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Has there been a drop in some OpenVAERS numbers at the end of 2022?

Published on
01 January 2023

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Yes. The lion’s share of the drop was caused by the removal of the free text field in the European data (read here for a fuller explanation of this).

However, the removal of the European free text field data last month precipitated our reevaluating our myocarditis query. Last September we had launched a revamped backend engine to our site, in the process rewriting the more complicated queries to optimize for efficiency. When checking over things recently we found that our query for myocarditis needed revision (mostly due to it having an overly broad search term-the result of trying to simplify code).  We are currently checking all our non-boolean queries-and likely a few more will be revised (some up, some down). Once done, we will work on open sourcing our queries to the public and possibly adding a changelog.

It is important to keep in mind that OpenVAERS is continually updating its programming -- that's the nature of what we do. Once the queries are made public it will be possible to provide feedback on them.

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