Following a lawsuit brought by Freedom Coalition of Doctors for Choice, U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has ordered the CDC to begin releasing the 7.8 million responses documenting negative side effects of Covid vaccines beginning on Feb. 15. V-safe is a program that allowed CDC officials to monitor vaccine safety in real-time. V-safe uses a smartphone-based application to allow participants to voluntarily enroll and report their health post-vaccination. The program was launched in December 2020 and is separate from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is often cited in reference to vaccine injuries. V-safe collects basic personal information (i.e., name, mobile number, date of birth, etc.), along with the vaccine dose(s) a person has received. Users are also assigned a registrant code to protect confidentiality. The application sends text messages to participants with individualized links to web-based health check-in surveys, according to the lawsuit. Each survey includes optional free-text fields for any “other symptoms or health conditions you want to report,” asking participants to “please describe” outcomes, healthcare treatment, or hospital visits. According to the decision by Kacsmaryk, there were 7.8 million entries of vaccine side effects. Doctors for Choice, a Texas-based nonprofit, argues that the government’s survey data collection method was intentionally bifurcated to “restrict reports of adverse events to the free-text entries, suppress the number of reported adverse events, render that data difficult to standardize, and thus curate a misleading health and safety profile of the COVID-19 vaccine — that it is ‘safe and effective.’” Doctors for Choice presented evidence that raw data released after separate FOIA litigation showed that 7.7 percent of v-safe users reported needing medical care post-vaccination, while another 25 percent said they missed school or work, or were unable to perform normal activities. According to the lawsuit, the CDC’s check box data only captures “symptoms CDC says are normal to occur after vaccination and are actually a sign the vaccine is working. Thus, collecting that data and then profiling the vaccine as safe and effective was based on a ‘pointless’ exercise. Any concerning symptoms would necessarily be restricted to only the free-text responses, to date unexamined by independent researchers not sponsored by” the government. The judge wrote that there is a “substantial public interest in the data,” given that the CDC says 81 percent of Americans have received at least one dose, including nearly 32 million children. The CDC must now produce all free-text responses with the registrant number (personal identifying information) redacted by Jan. 15, 2025. Disclosures must be made in 12 separate batches by the 15th of each month, with the first batch of data due out by Feb. 15, 2024.A federal court has ruled that the U.S. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must publish data on adverse events from COVID-19 vaccines that was reported through the government’s v-safe program.
