A report circulated in recent weeks suggesting that a two-year-old girl died in Virginia after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine during February clinical trials is “completely made up,” according to a statement to USA Today from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A CDC official told USA Today that the original report of the two-year-old’s death had been removed from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).
The federally run VAERS database allows anyone to submit reports of vaccine side effects, and may be “incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental or unverifiable,” according to fact-checkers.
Vaccine manufacturer Pfizer did not begin clinical trials on children under the age of 11 until March, according to The Dispatch.
The claim that a two-year-old girl died after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is FALSE, based on our research. The CDC said the report was removed from the VAERS database for being ‘completely made up.’ VAERS allows anyone to submit an unverified report, and the data can contain inaccurate information.
Clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine in that age group had not started at the time the report claimed the vaccine was administered to the child.
While it is a crime to make false reports to VAERS, there is nothing in that system that prevents people from doing so. Records in VAERS explicitly do not make any determination of causality to vaccination, and the system does not prevent people from submitting anecdotal, secondhand reports.
