A man is vaccinated on November 11, 2021. Shortly afterward he falls ill; a suspected adverse event is reported to the Paul Ehrlich Institute in 2022. Three years later he searches for himself in the Institute’s public tables — and finds himself listed under “Reporting Year 2024”.
Not 2021, the year of vaccination. Not 2022, the year of the report. 2024.
This is not a typo and not an isolated case. It is the logic by which the PEI orders its COVID vaccination adverse event reports. And this logic has a consequence that has not been stated plainly: it dissolves the temporal connection between vaccination and reported suspicion for anyone looking at the data from outside.
“Reporting Year” Is Not a Glitch — It Is an Official Category#
One might take this for an oversight. It isn’t. In the PEI’s pharmacovigilance tables (status 31.12.2024), “Reporting Year” is a distinct, named column — explicitly separated from the vaccination date and the date of the reaction. The tables deliberately distinguish between “All Reporting Years 2020–2024” and individual years such as “Reporting Year 2024.”
The reporting year is simply the year in which the report arrived at and was processed by the PEI — not the year of vaccination, and not the year the reaction occurred. Spontaneous reports that arrive late or undergo post-processing land in the year of their registration. The case of the person vaccinated in 2021 is therefore reproducible and documented: processed in 2024 → “Reporting Year 2024.” Not a curiosity. System behavior.
Why This Obscures the Vaccination Link in Public Data#
Here lies the actual finding. Anyone who wants to read from the publicly presented tables how many suspected cases relate to vaccinations in a given year will not get that question answered. The central axis — when was the person vaccinated, when did the suspicion arise — is simply not the axis along which the dominant sorting logic of the published tables counts.
Instead, the data is sorted by an administrative event: when the report arrived at the institute. For internal processing, this is an understandable metric. For public accountability, it is a veil. A suspected adverse event linked to a 2021 vaccination can appear in the 2022, 2023, or 2024 statistics — depending on when it made its way through registration. Any time series an outside observer attempts to construct refers to the filing year, not to the vaccination event.
Anyone claiming on this basis that a particular vaccination year was especially striking or especially unremarkable is calculating with a metric that cannot support that claim. This applies in both directions — the metric supports neither alarm nor reassurance.
What This Finding Is Not#
Precisely because this point holds weight, it is important not to overload it. Two obvious accusations do not survive scrutiny:
“The PEI made deaths disappear.” More recent individual tables show fewer deaths than earlier overall counts. The PEI provides an explanation: in its pharmacovigilance report for the status 31.12.2024, it refers to the consolidation of duplicate reports and revised causality assessments following new information. Whether this explanation fully accounts for the reduction cannot be independently verified from public data — but an explained reduction is not a concealed scandal. We do not claim it.
“The number X proves a signal.” A single report count — say, for a particular diagnosis across four years — says nothing in isolation as long as no credible pre-2020 baseline exists for comparison. No such public baseline exists. The bare number is therefore context-free: neither proof of a signal nor exoneration. Treating it as evidence in either direction does it a disservice.
This discipline is not a retreat. It is the prerequisite for the one finding that does hold to be taken seriously.
Cui Bono of Opacity#
The point is not that the PEI is hiding deaths. The point is subtler and more consequential: a public presentation that places suspected cases in the foreground sorted by the filing year rather than by vaccination or reaction year systematically obscures the temporal connection to vaccination — without falsifying a single number anywhere.
Anyone speaking of an honest accounting of the COVID vaccination campaign must begin with the architecture of the data, not with the headlines. A statistic whose primary axis is the date of administrative processing does not answer the one question that matters: What followed temporally from the vaccination? As long as that remains the case, any debate about “striking” or “unremarkable” is an argument over numbers that do not measure the question at all.
That is the transparency that counts. It does not shout. It sorts.
The impetus for this analysis came from a data review by an affected reader who traced his own case in the PEI registry. The underlying sorting logic (“Reporting Year”) was independently verified against the PEI’s public pharmacovigilance tables (status 31.12.2024).
