Evaluation of Cardiovascular Safety of COVID19 Vaccines in VAERS

While COVID19 vaccines have been administered to over 100 million patients, a small minority (40,000) have reported adverse events, and an even smaller fraction have reported cardiovascular issues (~500). There have been reporting of a few unusual cardiovascular events associated with some varieties of COVID19 vaccines resulting in pauses of use. Here we analyze the reports of adverse events associated with the COVID19 vaccines in the FDA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database to apply standard methods of detecting safety signals. In this work we apply this methodology to reports in the FDA VAERS database and have identified concerning signals for pulmonary embolism and myocardial infarction associated with COVID19 vaccines. These signals are compared with cardiovascular events reported in connection with influenza (FLU3) vaccines that are administered to a similar population. While signals of these events are higher for COVID19 than other vaccines, the incidence rates are comparable to the normally expected rate for non-vaccinated individuals.