Veria - Claim Fact Check

The apparent source is a preprint by Thorp et al. titled “Association between COVID-19 Vaccination and Neuropsychiatric Conditions” posted on Preprints.org in April 2025¹². It is explicitly labeled “NOT PEER-REVIEWED” and lists authors including Peter McCullough, who has a documented history of promoting vaccine misinformation.
That preprint analyzed VAERS data and reported that proportional-reporting-ratio thresholds were breached for 86 adverse events: 47 related to cognitive impairment, 28 to general psychiatric illness, and 11 to suicide/homicide³⁴. It did not report 146 signals.
Nicolas Hulscher, an epidemiologist affiliated with the McCullough Foundation who wrote about the study, stated it identified “86 serious neuropsychiatric safety signals”⁵. The figure of 146 appears in social media posts that misrepresented or inflated the preprint’s findings⁶⁷.
VAERS is a passive reporting system co-managed by CDC and FDA; raw VAERS reports do not prove causation and are not equivalent to official CDC safety-signal findings⁸. Official CDC monitoring relies on active surveillance systems (e.g., Vaccine Safety Datalink) and has confirmed only a small number of neurological signals, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine⁹⁸.

Overall validity: 0%