The Sonia Elijah Podcast · Investigative journalism, forensic style

Skewing The Safety Signals: Dr Jessica Rose Reveals All!

·1 hr 16 min·4 clips

The conversation starts with Jessica Rose revisiting her work on VAERS pharmacovigilance. She identifies herself as a computational biologist, an immunologist, and an applied mathematician. The focus is her 2021 paper on whether VAERS functions as a reliable pharmacovigilance system. She says the paper looked at deleted reports, delayed entry caused by backlogs, and recoding of some MEDRA terms from severe to mild. Those are the three problems she keeps coming back to. The discussion stays close to the mechanics of the database. It does not drift into abstraction. Rose and the host keep circling back to missing data and what it means when reports do not appear where they should. The episode then shifts to the myocarditis signal that Rose says appeared in 15-year-old boys after dose two. She describes that signal as irrefutable and says the paper went through peer review before the publisher changed its mind at the last minute. The interview keeps coming back to the same point: no valid reason was given. The paper sat in limbo for more than two years. That delay meant cardiologists, pediatricians, parents, teachers, GPs, health officials, and policy makers never saw the information when it could have mattered most. The host keeps pressing on timing and process. When did the submission happen. How long was it under review. Who had the authority to stop it. Those questions give the interview its shape. Rose suggests the issue was not isolated to her paper. She says other researchers questioning the narrative have faced long delays, refusals to publish, publications followed by retractions, and other forms of institutional resistance. The interview treats those tactics as part of the same pattern. It is not a detached summary of the science. It is a dispute over access, sequencing, and the consequences of withholding claims from the public record. The closing stretch turns reflective. Rose says she is exhausted after years of this work but still determined to keep helping people. The host thanks her for laying it all out. The conversation ends with a clear sense that the publication fight itself is part of the story.

As heard by us

A blunt discussion of VAERS, publication delay, and vaccine safety claims.

Jessica Rose walks through her 2021 VAERS paper with a level of detail that makes the disputes feel very concrete: deleted reports, delayed backlog entries, and MEDRA terms recoded from severe to mild.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want the paper trail around VAERS, not the slogans.

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