[phonypc]

The medical establishment is not trying to convince everyone that systems like VAERS are useless. That might be a hyperbolic talking point in some circles on Twitter. The issue is misusing the systems. They exist to generate evidence of possible correlations between adverse events and vaccines, for further investigation. Not so that anyone can infer the real rate of events or causation.

>reports of symptoms occurring just days after a vaccination

To be clear: these systems are not limited to reports of events occurring just days after vaccination.

[native_samples]

I'm afraid that's not what I've seen. So far there have been several studies by professional researchers that got published using VAERS data which were then forcibly retracted (against the will of the researchers themselves), the stated grounds being that they were "correlational". The message is clear now - you may not use VAERS or equivalent data for anything, regardless of who you are.

W.R.T. just days: indeed, they collect other reports. However within 1-3 days seems to be most common. Reports are strongly weighted towards happening quickly. See the histogram here:

https://openvaers.com/covid-data/mortality

[phonypc]

Ya, "correlational" is a legitimate criticism of a study based on VAERS data that wasn't presented as such. Anyway, I'm not aware of studies being retracted as you describe. Certainly there have been problematic pre-prints (never published) making the rounds

[native_samples]

It's not a legitimate criticism, it's a Kafka-esque catch 22.

If you say the analysis is merely "correlational" then the establishment says, by the studies own admission there's no evidence vaccines have anything to do with it so it must be ignored.

If you say that people dropping dead less than 24 hours after taking the vaccine were probably killed by it, then you will be told the CDC/etc don't allow the data to be used that way, that it's not valid to infer causation from a "merely" correlational data set, and that this is a retraction-worthy failure, and therefore it must be ignored.

Please. We can see through this kind of stupid mind game. "Science" has decided these databases may not be used for anything, even though they are the only way to understand side effects on a scale that the trials cannot pick up.

Examples:

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/10/17/paper-linking-covid-1...

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/07/02/journal-retracts-pape...

"Unfortunately, in the manuscript by Harald Walach et al. these data were incorrectly interpreted which led to erroneous conclusions. The data was presented as being causally related to adverse events by the authors. This is inaccurate. In The Netherlands, healthcare professionals and patients are invited to report suspicions of adverse events that may be associated with vaccination. For this type of reporting a causal relation between the event and the vaccine is not needed, therefore a reported event that occurred after vaccination is not necessarily attributable to vaccination"