The COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid rollout of COVID-19 vaccines—including two with novel mRNA technology—raised concerns about the safety of these new vaccines.
The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a postmarketing vaccine surveillance program, to which anyone can report vaccine adverse events. A comparison between the adverse event reports of COVID-19 vaccines and those of other major vaccines such as those for seasonal flu, hepatitis B, HPV, measles, and polio, shows more adverse events reported in the VAERS system for the COVID-19 vaccines compared to the others in terms of the number of administered doses.
