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The White House COVID-19 task force has asked the Centers for Disease Control to conduct a comprehensive study into the number of Americans who have died since receiving the vaccine and the circumstances that led to their deaths, according to two officials familiar with the subject.
Officials are not concerned that the vaccine will adversely affect large numbers of recipients. Instead, they are pushing for the study to ensure the federal government has a more complete picture of age-old mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal is to collect more data about the vaccine, its effectiveness, and what happened to recipients after receiving the vaccine.
This is a particularly pressing problem, given the vulnerable and aging populations who receive the vaccine. According to the CDC, about 3 percent of 75-year-olds die in their next year of life. With millions of people receiving the vaccine, there’s a good chance that some people will die within weeks or months, for reasons that may or may not have nothing to do with COVID-19. Some people who receive it are also expected to die between the first and second dose or after the regiment ends, officials said, especially if they have advanced pre-existing disease.
The White House Coronavirus Task Force wants to know if people who received the vaccine died as a result of a vaccine-related adverse event, such as anaphylaxis, from a coronavirus-related illness such as as pneumonia, or whatever.
Currently, the CDC doesn’t have a good way to track post-vaccination deaths in real time, officials said. The study is expected to come from state health departments, many of which are already overwhelmed with other COVID-19-related data collection efforts, including testing, case positivity, hospitalizations and vaccine distribution.
The CDC has worked throughout the past year to reduce the gaps in reporting COVID-19 data, but has struggled to collect timely information from some state health departments. The agency’s COVID mortality dataset – its information on the number of coronavirus-related deaths – is currently about five weeks behind schedule, officials said. Its vaccine complications monitoring system is far from complete. With 4,000 people dying a day and another million receiving the COVID vaccine, such gaps and delays in data can present a particularly blurry picture. The agency is working on a 2020 mortality report analyzing coronavirus-related deaths in the first year of the pandemic. It is expected to be released in the spring, officials said, adding that there are currently no plans to include vaccination data in the current analysis of CDC COVID-19 mortality.
The fight to find a way to complete the key study on vaccine mortality highlights growing frustration among officials working on the pandemic response that the federal government still fails to collect, analyze and report COVID data -19. It also highlights the extent to which the federal government relies on the often underfunded state health services to accurately portray the reality on the ground.
The study request comes amid a push by the Biden administration to update and reform how the federal government collects data on COVID-19 and how it delivers that data to the public. The president signed an executive order on January 21 guaranteeing that the administration’s response to the pandemic is “guided by the best science and data available.”
In recent days, officials have discussed whether to keep the existing HHS Protect system, a platform through which the Department of Health and Human Services tracks how hospitals across the country were handling the surge in COVID cases. -19. The system, which is accessible to state and federal officials, tracks hospital supplies, cases and tests, among other things. Officials within CDC are also understanding and closing the gaps between the agency’s immunization tracking and vaccine distribution dashboards. The lack of accurate data has frustrated officials trying to improve the distribution process.
In addition, the White House this week released previously hidden COVID-19 reports that describe, among other things, the outbreak, hospitalizations and the provision of personal protective equipment from each state. The data in these reports appears to be similar to the data collected by HHS Protect.
Health workers are already submitting information to the CDC about patients who have died after vaccination through the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a platform operated by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration that detects potential problems with vaccine safety. VAERS data is based on submissions from healthcare professionals who report “any significant health problem that occurs after vaccination”. Officials familiar with the system say the VAERS mortality data in these cases is usually related to vaccination, although the CDC says an “adverse event can be reported even though it is uncertain or unlikely that the vaccine be the cause. “
At a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on Wednesday, officials from the CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Working Group presented the preliminary data they have collected through the VAERS system. (ACIP is a group of medical and public health experts who provide public health recommendations and advice on the safe use of vaccines).
Slides posted to the CDC’s website show that the federal government has collected a total of more than 9,000 reports through the VAERS system since the launch of the COVID-19 vaccine – an incredibly small percentage of the total vaccinations administered. There are many reports that people who received the vaccine experienced symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, fatigue, and chills. The data also shows that VAERS has collected 196 death reports, although the slides indicate that deaths reported to VAERS are not necessarily related to vaccination.
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