Vaers or medalert website help

[Wendy HS]

Can anyone give me some pointers on how to do research using the medalerts vaccine reaction website. I want to know how to type in a particular vaccine and get the year it was given, the reaction type, the age of the child, and the outcome. It is pretty confusing to get the data, but I was hoping someone would know how to navigate the info. Thanks!!!

[Otto]

Originally Posted by Wendy HS

I want to know how to type in a particular vaccine and get the year it was given, the reaction type, the age of the child, and the outcome.

Neither interface is really geared to this sort of query. This makes a certain amount of sense, given that anybody can submit anything to VAERS, with the free-form SYMPTOM_TEXT field then having to be further broken down by coders, a process that is guaranteed to be incomplete and error-prone.

As far as I know, you're going to have to download the raw data and learn (for example) some basic SQL to sift the files at this level. The question becomes what you think the output would really represent.

[ETA.--File descriptions and download here.]