Veria - Claim Fact Check

Reasoning

The claim appears to originate from a preprint study that calculated a proportional reporting ratio (PRR) of 50.0 for the term “Delusion” in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) when comparing COVID-19 vaccines with influenza vaccines¹.
A PRR measures disproportionality in spontaneous reports, not actual incidence, risk, or causation. It indicates that the proportion of delusion reports among all COVID-19 vaccine reports is higher than the proportion among flu vaccine reports, but it does not mean vaccinated individuals are 50 times more likely to develop delusions².
VAERS is a passive, unverified database that accepts reports from anyone, including the public, and is subject to massive underreporting, duplicate reporting, and stimulated reporting from media attention and heightened public scrutiny. COVID-19 vaccines were under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history, which artificially inflates reporting rates relative to long-established flu vaccines³⁴⁵⁶.
Fact-checkers and health experts have repeatedly warned that raw VAERS data cannot be used to accurately compare adverse-event rates or risks between different vaccines, and the CDC/FDA state that VAERS reports alone do not establish a causal link⁶⁵⁷.
Rare case reports of psychosis or delusions after COVID-19 vaccination exist, but these are isolated case reports, not population-level evidence of a 50-fold increased risk⁸⁹.

Overall validity: 5%