Vaccine injures and adverse reactions are massively under-reported, as admitted by the Centers for Disease Control. Estimates show that only one to ten percent of vaccine injuries and deaths are actually filed with the government.

In the United States, the government has created a database to keep track of hundreds of kinds of reactions to vaccinations, including fevers, soreness, seizures, swelling of the brain, arthritis, and death. Since its inception, this program has awarded over $2.5 billion to individuals and families who have suffered vaccine injury and death. These awards are funded by taxes on vaccines. [1]

Even though health care providers are required by law to report vaccine injuries, most of these adverse events are not made public in this database, known as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Parents may not know that common reactions to vaccines, including fevers, long bouts of crying, or rashes following vaccination should be reported to their child’s doctor. When a more serious adverse event occurs, parents may be too overwhelmed to make sure a report is filed.

Unfortunately, rather than educating doctors and parents about the importance of reporting all adverse reactions to vaccines to the VAERS database, the US government has just tightened the requirements for reporting an adverse reaction, making the process even more difficult. [2] [adrotate banner=”21″]

What Most Parents Don’t Know About The Vaccine Injury Program

Almost thirty years ago, federal lawmakers in the US passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 to “reduce liability and respond to public health concerns.” This program granted immunity to pharmaceutical companies, preventing parents from suing vaccine makers for injuries or death sustained by their children from vaccinations. It was also supposed to encourage safer vaccines and vaccine programs.

As a result of this law, two new programs were created: the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) and VAERS. Under these provisions, health care providers were expected to report adverse reactions to vaccines.

Many people are less aware that this program also recognized the numerous concerns we have about vaccination. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own website, we have “limitations in our knowledge of the risks associated with vaccines” and vaccinations have “the following problems”:

“Limited understanding of biological processes that underlie adverse events.

1. Incomplete and inconsistent information from individual reports.

2. Poorly constructed research studies (not enough people enrolled for the period of time).

3. Inadequate systems to track vaccine side effects.

4. Few experimental studies were published in the medical literature.” [3]

When these programs were created, children received a maximum of ten vaccinations, beginning at two months of age until the age of six, spread through 23 doses. [4] Today, with the CDC’s blessing, children receive up to 49 doses of 14 vaccines from the day they are born to age six. [5]

As stated earlier, since its inception, the NVICP has awarded approximately $2.5 billion to families whose children were injured or killed by vaccines. The average award on behalf of a vaccine-injured child is $824,000. Ironically, families are only compensated a maximum amount of $250,000 if their child has died from a vaccine, if, of course, those parents make a claim with the program. [6]

Disturbing Changes To A Broken Program

In September 2014, the CDC notified federal vaccine advisory committees that soon they will no longer be accepting vaccine adverse event reports via phone, fax, or mail. Instead, officials have stated that they will only accept electronic reports of vaccine reactions, injuries, hospitalizations, and death.

Despite the trend toward increased use of technology in our country, 70 percent of VAERS reports are still filed the old-fashioned way, handwritten and submitted via mail or fax. A mere 30 percent of adverse event reports are submitted to VAERS online.

Clearly, consumers and doctors are not ready to abandon these convenient forms of reporting.

The Wrong Kinds Of “Reform” For VAERS

At a time when childhood vaccination schedules include dozens of doses of vaccines, including extra vaccines against human papillomavirus (HPV) and the flu, by sheer odds, vaccine injuries and adverse reactions would also be expected to rise, making the need even more critical for a system to track these reactions.

Documents about the NVICP show that members of Congress intended for safety provisions to have great importance when the vaccine injury act was passed. Unfortunately, lawmakers in our country have not made progress toward ensuring vaccine safety. The program has demonstrated severely limited effectiveness at helping families who have suffered vaccine injury or death. [7]

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, certain adverse reactions from vaccines have been removed from the injury tables, including encephalopathy (swelling of the brain) and seizure disorders resulting from specific vaccines, two very common adverse reactions to vaccination, and autism as a primary injury. Injuries from anthrax and smallpox vaccines are not covered under the NVICP. [8] Families whose loved ones who are suffering from these conditions deserve compensation.

Parents who file a report with VAERS must file a separate report if they wish to seek compensation for their child’s vaccine injury or death. Furthermore, if your child was hospitalized from a vaccine, but they did not require surgery, you would not be able to file a claim seeking compensation, unless you can prove with certain kinds of evidence that the effects of the injury have lasted longer than six months. [9]

If the government is mandating vaccines, shouldn’t they also encourage the use of this database when needed, and make this system as user-friendly as possible?

The Kind of Reform We Really Need

Two out of three vaccine injury claims are denied in court during federal hearings with a “Special Master,” which may discourage many already-stressed families from seeking the compensation they need to care for their vaccine-injured child. [10] Even more distressing, injury claims may take two to ten years to resolve in vaccine court, a lengthy battle families may not want to fight.

This flawed system is in dire need of reform in order to help families who have been harmed by vaccines, but simply educating doctors and parents about the importance of filing a report with VAERS, in whatever manner they are able to do so, will not be enough. Vaccines will still contain dangerous ingredients, including mercury, aluminum, aborted fetal cells, and foreign DNA. Children will still receive too many vaccines at one time.

Most vaccine-awareness advocates, especially parents who have educated themselves about vaccines, want to see studies comparing the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. This kind of research would create the kind of reform we need to keep our children safe from injected toxins.

Conclusion

Instead of eliminating the preferred methods of submitting vaccine adverse event reports to VAERS, CDC officials must find ways to encourage accurate reporting of vaccine adverse events. Only a tiny percentage of vaccine reactions, injuries, and deaths are ever reported, failing to give parents a true picture of what can actually happen when their child is vaccinated.

The public comment period for this proposal has closed, but you can still make your opinions known about the changes to the VAERS guidelines. Share this article in your social networks to let others know that vaccine injuries and deaths are very real.

Finally, consider, if you have not already done so, the overall safety of vaccinations. A federal program has awarded billions of dollars to people whose family members have suffered injury or death at the legally protected hands of phamaceutical companies. If vaccines are so safe, why do we need federal programs to compensate victims, meanwhile protecting the vaccine makers?

If you have experience filing a report or a claim with federal vaccine injury compensation programs, please share your story in the comment section below, so other parents may learn more about protecting their children from vaccine damage.

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