The Sconi

Sen. Ron Johnson tried to raise awareness about the possible negative side effects of COVID-19 vaccines in posts on Twitter. Conversely, the CDC insists these are rare. 

The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) was created in 1990 to serve as a way to potentially discover negative effects in vaccines. VAERS is overseen by the CDC and the FDA. Johnson addressed the organization in his critical tweet about vaccine side effects. 

“Sadly, we passed two milestones on VAERS," Johnson said in a post to his official Twitter account on Jan. 3. "Over 1 million adverse events and over 21,000 deaths. Thirty percent of those deaths occurred on day 0, 1 or 2 following vaccination. When will federal agencies start being transparent with Americans? Why do they continue to ignore early treatment?”

The goals of VAERS, according to its official website, are to find novel, unusual or rare vaccine adverse events, keep an eye on upticks in established adverse events, find potential patient risk factors for particular types of adverse events, assess the safety of newly licensed vaccines, determine and address possible clusters in reporting, recognize persistent issues with safe use and administration problems and provide a national safety monitoring system that expands to the entire general population for response to public health issues, such as a significant program for vaccinations in pandemics. Nonetheless, VAERS does not claim to be able to definitively discover if a vaccine caused a particular side effect. 

The CDC's position is that serious negative side effects caused by COVID vaccines “are rare but may occur.” The CDC concedes that following a vaccination, people may experience anaphylaxis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), myocarditis or pericarditis. Deaths that are reported to VAERS are overseen by the CDC and FDA.

Despite any risk of side effects, the CDC officially recommends that all citizens over the age of five get a coronavirus vaccine in some form.