I'm not sure how many of my audience have worked with .gov data viewing tools, but I have to let you know, they mostly are awful. So when a FOIA request returned the information that NO analysis of VAERS had been done, and a RFP went out for VAERS analysis work, I was not at all surprised.
Government data viewing systems are long term cash cows for contractors. They are generally full of legacy code and assumptions about data volumes baked into the system. VAERS is an absolutely perfect system for a catastrophic failure of the official viewing system. The volume of VAERS reports prior to the Covid vaccines was extremely low. It actually speaks well of the data entry side that the system didn't crumble under the weight of orders of magnitude more data, but it would shock me if the current viewing system was up to the task.
Government agencies get very weird about their viewers. Mostly it's because the big contractors who create them, and count on continued maintenance contracts, are extremely protective of their turf. Viewers generated by other contractors, out of business necessity, face nearly insurmountable political headwinds if they even hint at replacing the “Official” viewer.
Data analysts are often required to use the “Official” tool in all reports. In a data set like VAERS, which exploded in the post vaccine era, it is an extremely unhappy employee that gets tasked with running analysis. In fact they might often kick the can down the road repeatedly by playing up any outright failures as reasons they are unable to do the task they were assigned. These reasons might even be 100% accurate. It could be literally impossible to get the desired data in the required format for official reports. Official viewing software crashes all the time.
If it happens to be politically undesirable to see the data, then these failures can be intentional slow rolled to stall any undesirable revelations.
On the flip side, if the data is high priority, they will be afforded wide latitude to sidestep any viewer issues and contract a smaller, more nimble, contractor to figure out how to extract the data they need. This will of course be done in parallel with funding a “Next Gen” viewing system by the original prime which almost inevitably ends up taking years to develop and ends up functioning nearly the same as the current iteration but with 200% more technology buzzwords involved.
Which leads me to the conclusion that it is completely possible that the government was literally unable to analyze the safety signals due to institutionalized incompetence and beauracratic inertia. I don't say this to excuse them, but to point out that upon reflection, it's really possible they were never able to put the data together in a way that let them see the signals, especially since they really didn't want to.
Surely the vaers web viewer is just for the plebs... But you can download the raw data and use any tools you want. I guess I assumed they had their own internal tools.
Even just using the website, it's obvious there are major problems with the vaccine, so I have to assume that there is some other reason why they didn't discover this.