What Is VAERS? Why the CDC Database Is Crucial to Vaccine Safety—And How to Use It Responsibly Health.com 8 hrs ago There's a lot of information out there about the COVID-19 vaccines. You could spend an entire day reading clinical trial data, catching up on info from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on potential side effects, and cruising social media to learn about your friends' personal experiences. But there's one resource that's been getting a lot of attention lately. It's the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a national early warning system to detect possible safety problems in vaccines licensed in the US. VAERS didn't start with COVID-19—it's actually been around for decades. Still, since the COVID-19 vaccines are new, plenty of people in the general public have suddenly started caring about the reporting system.