Rand 245,000 suspected cases of side effects or complications following a corona vaccination were reported to the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) in 2021. However, the actual number of such undesirable reactions might be significantly higher. This is supported, among other things, by the results of an analysis of the anonymous data of more than ten million insured persons German company health insurance (BKK) underlie. The evaluation was initiated by Andreas Schöfbeck, the board member of BKK ProVita. “Last year we, a health insurance company with around 125,000 insured persons, received a striking number of benefit statements for vaccination side effects. That made us suspicious,” says Schöfbeck. In order to get to the bottom of the matter, they searched the entire BKK data pool for comparable signals.
Schöfbeck recently presented the results of the evaluation to the PEI. As can be seen, in the first seven and a half months of 2021, almost 217,000 BKK policyholders turned to a doctor because of symptoms following a corona vaccination. “If you extrapolate these figures for the year as a whole and for the population in Germany, probably 2.5 to 3 million people in Germany have received medical treatment because of side effects from vaccination,” says Schöfbeck. He therefore assumes, according to the board of directors, that there is a very significant under-recording of suspected cases of this kind. In 2019 and 2020 – i.e. before the corona vaccine was available – only around 12,000 BKK policyholders went to the doctor because of side effects following a vaccination, such as once morest the flu. This number is taken into account in the analyses.