COVID adverse-event reporting rates per million doses

Summary

For each adverse event, the reporting rate per million doses is similar whether the denominator uses the 546 lots with known doses (840M) or all 6,130 lots including imputed doses (924M) — every ratio falls between 0.97 and 1.04.
Adding the ~5,584 smaller lots with imputed doses does not materially change the rates.
These are reporting rates from passive VAERS — not incidence, not causal.

546

lots with known doses

840M

known doses (denominator A)

6,130

all lots (known + imputed)

924M

all doses (denominator B)

Serious events — reporting rate per million doses

Serious event	Known doses /mil	All (incl. imputed) /mil	Ratio
Myocarditis	1.83	1.82	0.99×
Pericarditis	1.52	1.51	0.99×
Guillain-Barre syndrome	0.67	0.67	1.00×
Anaphylactic reaction	1.92	1.88	0.98×
Pulmonary embolism	3.16	3.26	1.03×
Deep vein thrombosis	2.40	2.50	1.04×
Thrombocytopenia	0.86	0.85	0.99×
Bell's palsy	2.74	2.73	1.00×
Seizure	4.59	4.55	0.99×
Cerebrovascular accident	3.08	3.14	1.02×
Death	12.98	12.50	0.96×
Myocardial infarction	1.31	1.33	1.02×
Cardiac arrest	1.42	1.40	0.99×

Every reported term: rates for all 11,000+ individual adverse-event MedDRA terms (searchable/sortable) — exhaustive AE rate table →
Per-lot variation: box-and-whisker of each AE’s rate across lots, crude vs age-adjusted — per-lot rate distributions →

Symptom categories — reporting rate per million doses

Overall (any report): 721 /mil (known) vs 728 /mil (all).

Category	Known /mil	All /mil	Ratio
Neurological	230.8	228.3	0.99×
Fever / Chills	158.3	157.6	1.00×
Dermatological	150.2	150.9	1.00×
Fatigue / Malaise	133.9	133.2	0.99×
Musculoskeletal	133.9	133.8	1.00×
Gastrointestinal	105.0	104.0	0.99×
Injection site	99.7	100.9	1.01×
Respiratory	97.0	96.1	0.99×
Chest pain / Cardiac	68.2	67.8	0.99×
Sleep	21.7	22.0	1.01×
Tinnitus / Hearing	20.2	20.2	1.00×
Anaphylaxis / Allergy	18.3	18.2	0.99×
Mental Health	17.3	17.0	0.98×
Vision	16.2	16.0	0.99×
Thromboembolic	9.2	9.4	1.02×
Menstrual / Reproductive	8.5	8.4	0.99×
Cognitive	6.2	6.2	1.00×

Method & important caveats

How the two denominators are built

Known doses: 546 COVID lots with per-lot dose counts from openVAERS (third-party; validated against their published rates at r=0.999 for deaths).
Imputed doses: for lots without a known dose, doses are estimated from a reactogenicity-index calibration (reports ÷ per-manufacturer reports-per-dose coefficient). This imputation is only reliable in aggregate — the all-lots total (~0.92B) matches the true US total (~1B). Per-lot estimates are unreliable (cross-validation R² < 0), so imputed doses are used here only for pooled rate denominators, never per lot.

What these rates are not

Reporting rates, not incidence or causal rates. A VAERS report is an unverified, temporally-associated claim.
Because imputed doses are derived from reactogenicity report volume, rates for the reactogenicity categories themselves (Fever/Chills, Fatigue, Musculoskeletal) are partly self-referential in the “all lots” column; the serious, distinct events (myocarditis, thrombosis, GBS) are the meaningful comparison.
Rates are pooled across manufacturers, ages, and eras — all of which shift the numbers and are analyzed separately in the lot AE analysis and rollout corroboration.

Data: VAERS 2006–2024 lot events × openVAERS doses + reactogenicity-index dose imputation. Reproducible: build_ae_rates_page.py. Passive surveillance; hypothesis-generating only.

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