My estimate of the VAERS under-reporting factor (URF) at 41 was based on anaphylaxis rates reported in the Blumenthal paper published in JAMA. I have argued that the anaphylaxis rate is an appropriate number to use to (under) estimate deaths because I believed that deaths would be less reported than anaphylaxis to VAERS for two reasons: 1) usually lacks the time proximity to vaccination, 2) the person seeing the death may not know the vaccination status of the victim and may not technically be required to report the death. Some people have quibbled with that assumption, including my friend Professor John Ioannidis, who argued that there is no evidence that that is true and it could be the other way around. It’s a fair point and I told John it’s only an estimate and I’m happy to modify it when we have more data. That day has arrived courtesy of Wayne at VAERS Analysis. Wayne did a URF computation using death data in CMS. This overcomes any objections about the validity of using anaphylaxis rates as a proxy for death rates. The VAERS URF he computed was 44.64. This seems reasonable to me. It’s really not far from the 41 I calculated. Also, Wayne subsequently looked at the numbers for 9 states. The average value was 40, not far from the 41 I calculated from anaphylaxis. I had two team members (Albert Benavides and Jessica Rose) double check his numbers. No mistake. Now, let’s see what that means. As of Dec 14, 2021, there are 9,136 deaths reported into VAERS for domestic deaths (if you are using OpenVAERS, flip the switch at the top to see the US only deaths). If we subtract out more than twice the total number of deaths reported in any previous year (to be super conservative about estimating background deaths):