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Among the most abused sources of data in the anti-vaccine blogosphere (outside of perhaps, retracted papers) are records regularly released by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a federal claims court that settles cases of alleged vaccine injury. The court was established in 1986 as part of a compromise between vaccine producers, who did not want to shoulder the litigation risks of vaccine production, and the federal government, who needed a source of vaccines for national immunization programs. The VICP aims to ensure an adequate supply of vaccines, stabilize vaccine costs, and establish and maintain an accessible and efficient forum for individuals found to be injured by certain vaccines: This court frequently settles cases through compensation, but that compensation is rarely issued as part of findings that scientifically or medically tie a vaccine to an alleged injury. Almost 75 percent of all compensation awarded by the VICP comes as result of negotiated settlements between the parties in which HHS has not concluded, based upon review of the evidence, that the alleged vaccine(s) caused the alleged injury, according to the most recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Still, anti-vaccine websites regularly and frequently highlight cases from the VICP in which the government has awarded compensation as purported evidence that vaccines caused the conditions for which damages were awarded -- often citing only the vaccine-injury lawyers who received a cut of the money awarded by the courts in those cases. A common example of this phenomenon can be found in a post from the conspiracy-minded Health Impact News website that is at least five years out of date but continues to be shared as if it were a breaking news story: Flu Vaccine is the most Dangerous Vaccine in the U. S. based on Settled Cases for Injuries. That post highlighted raw VICP data from the final quarter of 2013 without performing any mathematical analysis on, or providing any attempt at context for, that data: Despite the fact that this post uses only three months of data collected several years ago, it continues to be re-shared and reused by clickbait factories. On 11 December 2018, for example, the website NWO Report used the same statistics described above for their post headlined Dept. of Justice Admits Flu Shot Is Most Dangerous Vaccine in US. In fact, the Department of Justice, who oversee the VICP, never admitted such a thing, nor do the data support such a statement. In our view, it makes more sense to look at the totality of influenza vaccinations before the vaccine court, not a randomly selected three month period from 2013. The most recent data, provided by HHS on 30 November 2018, covers all doses of vaccines administered from 2006 to 2016, along with the number of claims filed and awarded by VICP. Reviewing these data (which we have organized in this document), we find that it is true that the greatest number of cases in which compensation was awarded involved the influenza vaccine. What is not mentioned in anti-vaccine posts is that significantly more flu shots (1.2 billion doses more than the next most commonly administered vaccine) were administered during this time period than any other type of vaccine. This context demonstrates why raw data are not terribly meaningful for this sort of exercise (and are of limited use in the first place, since awards of compensation in VICP are based on legal findings and not medical or scientific ones) -- it should be no surprise that the vaccine most commonly administered results in the greatest number of filed claims. A better way to compare these data would be to divide the number of successful claims per vaccine by the number of doses of that vaccine given over the same time period. Such an approach puts the influenza vaccine below several other shots in terms of successful claims awarded per dose: Both because the DOJ never asserted that these data were meant to determine the most dangerous vaccine, and because the data released by VICP do not support the notion that the influenza vaccine is actually the most dangerous vaccine, the claim that the DOJ admitted to such is rhetorically as well as empirically false. The Health Impact News article went on to assert that the reason for this (imagined) increased risk in flu vaccinations stemmed from a link between Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) and the flu shot. Because GBS is thought to be caused by an overzealous immune response, and because the influenza vaccine provokes an immune response, a causal connection between flu vaccines and GBS is often asserted in vaccine courts and on blogs. Significant scientific work has been undertaken with an eye towards understanding possible links between GBS and vaccines. While a slightly increased risk of contracting GBS may stem from flu shots, a significantly higher risk of contracting GBS stems from actually contracting the flu, according to a 2013 paper published in the Lancet:
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