⚠️ These are REPORTING rates, not incidence or causal rates — read first
A VAERS report is not a confirmed, vaccine-caused event. "Deaths per million doses" here means death reports temporally associated with a lot — not vaccine-caused deaths.
Lot-rate variation is confounded by how long a lot was in use, the population that received it (early lots were given largely to nursing-home residents and other high-risk groups with high background mortality), and reporting intensity. A high or low per-dose rate should be interpreted with these factors in mind rather than read directly as batch quality.
Passive surveillance: under-reporting, over-reporting, and no causality assessment.
Denominator source & validation. Per-lot dose counts are from the
openVAERS "Search Vaccine Lots"
“# Doses” column (attributed by openVAERS to ICAN / Aaron Siri; the method used to derive per-lot doses is not documented and should be treated as a third-party estimate).
We matched 521 lots to our VAERS counts. As a check, our death counts ÷ these doses reproduce openVAERS’s own published “Died/mil” column at r = 0.999 (all-SAEs r = 0.965), confirming the join and denominator are consistent.
Aggregate reporting rates (dose-weighted)
764
reports / million doses
111
serious reports / million
18.7
death reports / million
521
lots (839M doses)
Raw report count versus rate per dose
Each point is a lot: x = raw VAERS report count, y = rate per million doses, colored by manufacturer.
If report count and per-dose rate carried the same information, points would fall along a single curve. Some lots with many reports have a lower per-dose rate because they contained more doses; a lot’s raw report count and its rate per dose therefore rank lots differently.
Rank correlation between raw count and per-dose rate is ρ = 0.69.
Per-lot table
Click any column header to sort. Toggle the rate metric above the chart; the table’s highlighted rate column follows it.
Lot
Mfr
Doses
Reports
Serious
Deaths
Reports/mil
Serious/mil
Deaths/mil
Data: our vaers_lot_reporting_rates.csv (VAERS 2006–2024 lot counts) × openVAERS “# Doses”. Reporting rates only; not incidence, not causal.