On Wednesday night, Tucker Carlson used his show to warn viewers about the increasing death toll from taking the Covid-19 vaccine. He diligently referred to a federal database where people are allowed to report unexplained deaths and adverse reactions without authentication. Despite Carlson’s conviction about the matter, federal officials have plainly stated that there is no concrete evidence of these deaths being linked to vaccines.
His show’s segment consisted of him citing data from a database run by the FDA and CDC, popularly known as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. The apparent data in the system reports more than 3000 deaths that seemed to have been a result of the Covid-19 vaccines taken by those people. Although Carlson admitted that some of these deaths may just be pure coincidences, he declared that this number is “not even close to normal.”
However, since VAERS is a system designed to approve symptoms and deaths without verification, the possibility of these cases being authentic is also low. The CDC has stated how it conducts an extensive investigation into the deaths that have been reported on the system and to date, they haven’t found a clear link between the Covid-19 vaccines and fatalities.
Moreover, even VAERS has a disclaimer that tells people not to link the Covid 19 vaccines and the resultant deaths as information may be “incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental or unverifiable.” The probability of information being coincidental is high especially because health care professionals are advised to report deaths or other side effects regardless of the connection with the vaccination.
In a conversation with PolitiFact, Dr. William Moss, a professor at John Hopkins University, mentioned how the likelihood of information being purely coincidental is incredibly high due to the large number of people who have been administered with the Covid-19 vaccine. His perspective offers a different way to look at things: “When you’re giving a Covid-19 vaccine to elderly adults, there are going to be people who will die shortly after vaccination because they would have died anyway.”
Even though VAERS statistics are mostly used by anti-vaccine groups, Carlson has stated that he is a vaccine advocate on multiple occasions. He only used the example of VAERS in his show to point out the system’s flaws.
