RFK Jr.'s HHS Prepares to Cite VAERS Data He and Allies Likely Inflated

VAERS was designed as one of many safety monitoring tools. It became a primary weapon for vaccine opposition. Now FDA officials reportedly plan to cite VAERS as evidence of child vaccine deaths.

A network data visualization linking websites that have shared identical content. The interactive data visualization is available to paid subscribers.

Key Findings: An activist network systematically amplified VAERS adverse event reports during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, encouraging people to submit events. Now, these same actors cite the potentially inflated numbers to justify restricting childhood vaccines.

Why it matters: During the pandemic, groups such as Children’s Health Defense and OpenVAERS circulated detailed instructions urging their audiences to file reports, including for speculative or anecdotal experiences.¹ This activity may have inflated the volume of submissions unrelated to genuine adverse events. The volume of submissions was then used to portray vaccines as unsafe.

More Context:

• An analysis of 11,891 articles (deduplicated to 11,358) linking to VAERS in 2022 identified 7,667 unique content groups through text similarity clustering. Of these groups, 1,269 (16.6%) contained content that appeared across multiple domains, accounting for 4,976 cross-posted articles (41.8%).

• In 2025, the dataset comprised 1,691 articles clustered into 1,154 groups, with 165 (14.3%) of those groups spanning multiple domains and resulting in 626 cross-posted articles (37.0%). This indicates that, although overall output decreased after 2022, the infrastructure remains intact and is still capable of rapid amplification.

• The most frequent cross-domain sharing relationship occurred between Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and its associated Substack newsletter (tdefender.substack.com), which shared 59 content groups. CHD also had substantial overlaps with GlobalResearch.ca (42 groups) and LifeSiteNews.com (37 groups). Among non-CHD domains, the strongest tie was between counterinformation.wordpress.com and GlobalResearch.ca (37 groups). Examples of titles that were published across multiple domains: Republished Sets.

• Children's Health Defense published 421 articles about VAERS (as opposed to backlinking to VAERS), with 261 of them (62%) appearing across multiple domains. This suggests they operated as both a major content creator and a central hub in the distribution network. GlobalResearch.ca exhibits an even more striking pattern—88% of its 109 articles appeared on other domains, indicating that it functioned primarily as a content syndication operation.

• Content spikes correlated with policy developments. Over 600 republished articles appeared in one month during the initial vaccine rollout, with secondary spikes matching pediatric approvals and booster authorizations.²

  

  Observed data in solid lines; uncertain gap period in dotted line. Note: The dotted line spans from December 18, 2022, to September 14, 2024.

• Groups directly instructed followers on how to file VAERS reports, linked to the database, and paired those instructions with misleading claims that vaccine injuries were common. Headlines emphasized terms such as death, injury, clot, and myocarditis. This medicalized language lent a false sense of clinical rigor while portraying unverified submissions as confirmed adverse events.

• An example of the deceptive claims in a headline, “5-Year-Old Died 4 Days after Pfizer Shot.” The publicly available information reveals the child had multiple serious conditions, including a preexisting brain injury, chronic respiratory compromise, acute infection, and possible missed CPAP. The death was included because the vaccine was given shortly before the death, as is required. Still, this story was rapidly published on 11 websites.³

News media began reporting in September 2025 that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) intends to argue that vaccines have caused deaths in children, using VAERS data.⁴

Data Access and Final Report

More details, the final report, and access to the data are available for subscribers.