Hundreds of thousands of Americans sought medical care after getting a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data released on Oct. 3.
Roughly 782,900 people reported seeking medical attention, emergency room care, and/or hospitalization following COVID-19 vaccination. Another 2.5 million people reported needing to miss school, work, or other normal activities as a result of a health event after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
The reports were made to the CDC's V-safe program, a new vaccine safety monitoring system to which users can report issues through smartphones.
“It took numerous legal demands, appeals, and two lawsuits, and over a year, but the CDC finally capitulated and agreed to a court order requiring them to do what they should have done from day one, release the V-safe data to the public," Aaron Siri, a lawyer representing ICAN in the case, told The Epoch Times in an email.
About 10 million people utilized V-safe during the period of time the data covers: Dec. 14, 2020, to July 31, 2022. About 231 million Americans received at least one vaccine dose during that time.
The V-safe users reported about 71 million symptoms.
The most commonly reported symptoms were chills (3.5 million), swelling (3.6 million), joint pain (4 million), muscle or body aches (7.8 million), headache (9.7 million), fatigue (12.7 million), and general pain (19.5 million).
About 4.2 million of the symptoms were of severe severity.
Users of V-safe filled in data for about 13,000 children younger than 2 years old, reporting more than 33,000 symptoms, including pain, loss of appetite, and irritability.
The data produced so far by the CDC don't include free-text responses, according to ICAN. The data covered fields where users checked boxes.
ICAN, founded by film producer Del Bigtree, stated that the newly released data "reveals shocking information that should have caused the CDC to immediately shut down its COVID-19 vaccine program," citing the percentage of people who reported needing to get care or missing school, work, or other normal activities, as well as the reported adverse events.
CDC officials didn't respond by press time to a request for comment.
CDC researchers had presented summaries of the V-safe data during meetings with the agency's vaccine advisory panel but hadn't released the data for outside researchers to analyze. CDC researchers have said that V-safe raised no new safety concerns.
ICAN is going to keep pressing to obtain more of the V-safe data.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, an Obama appointee overseeing the litigation, ordered the parties to meet and confer regarding what other data the group will seek following the CDC production of the data.
Pitman said the parties will then file a joint status report "that proposes any additional deadlines that the parties determine are necessary for the resolution of this matter."
