COVID-19 vaccination safety data mischaracterized

A collection of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data is being characterized as if it proves COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous.

"Covid vaccine injuries exposed in newly uncovered data," declared multiple April 5 Facebook posts that linked to an article by American Military News, a publication about the U.S. military and foreign affairs, published the same day. That article cited information from an Epoch Times story that said data released by the CDC shows 780,000 vaccine injury reports were made after individuals were vaccinated against COVID-19. 

The Epoch Times, a news outlet tied to China’s religious movement, Falun Gong, has a history of sharing misinformation; PolitiFact has rated some of its past claims about COVID-19 vaccines False and Pants on Fire. 

These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The data these posts refer to is from v-safe, a CDC COVID-19 monitoring system that lets people self-report health symptoms weekly for six weeks following COVID-19 vaccination. 

In 2022, the Informed Consent Action Network, a Texas-based anti-vaccine group, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, seeking public release of CDC data from more than 10 million people who used the system to self-report symptoms from December 2020 to September 2022. 

After the CDC released the data, the group created an interactive visualization of this data on its website showing that more than 780,000 people said they required medical care after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.

But public health officials said it’s inaccurate to characterize the data as proof of causation.  

Martha Sharan, a CDC spokesperson, told PolitiFact that the adverse events reported in v-safe have not been verified by the CDC as having been caused byCOVID-19 vaccines. To verify the symptoms’ causes, an individual’s medical histories and records would have to be reviewed. 

CDC spokesperson Nick Spinelli said his agency called v-safe participants who reported receiving medical care after vaccination and encouraged them to submit a Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System report. 

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The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, also called VAERS, is another CDC safety monitoring system that allows anyone to submit reports about post-vaccination health effects. Researchers use it as a means of detecting possible trends that could merit a closer look. But none of the reports themselves constitute verified cases of vaccine-related symptoms or injury.

"V-safe is not designed to capture reports of unusual events, but more common symptoms like fevers, chills, or sore throats," Kawsar Talaat, a co-director of clinical research for the Institute of Vaccine Safety said in a story published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "You cannot take the material from one of these systems and expand it beyond the limitations of the data collection."

A 2022 peer-reviewed study of COVID-19 vaccines using v-safe data published in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, found that individuals seeking medical care after an mRNA vaccine were rare. V-safe surveys also did not ask participants which symptoms led them to seek medical care. 

Studies of COVID-19 vaccines have found them to be safe and effective by public health officials around the world. Adverse effects are rare, and the World Health Organization estimated that COVID-19 vaccines saved about 14.4 million lives worldwide in 2021 alone. 

We rate the claim that COVID-19 vaccine injuries were exposed in newly uncovered data False.