[It] is nearly impossible to categorize post-vaccine deaths as vaccine-related
Passive surveillance systems contain many reports that fall into this category. Reports to the manufacturer or to the government regarding the death of a vaccine recipient in temporal relation to vaccination can be made before a cause of death is established. Once an autopsy is performed, it is sometimes clear that the death was temporally but not causally related to vaccination. An example of such a death is one that was reported to VAERS. This report describes the death of a 5-year-old 10 days after receipt of diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and pertussis vaccine (DPT), OPV, and measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR). The cause of death was Haemophilus influenzae type b meningitis, which did not appear to be vaccine related. [...] The committee explored the possibility that vaccines may cause death by mechanisms other than vaccine-strain viral infection or an adverse event that itself is causally related to vaccine administration. The committee considered whether it might have overlooked possible vaccine-related mechanisms or pathways that could lead to death. The committee was unable to hypothesize such causes. However, had the committee identified reports of death following vaccination that did not fall into any of the other six categories, de facto those reports would have been placed into this category and causality would have been assessed for those reports. The committee found no reports of death that could be placed in this category, either in theory or by exclusion from the other causes listed above.