My name is Steven Rubin, and my wife (Amy Lansky) and I have been in contact with Alan Yurko. He told us of the U.S. Government's VAERS database and suggested that if it were properly organized, it would be a powerful tool.

This intrigued the computer programmer in me, so I accepted the challenge and created a Web-searchable database. This data covers the period of time from the start of the program in 1990 through the end of 2002, and is available at:
http://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb

DOWNLOADABLE FILE
In acquiring the VAERS data, I found that the data for each year are split into two files: one has all of the main records with events, symptoms, vaccinations, etc. The second file gives further details on the particular vaccinations given (such as manufacturer, lot number, etc.)

I wrote a program to read all the files and merge them into a single "Microsoft Access" database for computer-savvy folk and those who wish to do extensive research. This is not necessary for most people, since the searchable database is on the Web.

I have posted this database to the web so that anyone can download it. Each record of the database is a single VAERS event, and it has all of the information in it (symptoms, vaccinations, manufacturer, lot number, etc.) "Access" has a query language that can be used to search this database. In addition, it can export its data to other database systems.

Some things to note about this database:
(1) The symptom text is a long paragraph describing the symptoms for each event. "Access" limits such text fields to 256 characters, but starting in 1998, some of these paragraphs were longer than that. By the year 2000, the paragraphs were as long as 520 characters. In my database, all of these paragraphs are truncated to 256 characters.

(2) I created a query in this database, but I never did anything with it, so it is worthless. You can delete it and build your own.

(3) While processing this data, I found a few errors in the raw data which I corrected.

The full 12-year database is about 76 megabytes, but on the web it is compressed into a 27 megabyte file. For more info and to see a sample Table and form, look here:
http://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/access.html

To download directly:
http://www.std.org/strubin/vaers.zip

Good luck. If you have any questions, let me know.

-Steven Rubin
strubin@rulabinsky.com