published a report acknowledging experts’ concerns about “gaps” in federal monitoring of the COVID vaccines. While the government currently relies on a “hodgepodge” of sources for safety data, the report explained, the quoted experts call for a more “robust ‘active’ surveillance system [that] can search large volumes of patient care records to compare rates of adverse events in people who received vaccines with those who didn’t.”
Additional evidence against the shots’ safety was unearthed in late February during a COVID-19 vaccine hearing held by Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, where attorney Thomas Renz presented medical billing data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showing that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, 487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
In a statement to left-wing “fact-checking” outlet PolitiFact, the Defense Health Agency’s Armed Forces Surveillance Division spokesperson Peter Graves confirmed the existence of the records but claimed that a conveniently-timed “data corruption” glitch made the pre-2021 numbers appear far lower than the actual numbers of cases for those years, which PolitiFact took at face value.
And yet the COVID-19 vaccines have failed to end the pandemic in exchange for these risks. The federal government considers more than 216 million Americans (almost 65% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet data from Johns Hopkins University reported last October shows that more Americans died of COVID-19 by that point in 2021 (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000). The Moderna vaccine has been available throughout all of 2021; the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson shots were made available in late February.