V-Safe Part 3: Who Were the 10 Million V-Safe Users Reporting a 7.7% Rate of Seeking Medical Care After Covid-19-Vaccine? Anti-vaxxers? Pro-vaxxers?

Third part of an incredible story that shows just how broken our public “health” apparatus is: very, very broken.

If you have not already read Parts 1 and 2 of the v-safe saga, you should do that first!

Who Registered for V-Safe?

After reading Parts 1 and 2, you know what data was captured by v-safe.  Now let’s break down the people who likely registered for v-safe.  Vaccine enthusiasts?  Anti-vaxxers?  Aliens? 

To start, if you received a Covid vaccine, you may have received this flyer:

or seen this poster:

or otherwise learned about v-safe from one of the CDC’s carpet bomb literature and promotional advertisements encouraging people to get the shot and register for v-safe. 

And, as noted, v-safe was open to anyone with a smartphone to register.  So, let’s analyze who the individuals were who were registering for v-safe. 

Here is a chart breaking down the number of new v-safe registered users by month: 

This pattern shows that most users registered during the early rollout before mandates and comports with the approach that most individuals who registered for v-safe were vaccine enthusiasts.  Those who were excited about its rollout.  The crowd that cheered with emotion as the vaccine was rolled out and who clamored to get the shot.

This is not a crowd that wants to report issues with the vaccine. 

Meaning, the 10 million v-safe users, if anything, may have been prone to underreporting health impacts, not overreporting, and hence the concern may be that the symptoms and health impact rates reflected in the v-safe data may actually be higher among the general vaccinated population. 

Another factor that may have depressed the adverse health impact rate in v-safe is that the vaccine was rolled out to the elderly as a high priority population.  Yet this population was less likely to be adept at or to use a smartphone-based program to track their health following vaccination but at the same time may be more susceptible to adverse health effects from the vaccine.  This may further reflect that the rate of health effects from the Covid-19 vaccine may be higher in the general population than what is reported in v-safe.

Bottom line: the v-safe data likely can be generalized to the larger vaccinated population and, if anything, likely underreports adverse health effects. 

Ironically, CDC probably designed the v-safe system so that it could collect data that could be generalized to the larger population but, after the data it collected did not match its policy objectives of promoting the vaccine as safe, the CDC now would likely not agree that v-safe can be generalized to the larger vaccinated population.  That is reflected by the fact that the CDC initially planned to call anyone who reported an adverse health impact to v-safe (v-safe protocol v.2 at p.5) but had to abandon that plan early on after rolling out v-safe due to the volume of people reporting impacts (v-safe protocol v.3 at pp.7-8).

That is all for today!  Now that you know what data was in v-safe and that its users were likely vaccine enthusiasts – less prone to report an issue with the vaccine either purposely or due to an unconscious bias away from associating harm with the vaccine – the actual data in the database should be intriguing!  Part 4 to be released soon!