At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, senior staff at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were incredibly frustrated with the limitations of the Vaccine Adverse Event Recording System (VAERS) and were pushing the federal government to update the system for better analysis, said Dr. Robert Malone, a biochemist and vaccinologist.
Malone, who helped develop the mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 vaccines, said he spoke regularly with federal health officials, and that at one point the agencies did test new data analysis tools.
