No, reports to the CDC’s vaccine early warning system are not ‘vaccine deaths’

Without mentioning COVID-19, a headline widely shared on Facebook raises an alarm about vaccines while referencing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading federal agency fighting the coronavirus.

The headline is on an article from the Gateway Pundit, a conservative website. It states:

"Per the CDC, there are nearly twice as many vaccine related deaths SO FAR in 2021 (1,755) than all the vaccine deaths this past decade (994)."

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) 

These are not counts of "vaccine deaths" — they are unverified reports of deaths that occur after a vaccination. There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines have caused any deaths. And there have not been more vaccine-related deaths in 2021 than in the previous decade.

The headline cites figures from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, which is maintained by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The agencies warn that reports of adverse events — in other words, possible side effects — made to the VAERS database do not indicate whether an adverse event is linked to or caused by a vaccine; the reports, which can be made by anyone and are not verified, are intended as an early warning system to detect possible safety problems. 

As Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and a physician in the infectious-disease division at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told PolitiFact: "The VAERS system is very noisy, so it's hard to compare." Offit said the system identifies "a lot of temporal associations that are not necessarily causal."

Moreover, the database does not compare death rates associated with vaccinations to see whether they are higher or lower than death rates among people who were not vaccinated, said Dr. Walter Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center at Emory University.

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Orenstein also said that given the national focus on COVID-19, people are more likely to report deaths following a COVID-19 vaccination; and given the focus on vaccinating the elderly for the coronavirus in care facilities, it’s likely there will be more reports of death because those older people tend to have other health problems.

Here’s what the CDC told us on the numbers

• Number of all vaccine-related deaths over the past decade: 2,928

• Number of all deaths after vaccination in 2021: 1,934

• Number of deaths after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021: 1,911

That means almost 99% of reports in 2021 followed COVID-19 vaccines.

More than 145 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the U.S. from Dec. 14, 2020, through March 29, according to the CDC. Reviews by physicians from the CDC and the FDA "revealed no evidence that vaccination contributed to patient deaths," the CDC said.

The Gateway Pundit recently made another False claim about fatal side effects, this time taking European data out of context to exaggerate the risk of vaccines. The claim shared information from a European database that stresses its information is preliminary and requires additional research before making conclusions. 

The claim that there were nearly twice as many vaccine-related deaths so far in 2021 as the past 10 years is not accurate. We rate it False.