• No credible evidence supports the claim that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of autoimmune encephalitis by 79 times compared with flu shots.
• A formal disproportionality analysis of VAERS data found that, compared with recipients of other vaccines (including flu vaccines), COVID-19 vaccine recipients were over 70% less likely to report a neuroautoimmune adverse event rather than a non-neuroautoimmune adverse event (reporting odds ratio 0.292, p < 0.0001), and the excess of immune-mediated encephalitis cases was negligible (fewer than 0.25 additional cases out of over 1.3 million reports)¹.
• Raw VAERS comparisons are misleading because VAERS is a passive reporting system that cannot establish causation or support direct vaccine-to-vaccine comparisons; differences in reporting rates, public awareness, and doses administered make simple counts invalid².
• Large population-based studies found the incidence of encephalitis after COVID-19 vaccination to be approximately 1.9 cases per million doses, and a cohort study using primary-care databases recorded a standardized incidence ratio of 0.79 (below the expected background rate) for encephalitis after the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine³⁴.
• The “79 times” figure appears to originate from a flawed, unsourced interpretation of passive surveillance data rather than from rigorous epidemiological analysis.

Overall validity: 0%

1. VAERS data reveals no increased risk of ...
2. Misleading to compare the safety of COVID-19 and flu vaccines based solely on VAERS reports; VAERS reports alone cannot demonstrate that a vaccine caused an adverse event - Science Feedback
3. COVID-19 vaccines and neurological disorders - PMC - NIH
4. Chapter: 3 Neurologic Conditions and COVID-19 Vaccines