A sudden jump in the post-COVID-19 vaccination death reports is not correct and was the result of an “error,” according to a U.S. health agency.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday said a passive reporting system it runs with the Food and Drug Administration had received 12,313 reports of death among those who received a COVID-19 vaccine.
That was a sharp increase from the previous number of reports, 6,079.
The jump would have effectively doubled the percentage of post-vaccination death reports, from 0.0018 percent to 0.0036 percent.
But a CDC spokeswoman told The Epoch Times the number the agency has displayed on its website is not correct.
“It is double what it was yesterday and so it definitely is incorrect,” the spokeswoman said. “We checked our stats internally and it’s only 6,000. So someone doing an update misrepresented that or made a mistake, in other words.”
“We caught it this morning ourselves and noticed that it had doubled suddenly,” she added.
The spokeswoman was unable to say when the error would be fixed. “It’s being worked out,” she said.
Investigative journalist Alex Berenson first reported on the number in question, which stems from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
“The new figure means CDC has now received more reports of deaths following Covid vaccination than ALL OTHER VACCINES COMBINED IN THE 30-YEAR HISTORY OF VAERS,” he wrote on Twitter.
“We don’t know at this point why the number of death reports in the system doubled in a week. Probably the answer is not a new surge in deaths, but older deaths being added to the system. But given VAERS’s importance as a monitoring mechanism, CDC must explain quickly,” he added.
According to the CDC, VAERS received 6,079 reports of death as of July 12. A review by The Epoch Times of the system on Wednesday afternoon showed 5,913 deaths.
The system accepts reports from anybody but is relied upon by health officials for rapid adverse event detection.
Health officials describe the system as “a national early warning system to detect possible safety problems in U.S.-licensed vaccines,” and reports to it have helped officials learn about severe side effects like heart inflammation and blood clots among those who have gotten COVID-19 vaccines.
As of Tuesday, over 186 million Americans had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, according to the CDC.
